I Miss My White Supremacist Mom Part Two

I want to try and piece together the beginning of Covid, familywise. Just before the quar hit, I would have said I was close with my mom and aunts. In February, Sweetie and I spent a day at my late Grandmom’s house, trying to help sort her stuff, which really just boiled down to mom and aunts convincing us to take home a bunch of stuff to ease the burden. I took home many spools of ribbon, a ratty but retro pink towel, trash bags’ worth of silk flowers for art projects, and a random little business card holder that I now use every day for my work Zoomings.

 

Despite Catholicism/conservative politics’ lifelong irking of my soul, I loved my Grandmom so, so much. I felt united in grief with my mom’s generation, intensely aware that I might be doing this sorting in my own mom’s house before too long. That night that we sat around Grandmom’s old table, Favorite Aunt, Beach Aunt, Mom, Sweetie and me, I felt closer with them than I ever had before. I don’t always allow myself family attachment easily, but that night, I was all in. I felt powerfully purposeful and secure, buoyed by these women who’d shaped me all my life. It wasn’t like I forgot politics, but love did let me forgive and transcend.

 

When quarantine came, when I wasn’t taking trauma naps or crying into Zoom, I shifted mightily into tend-and-befriend mode. I checked in daily with family members to make sure everyone was okay, sending (I hope) undemanding good cheer in the form of cats-and-flowers pictures and bird-sightings updates. The first inkling that they were tapped into the disinformation machine was subtle, but it heaved me into reality and a lifetime of stored hurt.

 

My mom was sewing me a gorgeous set of masks, as was Favorite Aunt. While Favorite Aunt griped along about some nebulous “they” forcing us to wear the masks, I thought my mom was mostly in sciencetown with me.

 

But then, in a Messenger thread, I expressed worry about my mom (68) visiting the post office to mail the masks.

 

“Oh, I’m not worried,” she said “I have a really strong immune system, and besides, it’s not like this is the city.”

 

Pretty innocuous, but to me what she said had the bitter sting of racism. It reminded me of back in 2016 when she’d told me that “Rural people are just better with guns than city people are.”

“Sometimes,” I typed as gently as possible, “It comes across as racist when you say things like that.”

 

That concern went unresolved as mom pivoted into her fave form of gaslighting, medical magical thinking that ranges from the victim-blamey to the Eugenic.

 

“I think fear is what’s causing the disease. I wish you weren’t so fearful.”

 

I wasn’t going through my days in fear, at least I didn’t think so. I was listening to poetry from far away, I was taking walks, I was working when I could, I was checking on the neighbors. I was proud of how well I was taking care of myself and Sweetie in such a horrifying month. But all my mom could see in me was weakness and cowardice and self-fulfilling dread. The grief-chasm between who I am and who she thinks I am made me panic and flail like Wile E. Coyote realizing belatedly that he has just walked off a cliff.