Gifts

“It is better to give than to receive” I so hate that saying. It’s such a lie. It’s easy to give something, but really hard to be accepting of others gifts. That’s how I see it. “Charity begins at home” is another one of those platitudes, yet more often I hear people saying that they don’t want to be a charity case. My mother never wanted to be a charity case, that’s why we ate out of the garbage. She refused welfare, or so she said. We’d be dragged to nursing homes to speak with the elderly at Christmas time and shyly hand them gifts the church was donating, but we weren’t allowed the candy they offered. We were there to give to them.

I remember, when I was younger the “Speak and. . .” series were huge. They were by Tiger Electronics I think, some Eighties giant computerized portable games. My brother had Speak and Math and I loved it (luckily, he hated it. But it was bought to improve his math skills). I really wanted the Speak and Spell. Just before our trip to New York, my mother got it for me for Christmas. She said she had to sell off a couple things and then go down to the clinic and sell plasma. Now, off and on she had sold blood to help us, well, live basically. I don’t know if they do that anymore, but they did then according to her. Plasma, she said, was harder to do because they have two tubes going in and out of you.

“Merry Christmas, here’s the gift you wanted; I was in pain to earn the money to buy what you wanted.”

Admirable what she did, sticks with me what she said about it. (Yes, I felt guilty for wanting it so bad she had to suffer for it to be the good mom she told everyone she was.)

My brother didn’t do well with the holidays. He always got so worked up that he wouldn’t get what he wanted that he’d throw temper tantrums leading up to the day. One year he took these blue plastic horses my mother got as her gift (I actually think he got them for her) and, in front of her, snapped all the legs of one by one. Another year, when he was much older, he tossed the coffee grinder (this time I think I bought for my mother) down on the ground and cracked it. One Christmas my parents got so mad I got all his presents. I loved it because he always got ‘action toys’ and I got boring dolls. But, eventually, I had to give them back.

‘Giving things’ was huge in the house. And it was always a show, with the story of suffering behind it to give something so grand. Accepting, not so much. It got to such a fever pitch that at one birthday party I refused to allow anyone to give me a gift. I couldn’t handle it. We had a piñata, a Carvel Ice Cream Cake, and a lot of fun (oh yeah, and no mother or brother at that party). But no presents for me.

So here I am, writing about this, and reflecting back, and realize it’s all another great game of control and power. You are the one providing when you give a gift, and everyone in the family didn’t want to accept anything because it was some weird power over the other person. No accepting of charity, no accepting of food, of little gifts knitted by people in nursing homes. That was wrong. Always the giver, never the receptor.

That is doing such an injustice to other people. Everyone feels good when they give something of themselves, and if it’s left hanging in the air it’s a rejection of that person and their thoughtfulness. I’ve come to realize that gracious acceptors are few and far between. Hell, I have trouble even taking a compliment! “Oh, no, you look better today! The blue in your shirt really brings out your eyes! Ah, no, I just got it in the sale bin, it’s nothing special. You’re too kind, really, no, it’s all about you!”

But I see it’s not just me. Compliment someone on their clothes they’ll tell you the cost. Compliment a woman on her hair she’ll say something self-deprecating. At least, that’s been my experience.

What the world needs is more gracious acceptors. That’s what I’m working on (oh my, I have a long list of things to work on!)

Image found on www.peppersandpollywogs.com

Who Will Save Me?

photo from http://churchoutlet.com

When I was talking about R. with my therapist the other day she brought up something interesting – that R. had said she saved me just like my mother did. That hadn’t occurred to me before. In fact, I forgot the story of the times my mother claimed she saved me the minute I told them to her. But when she mentioned it they came back.

I don’t know how much I mentioned about my father, or how much I really remember. A lot of my memories are tainted by my mother’s ‘retelling’ of events where things changed each time until she became the hero of every situation. There are some things I have a vague recollection of, some I know for sure, and some that I only remember her telling me, not what really happened.

There is a scar under my bottom lip. Just a thin white line that used to bother me more than it does now. It’s not like anyone sees it but me when I stand, biting my lower lip, and examine it in the mirror tracing its ethereal translucence. Do I remember how I got it? Not really. I only remember the story my mother told of how my brother and I went into my parent’s room when they were sleeping. “He didn’t mean to hit you honey, he meant to hit your brother.” Was one way that she told the story. Another is that my parents were having sex when my brother pushed me in the room. Either way the story ends with me getting hit in the face and my tooth growing through my lip. Considering snippets of my father’s temper that has stayed with me, it seems plausible. It also seems plausible that my brother would push me in front to deflect the blow.

What I remember most about my father is lying down on his thick fuzzy arm to watch television. Nothing was as soft as his arm. I remember he loved science fiction and M*A*S*H and he taught me to love Star Trek. He read to my brother and I. I used to love this picture of baby me slumped in his lap as he reads some thick sci-fi book, presumably out-loud. However, I also remember him swinging shoes at me as he kicked us kids out of his apartment when we were there for visitation, before it became supervised visitation only. I remember him admonishing us when we didn’t thank him for his generous Christmas gift after the divorce – two dollars and shoelaces. I also remember what he took from my brother, an innocence he can never return, and I can’t forgive him for that.

In terms of saving – my mother was the martyr who sacrificed her life to save her children (her words.) She gave up sex and a husband. But there is one more specific to the task at hand – which is me figuring everything out. She often used my father as a threat, that she would send me to him to get raped if I misbehaved. And in the same breathe as the threat would tell me how she saved my when I was five years old.

“You were coloring in your room,” she’ll begin as her eyes fade out and move to the past, “and your father walked in naked. You were just sitting there staring up at him so shocked and scared. But luckily I found him in there and got him out. I saved you. Who knows what would have happened?”

Who does know? And who knows if that did really even happen? Much of what my mother said has been, we’ll put it nicely, ‘her reality’ and doesn’t exactly mesh up with others. Was my brother just convenient because my mother ‘guarded my chastity’ when I was a child? Was she my savior because she held ice to my chin to stop the bleeding after he hit me the year before? Plus, if that happened when I was five, they didn’t divorce until a couple years later, so that’s a bunch of questions. Not to mention the fact it’s in the same sentence as her wanting to send me off to get raped.

So R. said she saved me by allowing me a place away from my mother (who she later threatened to send me back to).
My mother said she saved me by taking me away from my father (who she later threatened to send me back to).

Luckily it’s only those two I can think of now, though I’m sure my brother claimed to be my savior on more than one occasion. This makes me wonder if saving me was addictive at that point in time. But as I mentioned before, I hate that idea. You can only save yourself, to claim it over another just seems like a power ploy. And really, I think that’s all these people were doing – trying to lay claim to me in ways they could rationalize.