It's Better This Way

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “It’s Better This Way” by Monica Cardenas. Monica authors the Bad Mothers Substack, which covers reproductive rights and maternal ambivalence in culture and literature. Her debut novel The Mother Law was longlisted in the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize and runner-up in the Borough Press open submission competition. My braided memoir proposal about bad mothers & daughters and debut novel are both on submission to agents. She is from Washington, D.C. but resides just outside London in the Chiltern Hills, where she chairs the Democrats Abroad Women’s Caucus. Find her on Instagram at @monica_is_reading and at monicacardenas.com.

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Jess was three, standing alone over the toilet, her too-big nightgown puddling at her feet. I can see her small hands pressed to her mouth, her face pink and wet with tears. She always vomited when she cried too hard, and she was hysterical because my father had just dropped us off at home with our mom. My parents had recently divorced, and Jess still didn’t understand why Dad no longer lived with us. My other sisters and I whispered to her from the doorway to calm down. We were all too afraid to hold her, because offering any consolation would be equivalent to missing our father, to choosing his side. 

This is one of my most shameful memories. My biggest regret. I was 11. I was the oldest, and I let Jess cry alone because I was afraid of upsetting my mother. It took me another decade to learn that, many times, the things we dread most are not as bad as we imagine.

Mom called me, out of the blue, in 2013. It had been about three years since we’d spoken and eight since we had any meaningful relationship. During that conversation, she told me about the two greatest regrets of her life, neither of which were her abandonment of me and my sisters.

**

The 1996 Summer Olympics and the Magnificent Seven transfixed us. My sisters and I spent all day on the lawn in front of our apartment building in our bathing suits, judging each other’s balance beam and floor routine performances. We had a small stereo and little awareness of passing traffic. In the evenings, we cheered on Kerri Strug and Dominique Dawes.

I view that summer on a wooden lawn-edging-turned-balance-beam as a metaphor for the balance we’d found in our relationship with Mom. We’d moved further away from Dad and things felt calmer, for a while. We only saw him once a month, for the weekend. Often, I skipped those monthly visits to earn some goodwill at home. My sisters and I had learned to steel ourselves when we said goodbye to Dad, to never appear too excited about his visits.  

When we did mess up—by oversleeping on Mother’s Day or getting a bad report card or not putting away our clothes properly—we knew how to redeem ourselves. We’d suffer Mom’s silent treatment for a few hours, then make a grand gesture. We would clean the baseboards, make her morning coffee, slide an apology note under her bedroom door...anything to be seen, treasured, by her again.

But then Mom met Rose, a portly woman with tightly curled hair and leathery skin. Rose was a distraction from the score-keeping, and the two of them spent their time having coffee, talking about work, and complaining about children. They also went to early-morning garage sales across the region. This provided another way of climbing out of the silent treatment pits: we staffed her garage sales.

Our garage was one of eight in a row, behind the apartment building. At six a.m. Saturday mornings, we set up our childhood books and games, along with goods mom and Rose found at other people’s garage sales. It became a money-making scheme—one that was never effective.

**

When I feel anxious, I often talk myself through the worst-case scenario. “What is the worst that can happen if...?” I feel safe when I have mentally faced all that could go wrong. Just like a good thing rarely lives up to expectations, worry about a bad thing usually overshadows the thing itself. The worst-case scenario of my mother’s anger was her abandonment of us.  

As we got older, hours of silent treatment expanded to days, and the balance slipped away. Our grand gestures had to get even bigger, with elaborate apologies and promises. The worst was when she wasn’t mad at all of us at the same time. If Gina had a bad report card, she would be confined to her bedroom while the remaining three of us joined Mom at the dinner table as if nothing was amiss. When we discreetly delivered Gina some food later, Mom knew—she wasn’t starving us. But since Gina didn’t exist to her, Mom couldn’t acknowledge the meal. If she was angry at me, she might drift past me in our tiny living room, pretending not to see me, or bring home new clothes for all my sisters and nothing for me. Her tactics were brilliantly exclusionary.

I know now that this is emotional abandonment. Being treated as a nonentity, particularly by someone on whom I was entirely reliant, is a trauma that has remained with me. I don’t often think about it because (by some mad stroke of luck and a lot of therapy) my relationships feel relatively healthy. But occasionally a net of paranoia drops over—if a friend cancels something last minute or doesn’t answer a text—and I must carefully extricate myself.

Sometimes, instead of ignoring us at home, my mother would leave. Where would she go for days at a time? We always had some idea how to reach her in an emergency, so perhaps it wasn’t total abandonment. We could look after ourselves—school and the grocery store were within walking distance, and of course our neighbors were just on the other side of a wall. But we did know, without being told, never to reveal that she was gone. If relatives stopped by, she was simply out, and when Dad called, he never asked if our mother had left us, so we never said.

