I Hate My Mutha

by Denise M.

I hate my mother. It took a lot of money and hours on the couch for me to be able to type those words so let me type them again. I hate my mother. Or as she’s known internally - Mutha. When We (the holy sect of family members whose cross she is to bear) say her name, it sounds like it’s being spit from the lips of a platinum-selling rapper. Mother is an honorific. Mutha is an epithet.

Mutha is a drunk. Sometimes sloppy, other times vicious, comatose when we’re lucky. Always a hot mess. A 75 year-old raging conflagration of toxic dysfunction and insatiable need. We know why. She’s had a very hard life. Violent alcoholic father who offed himself, sexual abuse as a child, desperately poor upbringing as the oldest of too many. But, ultimately, the whys are not an excuse.

All abusers have been abused. Does that mean the rapist, killer, molester gets a free pass? No, it does not. When they’re caught, they go to jail. Because once you reach the legal age, you have to be responsible and culpable for your own actions no matter what happened to you. That’s the price of being an adult.

If abuse is an excuse then I should be able to traipse through the world doing whatever I want to whomever I want whenever I want. And for longer than I’d like to admit, that was my worldview. I thought the world owed me everything -- money, love, fame. And I thought once I got those things, I would be happy. Everything that was wrong with me would suddenly, instantly, be right.

Well, it was only after clawing my way to the top of the mountain -- pushing aside whoever was in my way, sucking the dicks that needed to be sucked, hiring and firing as needed, planting stories as needed, having abortions as needed -- that I realized the mountaintop view is just that. A view, a perspective. It’s not the end-all, be-all. It doesn’t change or fix anything, it just makes you look at everything differently.

And there are only so many people who have reached that peak and know what it looks like from there so it can be an extraordinarily lonely place to reside. When you first arrive it’s just like going to a place with a very high altitude. You get light-headed and dizzy, you may have to lie down for a while. You have to learn how to breathe that air, how to exist and maintain your equilibrium up there. But once you’re stabilized you realize, after all that effort, there’s no one around with whom you can enjoy the view. That’s the ultimate cliche but cliches are just things that are fundamentally obvious and true. You’re on the mountaintop where you can see for miles in every direction but at the same time you’re in a cell.

That doesn’t just make you feel lonely -- it can, quietly but insidiously, drive you crazy. Only in hindsight do you realize the best times of your life were killing you softly. Is that Michael and Whitney I hear singing a divine duet?

That’s why you eventually find yourself envying those lumpy, average-looking moms strolling into Old Navy with their wobbly strollers, talking about how hard they’ve been hit by the economic downturn. Because they have each other. People may admire me, worship me even, but most people don’t “get” me. And they never will. Not even my shrink(s), spouse(s), spiritual advisor(s).

Not just because I’m famous but because I have a Mutha who once showed up at a red carpet premiere, uninvited, dressed like she was going to a prom, and started shrieking at me from behind the police barricades like a Justin Bieber fan. Most bizarrely, she was calling me by my childhood nickname which no one else knew so I was the only one who understood what was really happening when security hustled her away. And that night she wasn’t even drunk.

After that, I made an executive decision that we needed to stop pretending that she would somehow, miraculously, get better and start dealing with the reality of what she plainly showed herself to be: a danger to herself and others, namely me. There are probably all kinds of mental disorders hiding under her addictions but at this point, who gives a shit? The die has been cast. Nothing will help her --we know, we’ve tried everything -- because she doesn’t want to help herself.

She now lives in a city where I do not have a residence with Sissy, her younger sister and paid caretaker who watches over her, either out of a deep sense of guilt, decency or a martyr complex. Maybe all three (and then some)? I don’t really know and I long ago stopped looking gift horses in the mouth. I don’t talk to Mutha and haven’t seen her in years but I financially support her. Not because I love her --I don’t. I do it to manage the threat level. And every month that I don’t hear about Mutha, Sissy gets a bonus.

It doesn’t surprise me that she keeps getting cancer because she is one. She’s been through chemo twice, had a double mastectomy, survived multiple overdoses, had a hip transplant, new set of teeth to replace the ones broken in a drunken fall... and she’s still here. Drinking and acting up like the delinquent teen that she is. At a family meeting with an intervention specialist I once said, “I keep having this nightmare that I’m at her funeral and she jumps out of the coffin” and two of her siblings immediately shouted, “Me too!”

Back in the days before I accepted that Mutha was a lost cause, in the days when I still complained about her out loud because I thought someone might actually be able to understand or sympathize, a friend/ employee who grew up in a supremely normal family said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Hey Mom...’” I immediately burst out laughing and didn’t stop until my eyes watered.

The fact that I could genuinely laugh is an example of how deeply I can mask my emotions, even from myself (at least I’ve made a good living out of it!), because when people say things like that to me, what I really want to do is curl up my fist and punch them in the fucking throat. All while knowing my laughing tears are dripping with a hundred different emotions, some I’ll never be able to articulate or care to. There have never been any “Hey Mom” moments in my life. Ever ever ever. Her first words upon seeing me after my birth were, “Yuck, she looks like a little rat. Get it away from me.” And on that note...

Do I feel guilty that she’s had cancer and I didn’t call or visit? Sometimes, but she had Sissy and others and I pay for it all. As far as I’m concerned that’s more than I need to do. She could be homeless. And don’t think I haven’t entertained that option.

At some point, I realized she was dangling out of a 30 story window and if I didn’t let go of her, we’d both fall to our deaths. So after sacrificing way too much of my life to her desperate, irrational needs, I chose me. Every day that I don’t allow myself to get sucked back into that toxic quicksand, I am choosing me. My proudest achievement in what is, by anyone’s estimation, a very “successful” life is that I cut the psychic cord to Mutha and never became a mother myself. I’ve already got my hands full raising three girls -- me, myself and I. They need my constant, vigilant attention and finally, at long last, they have it.

Denise M. is an award-winning actress. She lives in Los Angeles.  Have a Real Talk for us? realtalkproj@gmail.com  Guidelines: http://about.me/TheRealTalkProject