God Bless This Mess(11)
When she had me, nearly eight years later, it was almost like she got to live her childhood all over again—without the fire and brimstone, and without some other big struggles she had that I’ll talk about a little bit later. Only this time, she got to live it through me.
Did you ever see the movie Hope Floats? It’s a good one if you haven’t. Sandra Bullock stars as a married woman who goes on a TV show thinking she’s getting a makeover, only to get told on TV that her husband was cheating on her. With her whole world shattered, she goes back home to Texas, where to everyone else it looked like she was always Little Miss Perfect. Back in her hometown she was not only the homecoming queen, she was Miss Cream of Corn! “There was a time when your momma shined, too,” she says to her daughter.
When Sandra’s character gets home after the TV fiasco, though, her own momma says to her, “Have you took up drinking? You look horrible!”
The gist of Hope Floats is that when Sandra Bullock’s character was growing up, she found her mom to be more than a little embarrassing, and she felt it was her responsibility to be Miss Everything in order to make up for the way her mom was.
That’s how I felt sometimes, too. Almost exactly.
My mom wasn’t a taxidermist like the fictional character in the movie, though. My mom was the mama with big boobs who would tell somebody off to their face if she thought they deserved it. She wasn’t just blunt and up-front with me. She was blunt and up-front with everybody. Oh, and the boobs I’m referring to? She got a boob job after she gave birth to me and my little brother. She didn’t want to look like one of those tired old moms with saggy boobs, she said. So she went out and did something about it. And she was proud to let anyone who asked, or who stared at her in her tight and sometimes embarrassingly revealing tops, know it.
She was, without a doubt, the “hot mom.”
I was pretty young when I remember asking her why she dressed so differently than the other moms did, in their conservative matching sweater sets. She must’ve been barely in her thirties then, and she looked at me and said straight up, “I’m not gonna dress like an old woman, Hannah.”
The thing about Hope Floats is that even though there were some truly bad parts of the mom character, it’s clear that all of her intentions were good and from the heart. You come away from that film still loving the mom. And I feel the same way about my mom. She would do anything for me.
But some moms—like the one in Hope Floats—love too hard, and my mom could be like that at times.
I think parents can love too hard in a lot of different ways, but my mom loved too hard by living vicariously through me as I danced through my childhood and on into the pageant universe. (In therapy these last few years, I’ve learned the term for that: codependency. It’s as if she depended on me to fulfill her happiness, instead of finding happiness in herself. And I wanted to make her happy and proud, too!) Her attachment to and enthusiasm for everything I did felt smothering at times, yet still I bent over backward to please her. I was attached to her, too! Sometimes she had to tell me to go play outside because I kept clinging to her.
I bent over backward to please my dad, too, only the way he loved too hard was to always be scared that something was going to happen to us, like we were gonna mess up, or fail, or go broke, or hurt ourselves. His response to that fear was to always be telling us, “Don’t do it.” Honestly, there are too many times to count when I didn’t do something I wanted to do because of that overly worried voice of his ringing in my ears. I think his being so worried all the time was a way of controlling my brother and me.
But can I blame my parents for being controlling? My mom was only twenty-six when she had me. That’s about the same age I am now! The only thing I’m giving birth to at twenty-six is this book (okay, fine, I’m twenty-seven, but I was twenty-six when I wrote it), and that’s stressful enough! I can’t imagine how complicated my life would be if I tried to add a baby into the mix at this age. I truly can’t. How would I cope with all of the things I’m going through while somehow putting the right kind of love and time and effort into raising a child, too? I’m not sure I’d be prepared to raise a child at this age. What would I be giving up? What would I gain? Just thinking about these things gives me so much more empathy for what it must’ve been like for my mom trying to raise me back then.
Most of my friends from back home are already married, and most have had a baby, if not two. God bless them, because I don’t think I would be capable of getting through it. It may be the norm in Alabama, but maybe I’ve always been on a different path.
My dad had a child even younger than my mom did, with another woman, before he met my mom. (My dad’s nine years older than my mom.) My older half sister, Alisa, is thirteen years older than me. She was a full-blown teenager by the time I had my first memories of her, and she moved out when I was still a little girl. But she played a big role in my mom and dad getting together in the first place.
My dad was a hairstylist in town, and my mom didn’t take a shine to him immediately. (A lot of other girls did, from the stories I’ve heard. Being a straight hairstylist is apparently a really great way to meet women.) But this one time, they ran into each other at Wendy’s. My dad had taken Alisa there for lunch, and my mom was there getting a hamburger while recovering from a hangover after a night out with her friends. They sat together, and my mom and Alisa got along real good. Alisa couldn’t stop talking about her afterward. She kept saying my mom looked “just like a Barbie doll,” with her blond hair and blue eyes—and then my dad couldn’t stop thinking about her either.