5 months…

I’ve been remembering the weirdest stuff lately.

Most of it has to do with how my mother’s mental status was tenuous during my teen years and my early twenties.

I don’t remember her as being angry or lashing out so much before I hit my teens, which coincided with her starting perimenopause. I understand the correlation now between off-the-charts emotional swings and her acting out behaviors. At thirteen I didn’t have a clue what was going on with her, I just knew she was craycray-to-the-max.

There was the time she got so mad at me over something I have no memory of doing or saying that she threw a hot slice of pizza she was holding at me. Hot, like just out of the oven hot. And, yes, the same infamous oven of the Easter ham-on-fire incident. Luckily, her aim was awful and the slice barely grazed me in the chest, which was covered with clothing. If she’d aimed higher, it would have landed across my face and the resulting burn would have been awful.

Decades later, while I was giving her a shower, I happened to mention how menopause-induced-insomnia was kicking my butt. I asked if she had any problems during her menopause (I already knew the answer!) and she said no. For whatever reason, call me a masochist, I brought up the pizza-tossing incident. I truly couldn’t remember what I’d said or done to make her throw it at me.

My mother’s entire face changed. Now, remember: she was naked as the day she was born, sitting on the shower chair, with shampoo in her hair. She looked up at me, lips pulled into a thin, hard line, eyes narrowing, elongating the wrinkles at her temples even more. In a pissed-off tone I remembered well from my teen years, she said, “You were such a little shit.”

“Such a shit that you needed to throw a slice of pizza at me?”

Without any remorse – not even the hint of it – she replied, “It was either that or throw you outta the house. Pack you off to your bastard of a father.”

That shut me up pretty quick. I was still underage at the time of the pizza toss, so this was a potential threat she could have made good on because I wasn’t old enough to be on my own, out in the world yet. Having to go live with my father was something I never, ever wanted to do.

Not that he would have taken me in, mind you, because he wouldn’t have. There was no way on God’s green earth he was going to do something that would cramp the lifestyle he’d carved out for himself and his second wife, and having a moody, overweight teenager thrown at him wasn’t in his playbook for living the high life.

It hadn’t been when I was a baby, either, evidenced by the fact he’d so easily walked away from his parental, fatherly responsibilities.

But still, the threat was a valid one at that time in my life and she threw it out at me often. I recognize now it was her inadequate-parenting-skills attempt to get me to behave.

Has any child ever really behaved when threats are aimed their way?

Here’s the thing, though. Decades after that incident, my mother still had such a visceral memory of me making her do something as egregious as throw hot food at me. I can’t even imagine doing something like that to my daughter, no matter what the cause or reason for my anger.

The woman’s memory was long. And she rarely forgot when someone slighted her – whether they had or hadn’t.

I stopped talking about the incident right then because I could see her memories were getting her agitated. I knew if I pushed she’d be yelling and overly emotional before long, so I switched topics to my grandson.

She brightened up immediately, the bad memory relegated to the back corners and recesses of her aging mind.

Wish I’d had that insight into manipulating negative behaviors when I was a teen. Those years might have gone a little better.

Alas…