February 3rd, 2015 - Lisa Borders
My mom, Ruth Creter Borders,
died last night. She was 90 and feisty til the end.
Here she is at the height of her glamour.
(Facebook status update, February 4, 2015)
Social media has taught me a lot about how other people see their mothers after they’ve died. Some of my friends grieve their moms each and every year, on birthdays, on the anniversaries of their deaths. They talk about missing their mothers intensely, even decades later.
My mom lived to 90 and, as I sometimes joke, nearly took me with her.
I’ve known since my teen years that my mother’s and my relationship was, to put it mildly, complicated. At best, she could make me laugh with her takes on everything from Gwyneth Paltrow – my mom disliked Gwyneth long before it was fashionable – to wry observations about the “old fools” she met after her move from New Jersey to Florida in the late 1990s. Once social media came along, I began occasionally posting bon mots from my mother. I tried to choose examples that displayed her wit and downplayed her darker side, but almost everything she said that was funny also had a sharp edge.
Mom: I am canceling my subscription to People magazine and never reading it again.
Me: Why?
Mom: Did you know that People named Gwyneth Paltrow the most beautiful woman of 2013?
Me: Yeah, I heard that.
Mom: Ech. Her mother was so much prettier.
(Facebook status update, May 6, 2013)
Intensely critical of everything about me, from my physical being (“her mother was so much prettier” could have been said about me as well) to my politics, my mother knew like no one else how to get under my skin. She considered me “too sensitive” and insisted comments I found hurtful were intended to be helpful – her attempt to steer me in the right direction, or at least, the direction she wanted me to go.
This kind of ultra-critical mother was a not uncommon archetype in her generation, but mine came with an extra twist: most likely an undiagnosed personality disorder. As a child, I saw it as a monster within her. Sometimes she’d be fine: mostly kind and funny and, despite the occasional barb, we’d get along great for months at a time. And then a rage would take her over. Anything could set it off: my spilling a pitcher of Tang when I was seven. The time I forgot to turn the dishwasher on before I went to bed when I was thirteen. An asthma attack I had when I was ten, during a time when she insisted that I did not have asthma and was “faking.”
The rages became more frequent as she aged. She would scream at me until I sobbed – indeed, the goal seemed to be to get me as distraught as she felt inside. Despite how often it happened, especially in her last years of life, I cannot remember a single word of what she yelled at me. Maybe I never heard her when she went into those rages. Maybe I just went somewhere inside myself, and all that registered was the anger, the yelling.
Mom (looking at photos from my birthday party): What's that on your head?
Me: A Hello Kitty tiara.
Mom: Who on earth bought you that?
Me: I bought it for myself.
Mom: You bought it for yourself?
Me: Yes.
Mom: (long pause) ... You know, my mother used to remind me every time I had a birthday of how old I was getting. It's a good thing you don't have a mother like that.
(Facebook status update, December 26, 2009)
By the time of that birthday party, I was in my 40s, living in the Boston area and flying to Florida to visit my mother 3-4 times a year. I was single but had a large community of friends, and had confidently thrown myself a huge bash. I’d shown her the photos because I wanted her to see how happy I was, even though I knew her reaction to my own joy could be unpredictable. Was that the Christmas visit when she raged at me to the point where I ended up huddled in a corner sobbing so hard I started wheezing? Or had I had enough therapy by then to have simply left the house once she started screaming, returning an hour later to find her acting like nothing had happened?
The last ten years of her life were particularly hard on us both. She was ill, unhappy, and alone in Florida after my uncle, her brother, died. I and other family members tried to convince her to move – to Boston, to New Jersey, places where she wouldn’t be alone. She refused every idea. What she really wanted, I knew, was for me to relocate to Florida. And while I’d put myself through a lot for her, including helping her move multiple times to apartments she thought she’d like better but never did, that was the line I wouldn’t cross.
Mom: "This had better be my last move. I hope the next one is feet first."
(Facebook status update, May 22, 2012)
When I finally got the call on the night of February 3, telling me that my mother had died, my first thought was: It’s a trick. She had put someone up to it, to gauge my reaction, to look for something she could use against me later. I realized as the thought formed how silly it was. Mom had been ill for a while. We’d been having blizzard after blizzard in Boston, the snow piles on my little side street taller than I was. I’d been unable to get down there to see her.
My second thought came to me as a quiet little voice in the back of my head: I’m free? Maybe now I’m free?
Ten years later, I know she craved her own freedom, too.
Lisa Borders is a novelist, humorist and essayist. Her third novel, Last Night at the Disco – a dark comedy set in the disco era – will be published in October 2025. She is the author of two previous novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, the latter chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award and a 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards honoree. A frequent humor contributor at McSweeney’s, she has published essays in Cognoscenti, The Rumpus and Post Road. She lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two rescue cats.
As a love of animals was something Lisa and her mother shared, Lisa encourages you to check out the MSPCA and Newhouse Wildlife Rescue.