I don't know, fact is wierder than fiction, and genetic families are not as good as the people you get to choose...I wish it were different...

MY MOTHER WARNED ME


“You won’t fight, will you?” My mother put her hand on my knee, her words soft and pleading. And though we were driving home from her doctor’s appointment and those words were completely unrelated to any subject we’d talked about for months, I knew exactly what she meant.

At the next stop light she said it again and this time I replied, “No, I won’t fight.”
It was a promise I didn’t know I couldn’t keep.

“Don’t fight your sister over the inheritance when I die,” is what she meant. I wish I’d asked her why.

All my adult life I’d watched my parents prepare their elaborate pretense of a ‘normal’ family’s life each time my sister came to visit. They would busily stuff all the ugly realities of sexual abuse and extreme dysfunction under the couch – deep in the closets, behind moldering unused clothes and paint their faces with smiles. They would dust off the playing cards and trot out an itinerary of interesting excursions to entertain her. Feasts were planned, pots set bubbling on the stove with fragrant soups.

But everything was done with an edge of fear.

What threat did she hold over them? Had she ever put it into words, or was it just the ordinary life-long fear that my father’s aberrant behavior and my mother’s enablement would be exposed?

Imagine how you’d prepare for the visit of a known berserker on a weeks leave from the State Mental Hospital -- Like that. Plan on lots of soothing gestures, placating smiles, and careful avoidance of known triggers. It smacked of blackmail to me. I think that somewhere in there they’d all made a deal to keep the beast in her at rest, and I missed that part.

I watched the same play unfold year after year but never knew why it had such a long run. The script was so trite.

When my father died, my mother kept it up for another seven years, and then she died. Since I didn’t know the play or the speeches, and wasn’t privy to the pact, the tradition died with them.

Then I watched in amazement as the berserker leapt out -- retreated – and reappeared, with stunning regularity. Those five words my mother had said were the only warning I was given, I’m still angry about that.

Yet over the years I’ve learned to deal with that beast and all her attendant guises and assorted personalities with an interesting concept my parents never used. It’s called Truth. And even though it doesn’t always work for my sister, it consistently works for me.

The six year Inheritance War is nearly over now, so the relevance of my understanding her is close to a moot point. But sometimes late at night I still wonder…

What was the threat; was there a pact? Who wrote the play? I think of the stress and the legal bills I could have avoided if I had known.

If I could have that day in the car back, I would pull off the road and park. And then I would not move another inch until my mother explained the fear in her eyes to me when she said, “You won’t fight, will you?”