The Great Whimper and the Big Move Out
In which Teófilo remembers the final break with his mother and his moving out from his childhood home, and the consequences that followed.
After spending the summer with Mercie, working on minor gigs and otherwise taking it easy, I started my first sophomore semester at UPRM in August 1984. It was also the time of my final break with Mom. The reader might be forgiven for expecting another great explosion, but it didn’t happen that way. Yes, it was huge, hurtful, and consequential but it didn’t involve a shouting match. Hence my description of it as “the Great Whimper.” This is the core of what happened.
I was home readying to leave for Mercie’s. Mom was sitting on a rocking chair in the living room. I don’t remember what led the conversation to that point but, as she’s wont to do, she unloaded what she felt was a “zinger” that would awaken me to her viewpoint through deep realization and hurt:
You have left me for a c… of a woman.
My response was swift and heartfelt:
Today you lost me.
This is not how she tells the tale, of course. Without fail she neither acknowledges nor tells anyone about her dismal verbal knife, the one she aimed straight into my heart to achieve the greatest emotional and psychological damage in me.
Rather, she insists she was the victim of my reaction, adding “as a son” to my retort: “Today you lost me as a son” is how she tells it. I know because my little brother soon thereafter berated me for what I’d supposedly said. I chose not to tell him the whole story. I didn’t want to either relive or share the moment with him. It was just too foul and soiling to even mention.
From that moment on Mom would tear Mercie down in the eyes of others because, well, because she isn’t herself if she isn’t blaming her travails on some adversary. She tells a good story with the right inflections and face expressions. She’s so convincing that it occurs to no one to challenge the truth of what she says. That’s a covert narcissist’s best skill. She’s always a victim of other’s supposed malice, never a perpetrator. A narcissist of her sort is at her best when she covers and conceals herself behind the story.
In retrospect, I can’t deny that’s the kind of rupture and loss I meant and felt. The reason I didn’t say it the way Mom likes to tell it, “you lost me as a son” is because even at that time I refused to think that was the case. But it was. Her appreciation was correct. Her gross verbal attack against my Mercie destroyed any last emotional link I had to her.
Yes, she lost me. I no longer felt I had a mother. I no longer felt I was her son.
Since my great explosion there was not much left to destroy in my affections for Mom during “the Great Whimper.” My feelings for her were already a burned field that couldn’t be burned anew. That’s why we ended, not with another great explosion, but with a great whimper.
Later the same day or very soon afterwards I moved out of the house where I’d grown up. Mercie and I had some friends come over with a pickup truck when Mom wasn’t in the house. We loaded it up with my dresser and my clothes and a few cherished belongings and carried them away to Papi and Esperanza’s house - the same Esperanza Mom had taught me to hate ten years before. I just couldn’t coexist with Mom in the same space any longer. I had to leave.
Though Mom would move out from the house eventually and Titi Gloria would move back to it — it was her house to begin with — and I would come for brief visits, almost 40 years passed before I slept under that roof again. This happened not so long ago from the time of this writing, just after Titi Gloria’s passing.
Speaking of Titi Gloria, she objected to my departure. Referring to Mom, Titi Gloria said “Now she’ll want to keep everything” (Ahora se quedará con todo). That was a strike against Titi Gloria. She saw me as a road-bump to Mom’s pretensions, not as a long-suffering boy tired of bleeding inside so much.
Papi was the only one who stood by me. He understood me. Those were dark times indeed.
This final cutting of ties with Mom left me with no parental referent but Papi. Dad was physically unavailable despite our improving ties and Mom, well, as you can see, I had nothing left to cling to in her. From this moment on my life revolved around Mercie and focused on our emerging life together.
The intervening years would bring a new normal between Mom and I, but I never felt the same towards her. I love her because love is an act of the will and not of the emotions. That’s good because of emotions I have little left to feel for her.
I became a sign of contradiction: a man in love with God who found loving his own mother a challenge. The hurt and the pain she’d caused me and her unwillingness to recognize error and admit responsibility far surpass any desire I could muster to bring her closer to me.
This sundering between Mom and I, long in the works, became a principal contributing factor in forging my melancholic-choleric personality. The ensuing sadness at the dissonance between demanded love and the distance my mental and emotional health require is ongoing, coloring my mood and shading my personality to this day.
I do forgive Mom for Jesus’ sake. She owes me nothing. May she learn to forgive me without transactional expectations, exacting a conditional forgiveness predicated upon my surrender to her twisted narcissistic worldview in return. If and when Mom learns to forgive freely I’ll be glad to ask for her forgiveness. But time is flying, and I reckon as a reality that we may not reconcile while on this world. Only when our reconciliation takes place and it’s truly mutual can we both heal.
Thank God for Purgatory, the threshold to heaven where reconciliation can take place if not here.
With these events another era of my life ended. My teenage years came to a psychological if not to a numeric end. From the bottom of that pit I had nowhere else to look but up. A full adulthood beckoned us.
And God remained with us.
(Click here to listen to a voiceover for the poem below).
Goodbye, Mother dear, though
you’re still alive
Embracing the walls as
you walk
Sitting on your rocking chair
Your eyesight vacant
Waiting for me though
Knowing I won’t come.
Goodbye, Mother dear,
I said this long ago,
That day you slurred
My deepest love,
Forcing me to choose
Between you and her and
I chose her
Over you.
Goodbye, Mother dear and
Thank you for my life
For keeping me dressed
And alive
But also for our better years
When we laughed and
cried and dreamed
Together.
Goodbye, Mother dear
I wished things were
different
Without your hatreds, buffets
and lies that blotched
my deepest self;
Then we would have been
Together and I would have
Closed your eyes when death
Took you away
With a smile on your lips.
The Great Whimper and the Big Move Out
Dios quiera que algún día te puedas reconciliar con tu mamá 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙋🏻♀️♥️