Wilted

My mother scolded me on the phone one night for leaving my eight-year old daughter alone while I went to the store and I didn’t talk to her for months. I felt the scorch of her judgment in every part of my body. It made me sick, angry, indignant, sorrowful, shamed.

I sat down at my kitchen table in my upper flat, stared on the phone on the wall, and wondered if I would ever be able to face her again. That was how powerful her disapproval was, so rarely given, the snow owl of our relationship. I was as dumbfounded as I had been the single time she slapped me. I was 15. We were standing, face to face in the living room, well, actually where the living room joined the long hall to our bedrooms. Having words about something; I remember the geography of the slap but not the cause. Having words was a major thing, unusual, like thunder snow. So our words took a bad turn and she slapped me, her right hand hitting my left cheek.

“Don’t be impudent!”

My mother never raised her voice. So the shock of the slap was compounded by her having uttered something requiring an exclamation point. She had saved up her tiny anger and frustration for years to deliver it on that day with that once in a lifetime slap. You would think I would never forget the reason but I have.

Sometimes I think that because my mother’s disapproval was so rare, it was more potent, almost lethal like a dose of cyanide that had been sitting on the shelf for years until it distilled into a sticky paste that could kill people walking by.

I am not my mother.

The cyanide in my arsenal is watery, thin; it flows from a spigot with a worn out washer. It drips, drips, drips my disapproval even though I turn the handle to off, push it the little bit more to make it stop. It’s the washer that’s faulty, I tell myself.

I am so quick to judgment. This weekend my son took his daughter sledding, something I suggested that he start doing since his time with her seemed mostly comprised of their watching their own screens. So he did what I suggested but on a frigid day with 30 mile an hour winds, on the highest, most dangerous hill in our town, and with her wearing cowboy boots instead of snow boots. One would think he had murdered the Pope.

Not being my mother, I let fly. Why?

I don’t know. There are so many ways I’m not my mother’s daughter but am just the same. I’m encouraged to think that my diluted and frequent judgment of my children is less lethal than her so, so rare spouts of unhappiness. Water off a duck’s back, I think, when I reflect on how my criticism of the cowboy boot episode might have affected my son. I have been criticizing him for years, I tell myself, that he probably doesn’t even listen. As if I should find refuge there in that thought. He’s developed armor so it doesn’t matter what I throw at him.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I wouldn’t know, being such a delicate flower myself.