Toxic Blood: Are You My Mommy?
Chapter 6
It is common and normal for children to seek out role models in the adults they encounter outside the home, be that through school, enrichment programs, social programs, community centers and groups, religious settings, or somewhere else entirely. I believe it is also fairly common for children who are neglected and do not get enough love, attention, and guidance at home to seek substitute parental figures outside the home. At least, that was true in my case, even if it is only in retrospect that I can see and understand what I was searching for.
My first attempt at a substitute mommy was my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Wong. I was enamored of her from day 1 when she asked the students who thought she was married and who thought she was not. I do not think any of us had encountered honorifics for women other than Miss. and Mrs., so opinions were split, and I was one of very few students who admitted they had no idea. She explained that Ms. was the female equivalent of Mr., and like Mr., did not include information about her marital status. She happened to not be married, but she used Ms. because her identity and worth did not revolve around her marital status, and it was not any business of strangers whether or not she had a husband.
She had paper murals pinned up on the wall which had been painted by students from the previous year, encouraged critical thinking and artistic pursuits in equal amounts, and was fun, fair, and kind while still maintaining authority over the class. She was everything good that I could hope to find in an adult, and I admired her greatly. During the school year I would sometimes stay after hours to help with various tasks, and if she was in the room during recess, she would let me stay there where the other students could not harass me. When I would write poetry or create something, I went out of my way to share it with her. When I showed her my art, she was always encouraging without the awkwardly showy overenthusiasm I received from Mother.
When the school year ended, Ms. Wong chose a few students to help create the paper mural for next year, and I was not among them. After all the encouragement she had given me during the year, I was confused that she did not choose me to help. When I asked her why I was not chosen, she avoided answering the question directly. She said she already had enough students helping, and promised me that she would call if they needed me as well. I had a new outfit that I liked (a very rare thing), and I wanted very much to wear it to help with the mural. I wore it for the entire week after school let out, hoping, waiting, expecting that call. She had been direct and told me up front that she probably would not need me, but I felt a need for her to need me. I knew that was not fair to her, and that I had no right to impose upon her like that, but I could not help how I felt. She was just my teacher, and under no obligation to need me.
So, I quietly hid my crushing disappointment and went on with my summer.
My grade school was literally around the block from my parents’ house, and directly along the route I walked to get to or from almost anywhere else in the neighborhood or to the city bus stop. This made it easy and convenient to stop by from time to time as I got older. At first it was a couple times a year, to talk to her about what I was up to recently. Then it became once a year, and then every couple years. She was always friendly like I remembered, and happy to hear about the creative things I was working on, but that was all.
Around the time I stopped dropping in on Ms. Wong, I found the New Age movement, and by proxy, so did Mother. Since it was of interest to her as well, I frequently found myself at a New Age shop and attending different New-Agey events, or meeting energy workers and artists who were professionals in that framework.
There was absolutely no mention of cultural appropriation as a concept, let alone a problem, and there was no shortage of “shamans” or “Native Wisdom” to be gleaned from white people in the community. The local area was rife with exploitation of the idea of the Noble Savage, which in this context meant seeing Indigenous Americans as innately wise, spiritual people who had a nearly homogenous culture and religion which spanned the continent and was inherently more enlightened than Western religions. I think most of the people engaging in vaguely Indigenous practices meant absolutely no harm, and although it itched at the back of my head, at the time I had no frame of reference to understand how racist it all was.
One of the energy workers I met was also a professional artist. Among other things, she did energy healing out of her home, and I accompanied Mother to her place for a session. To my delight she was very nice, lived within walking distance of the junior college where I was going to school, and created art in an intuitive way that intrigued me. Much of her art took the form of spirit shields inspired by Indigenous tribes on the Great Plains. When the time was right, she said, the person who needed each shield would come into her path. I was particularly fascinated by one she was making based on a crow, and somehow, I saved up enough money to buy it several months later.
