An Unbound Love
There were beatings. Mostly with a belt—a thick leather thing with a shiny buckle on it that clinked as it dangled from my mother’s hand—but sometimes it was a thick, handheld wooden cutting board. One evening, when I was twelve, my parents invited a nurse from our church over for dinner and my mother made string beans with crumbled bacon. “Oh, wow,” I said to our guest. “She never makes these. They’re my favorite.” I had thought my comment innocuous—certainly it was in tone—but after the nurse left my mother dragged me into the hallway and whipped me with a heavy coat hanger. Five minutes later, she was in the kitchen, crowing happily to me and my siblings, “Who wants to make banana bread? C’mon! It’ll be fun!” My two sisters and I knew the code: join in, be happy, pretend nothing happened.
My mother was not naturally mean. She would wake me and my sisters in the morning, dancing around our bedrooms, singing a Beatles’ song—“All you need is love…doo, doo, doo, doo…”—make us whole wheat waffles on Saturday mornings, turn up Creedence Clearwater on the Pioneer turntable while my sisters and I folded the laundry, did the ironing, scrubbed the bathroom tile. We each had to be in the kitchen before dinner to help cook, and she made it fun. “Here—catch!” she’d shout, chucking two frozen boxes of corn my way from the freezer. “You’re in charge of the vegetables!”
But rage is a volatile cocktail. Unlike its alcoholic counterpart, rage leaves no bread-crumb trail of escalating inebriation, no spiking arc of getting snockered—no warning, in other words, to hide or get out of the way. It erupts in a split-second, an adrenaline shot that screams and smashes things, big wide swathes of arms swinging in anger, connecting often. A china cookie jar thrown at the wall. Pans hurled from the cupboard. Shouting that rattled the sliding glass doors. My bangs lopped off in a moment of fury, for what I had no idea. A sister slammed against a wall; a coiled-up backhand smacked across my face.
But we were a nice family. A good family. One that professed love. One that had fun. We went to church; we were upstanding. We were good middle-class Christians, people who cared.
By then, my parents had moved us from the Bay Area to a small Wisconsin lake town, a conservative little place with about 5,000 people. They started a fundamentalist church with their best friends—we’ll call them the “Lowe’s”—a couple who had four boys and who were even more in love with rage and “whippings” than my parents were. Once, having an after-church lunch at their house, the father got up from their picnic table and yanked his middle son by the arm into the driveway, pulled his belt from his pants, and with all his body weight and for a full eight minutes, beat his son to the ground. Then he sat back down at the table, lifted his fork and kept eating, picking up his sentence right where he left off. Everyone joined back in, chipper little comments about the chocolate sheet cake and the fried chicken. His son, too, crawled back to his seat red-eyed and newly bruised—“You put a smile on that face!” his mother said, and he did.
As a pre-teen, my parents dragged me and my sisters around the town we lived in, knocking on doors with our bibles to ask people if they wanted to be saved, and sometimes, with a willing taker, laying out “the plan of salvation” verse by verse until two or three in the morning, then baptizing the new initiate—full immersion—in the tepid summer water of the South Park lake.
At church, men and women cried at the drop of a hat—salvation was so emotional—and not “sparing the rod” was absolutely a full-force action plan. At one religious picnic, I watched a young mother run over and smack the hell out of her little boy for hitting another child. “I don’t know where he gets it!” she exclaimed.
In our house, my mother was gifted, intelligent, frustrated, and at times overwhelmingly unhappy. Our move to Wisconsin was supposed to bring a simpler life for her, and it did—sort of. My father bought a café; me and my sisters learned to work in it. We went skiing. My dad rented us a lake house for a month in the summer. We went out to eat—my father’s hobby—a lot. The family party line was simple: pull our corduroy maxi coats over our modest church dresses, sing in the station wagon on the way to services, sit up straight in a nice restaurant after church, look like a good family.
But I loved my parents still. We were supposed to love them, so I did. I didn’t know how not to.
There were good things, too. They made sure we had an instrument to play, that we knew how to sing. There were water fights, folk singing nights, fun days shopping for school clothes. They didn’t usually show up for sports or school events, but they came to several of my band field shows and musicals—big days for me. My mother ran the gamut from thinking that her girls should do all kinds of things, to suddenly professing that whatever we were doing or wearing was “sinful” or prideful—yet, when I was fifteen and wanted to date a boy from the marching band, she got my father to say yes. When I wanted to play drums and the school only let boys become drummers, she made sure I got to play. She appeared to want me around sometimes—and those were good days—but a lot of the time she just didn’t seem to like me. I would not breathe the words “rage addiction” for decades yet, but I knew something was wrong.
My mother fell in love with another man when I was fifteen, and since my parents didn’t believe in divorce, it took a full three years of misery for them to tell the truth and end their marriage. Those years were awful. Eighteen months later, all of us back in California, my mother married a new husband who was overly sincere—“He’s corny!” my sister said—but my mother loved him, and that was that. (Years later I would find out he was not so sincere.)
