A Line in the Sand

You're not going anywhere, young lady! my mother was shouting, spitting the words out and so redfaced that I started thinking about apoplexy. I stood my ground, I'm going to the library, I repeated. The hell you are! she screamed with spittle now actually on her chin. The hell I'm not! I yelled back.

It was a small victory when I slammed the door behind me and shut out her last words, You just wait until your father gets home! A small victory, but a significant one - the very first time I'd openly defied her, brazenly refused a direct order and actually challenged her one on one. My heart was pounding a little faster than usual and there were butterflies in my belly but I was on the sidewalk, on my feet, so I started walking. It hadn't been the first confrontation and it wasn't to be the last but it had been definitive. The balance of power between us had finally shifted and the sensation was so strong that it was a breath away from being physical. Somewhere deep inside I knew that this time there'd be no going back, no forced apologies, no false peacemaking. This would not, as my daddy liked to say, be put behind us and forgotten. Whatever had been been between us, and it had been neither motherly or daughterly, had been severed. I was in new territory, probably dangerous territory and I would have to watch every step I took. I had called her a drunken bitch and told her to go to hell. She had responded that she'd see me dead before allowing me to talk that way to her and immediately reached for the telephone. Nobody's going to save you this time! she screeched and I tore it out of her hands and threw it against the wall.
She flung a candlestick at me and I ducked and said I wished she'd die and leave us in peace and as I heard the words I realized how true they were.

The sanctuary of the library ended at nine and as I walked down the steps, I wasn't surprised to see my daddy waiting for me, leaning against the old station wagon with a sorrowful expression. Wordlessly, he opened the door for me and I slid in. We sat there for a few moments and then he asked if I wanted to tell him my side. There was no point in telling him that she'd unaccountably trashed my room, looking for Lord knew what, or that she'd called me a thief and a liar while tearing up my precious books, smashing the mirror and broken my belongings. I shook my head and looked away. She won't speak to you, he said gravely, or to me until you apologize. I looked straight ahead, held my head up stubbornly and said, Fine. With a huge sigh, he turned the key in the ignition and we drove home in a familiar cold war kind of silence. Your mother .......... began once and I cut him off in a fury, My mother is a drunk and a hateful bitch and you always take her side! The words came out in a rage of guilt and despair, born of a desperate longing to be heard and an agonizing need to be understood but it was breaking the rules to speak of her drinking and once we'd pulled into the driveway, he ordered me to my room.

It had been a small victory in a great war and there had been a price. In the end it changed only the way I saw myself and that was enough. After a few weeks, the incident was all but forgotten and life, such as it was, resumed except that there was a subtle change in the way she talked to me, as if she was being just the tiniest bit cautious, as if she suspected that I might fight back. There would be many more such small victories and defeats, many more triumphs and concessions as I grew older and she spiraled into alcoholic madness. What there would not be was forgiveness or reconciliation. In the end, only the war itself won.