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My brilliant friend's heartbreaking, moving tribute to her mother, who died of COVID-19 2 weeks ago
(Bri Haake recently ran in the Democratic Primary for Congressional Rep for Indiana's 1st District. She's good people, as we like to say.)
From Facebook:
My mom died two weeks ago from Covid. I couldn’t post this until I was comfortable writing honestly about who she was, a feat complicated by the pending Congressional election (which served my own ass to me on an unceremonious platter; apparently climate change isn’t at the top of NW Indiana’s list.) (yet).
The worst part of my mom’s death was that she- like most covid patients- died alone in a sterile hospital room with no family allowed to visit. Every time I tried to write this post, my simmering anger at how POTUS mismanaged and lied to the country about the coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions. Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only- if only- everyone voted.
My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her early disdain for a woman’s ‘fate’ to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to ‘see the world.’ The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted- my father’s- would buy her passage to the west coast, where he was enlisted in the Navy in Oahu, Hawaii. It was also where he brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.
Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, punctuated with burst capillaries from her near-complete asphyxiation, we kids went into foster care. When my mom eventually got out of the hospital & rehab (wtf can be done, anyway, to ‘rehab’ someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face?), we moved back to southern Indiana.
My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support- which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries incident. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance. So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister- Aunt Maggie.
My mom and her sister Margaret were apparent small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband- one that needs to capture, then own, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason. Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape- and her life- ended abruptly. Her violent ending and short life story would upstage even my mother’s.
Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story we see play out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma.
After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.
While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years- one through five- pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I'm pretty sure the only reason I became "successful" (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and a made-of-steel work ethic. I started working at 11, never stopped, and financially supported my mother and my sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew, and he runs on it still.
My mother's situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into incessant neediness over all things, large and small. On the campaign trail when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health ‘issues’ were organic, or caused by domestic violence. For sure, all three things in our household were related, as they are related behind most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that I lost my mother, yes, but also many decades of responsibility for her. The only gift I can offer her now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography, and culture.
My tribute to my mother is a siren of honesty, so kids and mothers who live with the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women who survive.
I’ll miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was MY heavy necklace, one that I wore every day.
It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her- and hundreds of thousands of women like her- in life. So I guess my screed survives after all. Stripped of anger, it boils down to one word: vote.
The worst part of my mom’s death was that she- like most covid patients- died alone in a sterile hospital room with no family allowed to visit. Every time I tried to write this post, my simmering anger at how POTUS mismanaged and lied to the country about the coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions. Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only- if only- everyone voted.
My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her early disdain for a woman’s ‘fate’ to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to ‘see the world.’ The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted- my father’s- would buy her passage to the west coast, where he was enlisted in the Navy in Oahu, Hawaii. It was also where he brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.
Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, punctuated with burst capillaries from her near-complete asphyxiation, we kids went into foster care. When my mom eventually got out of the hospital & rehab (wtf can be done, anyway, to ‘rehab’ someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face?), we moved back to southern Indiana.
My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support- which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries incident. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance. So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister- Aunt Maggie.
My mom and her sister Margaret were apparent small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband- one that needs to capture, then own, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason. Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape- and her life- ended abruptly. Her violent ending and short life story would upstage even my mother’s.
Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story we see play out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma.
After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.
While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years- one through five- pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I'm pretty sure the only reason I became "successful" (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and a made-of-steel work ethic. I started working at 11, never stopped, and financially supported my mother and my sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew, and he runs on it still.
My mother's situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into incessant neediness over all things, large and small. On the campaign trail when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health ‘issues’ were organic, or caused by domestic violence. For sure, all three things in our household were related, as they are related behind most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that I lost my mother, yes, but also many decades of responsibility for her. The only gift I can offer her now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography, and culture.
My tribute to my mother is a siren of honesty, so kids and mothers who live with the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women who survive.
I’ll miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was MY heavy necklace, one that I wore every day.
It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her- and hundreds of thousands of women like her- in life. So I guess my screed survives after all. Stripped of anger, it boils down to one word: vote.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10222280062821461&set=a.1175894288510&type=3&theater
13 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thank you.
my life healing from my father’s alcoholism and violence and my mother’s mental inclination to subject herself and my sister and I to his abuse.
Thank you for sharing your story.
We are survivors.
Women and girls are always the last to be taken seriously in these cases.
So sorry for your friend's loss of her Mom
She is courageous to share her story and it is very important for us to hear/read. She is absolutely right that our system failed to protect her mother and by conscious design. We must change our priorities and VOTE for people who agree.
Thanks for the post, and a hug for Bri.