In adulthood, my mother was not my friend. She repeatedly told me I was wrong: for falling in love with a woman in college (a topic we stepped around like the proverbial elephant it was); later, for “living in sin” with a Jewish man while running a Planned Parenthood clinic; for not going to church and “facing damnation.” Every phone call was an exercise in rebellion or caving.
Then, I stopped editing—stopped saying I was visiting my friend Richard, when I was really visiting him and his male partner. I started talking about my ex from college, a woman who was still a dear friend. When she said, “God doesn’t approve of that!” I’d say, “That’s your God. My God does approve.”
In my late twenties, I married my live-in partner and started acting, and his parents (and eight of their friends) came to every one of my plays in San Francisco. My mother didn’t. Once, my husband called her and begged her to come—the play was Crimes of the Heart—no accident—but she refused, even though she lived nearby. “I can’t do that,” she said. He turned to me after the call, baffled, and said, “I just don’t understand.”
For years I did not see her on Thanksgiving or other holidays, preferring my husband’s family, where I felt welcomed. When I did see her, we had a code: talk about the funny times in Wisconsin, ice skating on the frozen lake and falling on our butts, turning up the stereo until the walls rattled, my mother getting a speeding ticket going 80 in my father’s Camaro. The topic of my pain, her rage, the effects on our family, was off-limits.
There was a very bad day when she had promised to come to a big fiftieth birthday party of mine—me so sure we had rounded a bend—but then she cancelled at the last minute with a convoluted excuse. I told her: “I’m done now. If you want a relationship you’re going to have to forge one. I’m not calling anymore.” To my aunt, her sister, I said: “Does she not realize that eighty will be here in a blink? Then what?”
After that, she did soften. Less dogma. More friendliness. No more bombs dropped about how I’d lived my life wrong. Regular calls. I got a handful of years like that.
Now, she has Alzheimer’s. She’s had it for two years, an exercise, for me, in staying in the moment as her mind flits from topic to non-sequitur topic. Talking to her is like taking an improv class: the rule is, say yes to everything. In ten words, she’ll go from the salad to the squirrels to wisps of something she’s seeing in the air—something that’s not there in my world—and I say ‘yes.’ I follow the flash-frame images, comment, try to make her laugh.
And in the midst of this, she has begun to be sweet. She holds my face in her hands and says, “You’re my beautiful little girl. I used to pat your back in the night to help you fall asleep.” Or, she’ll run her hand over my face and say, “Look how wonderful you are,” or, “You’ve done so many amazing things in your life.” It can make me tear up in seconds, turning my stomach upside down and making my feet feel wobbly on the ground. I can’t bear it some days, the price of getting her love and approval; the anger in me still welling up—how could she wait until now to tell me these things?—the gifts in this make me want to fall to the earth and weep.
Without her right mind, it has spilled out: a love that I sensed was there all along has come rushing toward me, the mind-thievery end-game of a disease that I did not see coming, laying her loving kindness at my feet. It’s as if life is helping her make amends; as if the very nature of love between mother and daughter is finally winning out.
She did not earn my loyalty, it’s true. She did not breed my devotion. I don’t go often enough to see her, don’t call as much as I should. But I feel her nearer now. The question I ask myself is simple: how do I forgive the unforgivable? And I suppose it is this: somehow, in these mind-altered moments, I have been given a glimpse of the very young mother who birthed me, before she became fanaticized in her religious fervor, before she used that faith and her own rage to knock me back and hold me apart.
Somehow, without her, the world taught me that I am good, whether she approved of me or not. But now, in the loss of her right-minded self, I’ve been shown a tender and long-concealed side of my mother—the coming around of an unbound love. And come the day she does not recognize me, I will still recognize her. What was inside her, hiding. And I will remember what it felt like to have her, if only for a moment—right here, right now, and forever after.
JoAnneh Nagler is the author of three nonfiction books including Naked Marriage (Skyhorse Publishing); How to Be an Artist Without Losing Your Mind, Your Shirt, or Your Creative Compass (W.W. Norton); and The Debt-Free Spending Plan (Harper-Collins), two of which were Amazon Top-100 titles. Her books have been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, LiveStrong Magazine and many more media outlets. Recently awarded the National League of PEN Women Achiever Award (2020), she wrote and directed the play Ruby and George in Love (Sonoma Arts Live Theatre Company), and composed two singer-songwriter albums, I Burn and Enraptured, available in all outlets. Her new short story collection Stay with Me, Wisconsin will be published in January 2022 by Coyote Point Press, and several stories have appeared in the literary journals New Haven Review, Glimmer Train, Mobius and Gold Man Review. She is a founding member of The Pacific Coast Writer’s Collective, and has just completed her first novel, Key West. Find more at www.AnArtistryLife.com.