Motherhood or Shining a Light on Hell

Through my childhood my mother took me to scores of medical professionals. As a very small child I had an annual GI series. I had to drink radioactive grape flavored malted and they bumped my belly with what looked like the back of a dome-what looked like the back of a tube television set. I had a picture of myself as a sickly, frail, and a crippled weakling. But I was actually a fierce fighter.

These medical tests and subsequent surgeries went on through elementary, middle school and finally in my second year of high school when I was chasing the poet boys in my class my mother found a doctor who was drastic enough to temporarily paralyze me and bind me to her as if I were a helpless infant.

This doctor, a NY gastroenterologist was claiming to be shrinking my "distended" intestine by liquefying the contents of my guts through administering poisonous doses of Squibb heavy mineral oil. This was one of many kinds of treatments. I was prescribed 11 ounces three times a day, with a descending dose. This went on for 8-10 weeks.

I was locked up inside the house away from school away from my friends, taking this disgusting stuff. It caused all food to liquefy inside me and continually leak out. I oozed a disgusting smelly bright orange oil. I had to wear diapers and rubber sheets on my bed. I felt intense shame and went into hiding.

I was 16 and had been planning my escape since I was 13, collecting cast iron frying pans in my bedroom closet. By the age of 15, 16 and finally by age 17 I was running for my life. My mother was threatening surgery again this time saying she'd give me a colostomy. I knew this was not necessary because I had no "condition" but I also knew she could have ordered this surgery on me as she did with all of the others.

I escaped. I was technically still enrolled in the public high school but I was living on my own. I found a job working as a cashier at a health food store in the village while living on Mott Street in NYC Chinatown. I was given credit for the time I wasn't at school, and I graduated a year early as a junior. I was granted English credit for my poetry and journals.

I now see that even my mother's neurotic behavior was indicative of her mental illness. She was repeating her own physical and mental traumas on me. But that's another story for another day. Thank god for my school teachers. I have thanked a few of them, along with a few parents of friends who let me hide in their houses.

When I was five I knew I didn't want a life like my mother. Now I feel I'm the mother of a dog and cat and someday possibly a cow. I am the mother of bread, the mother of pie, the mother of yogurt, but not the mother of a human. I've had to relearn and rediscover the good mother through my grandmother because I didn't learn it from my birth-mother. As Robert Bly says in his book Iron John - you have to make a room in the (psychic) house for the bad father and a room for the good father, so true.

As my high school poetry teacher said to me when we visited him recently: You will continue see this in a myriad of new ways as you age.