I may have been attending junior college, but I was probably 15-16 years old at the time. I had made an agreement with my parents that I could drop out of high school if I passed a high school equivalency test, went to junior college, and earned my associate degree. I was in many ways participating in the world on an adult level, and after a lifetime of being told how “mature” I was, I perceived myself to be very much like an adult. However, without the perspective of actual adulthood, I was incapable of seeing the many ways in which I was still very much like a child, including the need for a supportive mother figure.
I usually missed the subtleties of polite discourse, so after being told I was welcome to come over at any time, I dropped by the artist’s home on occasion after school. She was friendly and welcoming, which I took to mean that she enjoyed my visits. There were probably subtle clues she gave trying to be polite about my intrusively frequent visits, but I completely missed them. I was too much in the habit of ignoring subtle cues as a coping mechanism for abusive family dynamics at home. One day she was direct and told me that she did not have time to visit, that she had work to do. She had a living to make, and my visits were frequent enough that it was interfering with her life.
I am pretty sure my face expressed my crushing disappointment. Her rebuke told me I was being a bother, and she did not want the kind of friendship I thought we were cultivating. She backpedaled a little bit and told me that I was still welcome to drop by, just not so often. I could tell she felt guilty about hurting my feelings, but if she had been so misleading about enjoying my presence there, I could not be certain her backpedaling was anything more than a polite nicety. I had no intention of imposing myself on someone who did not really want me around, so I never went back.
I may have been desperate for deeper human connection, but I knew it was not something that could be forced. Both parties had to want it for it to happen, and since even I did not like myself, I had no expectation that anyone else should either. I hoped for deeper connections, but I did not expect them, and I never blamed anyone else for avoiding me or not wanting me around, both of which were frequent occurrences.
It was a rather melancholy day for me when in my 30’s I looked back on those two relationships and realized I was actually looking for a mother figure. In my mind as a youth or child, I thought I was looking for friendship. I had a mother, and I was “mature for my age”, so I saw no logical reason to seek out a mother figure. It was pure emotion, an instinctive need for something that was not fulfilled at home, even though I did not have the perspective to consciously realize it.
As a result of that desperation, I took the kindness and compassion each of them showed me as an indication of reciprocation, when it was worlds from the reality of the situation for the grown women involved. Ms. Wong had her own life, which I know nothing about, and she certainly was under no obligation to take on a deeper emotional commitment to troubled children in her classroom. I am sure the artist was struggling to make ends meet, and she had two children of her own to take care of. It was not her responsibility to also take on a nearly grown child who was overwhelmingly awkward and dysfunctional.
There are a lot of pitfalls for “mature” children to fall into. It is definitely possible that a “mature” child is very well adjusted, but I believe most of the time that kind of praise gets piled onto children that are anything but well adjusted. I was not “mature” because of some inherent quality that made me less child-like. I was “mature” because I took care of myself emotionally and physically since I was cognizant enough to do it. I was “mature” because I had been taught not to be an imposition on adults. I was “mature” because I did not have another option. I had to be “mature” to navigate the circumstances I had been born into. I did not have the support, love, and joy in my life that allows a child to be carefree and child-like.
And that “maturity” was praised every time I turned around, by almost every adult in my life.
As far as I know, no one ever stopped to think about why a child might seem so mature, be so concerned about things that most children never think about, because they do not have to.
The kids that act out and make noise because of neglect and abuse get noticed. The ones like me who turn to self-reliance, we do not. The squeaky wheel gets noticed. The quiet one holds themself together until one day they no longer can. When they fall apart, everyone looks on stunned and baffled, because that mature kid “had it so together.”
Not only did my parents fail me, but so did every adult that could have asked why, including the two adults I looked to as substitute parents. My “maturity” meant I was one of the kids that adults did not have to worry about. I was the kid who could be counted on to stay on task and not cause trouble. The teachers, the schools, day care, and babysitters, they all benefited from the neglect I experienced at home on a daily basis, so there was no motivation to look deeper for a problem.