Cauldron Anthology Issue 9: They Who Were Spurned cauldron9finalproof | Page 11

But what about my mother? Though she guardedly sympathized with my situation to my face,
what did she really feel about my wholesale rejection of the tenets she raised me on? Was I a failure
in her eyes also? A sinner? That is the question I hope these journals will answer.
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Judging my mother has become more complicated in recent years. Not just because she is
dead and the memories I have of her are clouded, but because I have reached an age and distance
from my own children where I can begin to judge my mothering. These judgments are not pretty.
I look back through time and see a frantic woman, a woman so driven to distract herself from the
possible perturbations of memory that she turned housekeeping into a twenty-four/seven job, turned
child rearing into an interruption to that job, and kept the burners of emotional connection turned
low so they could never get hot enough to sizzle all the way through the dermis and touch truth. A
woman fundamentally altered by the plundering of men she was told to trust. Branded, seared with
the mark of their lust.

Wait a minute. Am I talking about me or my mother?
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I am still somewhat astonished—but grateful—to witness the #MeToo era, where we have
just begun to call out the actions of entitled, predatory men. We say their names, post their pictures,
and tell the stories of what they did. Some of them suffer the consequences—well, maybe a handful.
But what we don’t often discuss is the repercussions of that predatory behavior, the results of which
reverberate down through the generations, passed on from mother to daughter, each one setting the
next one up for diminishment, belittling, feelings of inadequacy and inconsequentiality such that
when a man looks us up and down, talks us down, holds us down, or beats us down, we question—
deep down—whether it’s warranted.
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Another day. Another hot cup of coffee in my hands. I take a breath and open my mother’s
journal from 1974.

I am pleased to find she expresses consternation about the religious leader who led our family
into fundamentalism, who weekly force fed the women in his flock submission and subservience,
and who demanded provisions and accommodations from my mother as if she was his personal
servant. I am pleased she had enough pride to bristle at his entitlement. I am not pleased to read her
response to her reactions. But I recognize them, oh so well. Prayers for humility. Prayers for for-
giveness for her sins of vanity, umbrage, lack of open-hearted love toward the very ones who closed
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Cauldron Anthology