**

In his essay for the collection What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, Brandon Taylor writes: “The thing that kept me from writing about her, about grief, in fiction was that I lacked genuine, human feeling for my mother. Or, no, that’s not true exactly. What I lacked was empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life.”

It took me almost 40 years to realize my mother had a life before me. I think that’s probably true for most children, as Taylor so eloquently explains. Now, when I think about her life before me, I remember my ignorance.

One evening when I was about 16, she was sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. I went outside and sat beside her. The street we lived on wasn’t very busy; it didn’t have lane markings but wasn’t strictly residential. On that night, the auction house across the road was shut and quiet; it only rumbled to life on Wednesday evenings, when my sisters and I would fall asleep to the sound of Mr. Collins gathering bids for antique furniture and tools. The drooping power lines on the other side of the road were cloaked in a heavy fog.

“It looks like London,” Mom said. She took a drag on her cigarette and stared ahead.

 I don’t remember if I asked her when she’d been to London, if she enjoyed the city life, what a trans-Atlantic flight was like. I have a vague memory of engaging in some conversation, but the details elude me. I was too self-involved to even realize that she was offering me a window into her life before it was consumed by her children. In fact, I’m quite sure the only reason this memory surfaced is that I now live in London.

A few years after that conversation, I earned a place in a study abroad program in the UK. It was unlike her, but Mom drove to campus and took me shopping for a raincoat, which she insisted I would need. I did not ask for details on how or why she knew this. I may not have even remembered that she spent any time there, despite the fact she had told me on at least one other occasion. I can only remember feeling distressed at the money she spent on the coat.

I still don’t know anything about her time in London, if we have walked the same paths, if she also thinks the view from the South Bank to St. Paul’s is the most stunning. If I told her I now live in King’s Cross, would she say, that used to be a dangerous part of town, as everyone else does? Does she know the grand staircase in the St. Pancras hotel where my sisters and I were photographed before my wedding? Does she know I’m married?

**

The year after I finished college, I moved home and began applying to grad school. That was when she finally had enough.

It’s now clear that my entire childhood was building to our separation. First, the brief spells of silent treatment, then her disappearing altogether for untold interludes. I like to think that our final break began with the garage sales: eventually, instead of selling, Mom began filling our otherwise uncluttered home with her purchases. There was an old window frame, repainted with a canvas tacked to the back, hanging in the kitchen. On the desk, odd little knickknacks, and on the floor, too many new plants in old pots. Years of collecting meant there was simply too much in our apartment, and something had to go. She told us each to leave.

Perhaps she planned it all along and was waiting until the eldest (me) was in a position to officially take over for her. I hastily rented a tiny apartment on my bartending earnings, and my sisters moved in. Mom changed the locks on our former home. She stopped taking my calls.

She was finally alone.

She put everything from our childhood on the shared front porch of the apartment building and told me to come get it. If I thought it was humiliating to be reminded of our days as gymnasts on the front lawn, I learned a new definition for embarrassment as I publicly weeded through old report cards and Honor Roll certificates, photos with her face scratched out, and a portrait we gave her one Christmas, now with a lipstick-scrawled message across the glass: So long to my four girls.

I salvaged our birth certificates and threw everything else into the dumpster.

Last Christmas, my mother-in-law retrieved a box of my husband’s childhood artwork, decades-old class photos, and the piano certificates he earned before the age of ten. Occasionally, I get such glimpses of other kinds of childhood that make me feel more confused than envious. Would I exchange my mother for one who saved locks of my hair and pictures I drew in kindergarten?  No matter how neglectful a mother is, how many daughters would exchange her for another? We are comforted by the familiar.  

**

After that phone call in 2013, my communication with my mother shifted to the occasional text message, then silence, again.

My mother could check all the mom boxes: she bathed and fed us; she helped with homework; she threw us birthday parties and knew all our favorite things. Her reasons for having kids were all well-intentioned, I’m sure. The regrets she shared with me were about matters she thought she handled wrong as a mother, but they were the usual failings all mothers worry about – not the traumatic, neglectful things she did to hurt us. For a change, I listened to her. And I thought about that phone call for years afterward. She either chose not to acknowledge the pain she caused, or she lacks the self-awareness to see it.

Now I’m 42. I’ve lived as long without my mother as with her. My sisters and I no longer worry about upsetting her, about choosing sides in mysterious disputes, about proving our love and commitment to her. I imagine she is much happier without us; she can come and go as she pleases.

Being a mother is an impossible job, but so is being the daughter of a mother who can’t cope. I never would have left of my own accord. Mom’s final abandonment—whether she knows it or not—was the best thing she could have done for all of us. I know it’s more likely that she expected somersaults and promises from me to win her back. It was the dynamic we lived by until we all became too exhausted to sustain it. Still, I choose to see her decision as a selfless act of love.

I sincerely hope she is content. It is the thing I most want to be true in this world.