Foundation of Lies

What if everything your parents ever told you was a lie? Or at least so much was not true that nothing could be trusted?

When my mother was dying I stayed in her home with my one year old son.. The progression laid out to us was grim, pain, cancer spreading, it would end in her brain stealing her ability to communicate. There were reams of journals she had kept for fifty years. Alone at night while my son lay sleeping I started to read. My desperation ratcheted up and I careened from one journal to another desperate to find anything that would raise questions I’d want answered, questions only she could answer.

I started to piece together a portrait of a very lonely person. First. It seemed she had written versions of the same journal over and over. As if every decade she revisited the same spiritual crises without realizing she was repeating herself. Then I began to talk to my family about what I read, questioning what was going on with her.

I heard the story of my mother having polio at the age of three so many times I can add so many details. I guess these details would even make it easy for it to become my story but I understand it is not. That is the difference between the way my mother’s mind was and mine is.

She had polio and was paralyzed for a year before she recovered. During this time her sister would steal her bottles and when she recovered she had rickets and malnutrition. Or alternately her parents wanted her to die because she was inconvenient and were starving her.

None of this was true.

I presented the idea to my aunt that perhaps the polio virus had caused the mental instability, perhaps there was some connection between it and schizophrenia or whatever she had (she was never diagnosed so all this is parlor diagnosis). My aunt said “Gennyfer, she was never paralyzed. She had such a mild case of polio we thought it was the flu. We didn’t even know it was polio until she was recovered.” Imagine your mother telling you he same story about her childhood over and over until you could tell it word for word yourself. Imagine that this story became somehow archetypal, part of the structure of who you are and how the world works. And then suddenly it is not true.

But it wasn’t just this story. It was every story. Slowly I became more investigative than curious. I read to find the patterns in her stories. I wanted to understand some truth about my childhood to have some bedrock under me again. This is what I figured.

Someone would come in to her life. Some were impressive some mundane, I could not figure out why she chose the people she did to steal their particular stories. She met my godfather. He walked with a limp because of polio he had as a child. Suddenly, her brush with polio morphed in to a much bigger more interesting story. I wonder how long she told the story before she got enough practice to sound so sure and believable. Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with her but I believe she didn’t realize the extent of her own lies. There were so many incidents that I began to piece together a time line in my head. The notes on a student who had been locked in a closet and traumatized by her parents were written around the same time she was “able to retrieve a repressed memory” about when her sister starved her and locked her in a closet.

There were these co-opted tale lies I’ve touched on, but we also uncovered so many other lies. The time from when she told me she was dying until a week after her death was short really. It didn’t seem that way at the time. I guess it was seventeen days. From that time two years ago the prevailing question that entered my life is this… “Who am I if everything I grew up knowing was a lie?”

This entry was posted on 11. February 2009 at 15:57 and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.