Free What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict Page A

and I do not exactly know what to do with money, and I wish my mother had bought me a present, like other people’s mothers. But the only time I expressed that wish she answered, sharply, harshly, “Who the hell could figure out what you want?” So I’m not getting a present like other kids, and it is—somehow—my fault.
    Th is is the scene that came into my mind when I was asked about a favorite gift from my mother. My first response was, “My mother never gave me any gifts.” Th ese words were followed by a generous helping of self-pity: that sickish sweet, oily syrup that somehow encourages the tongue and the palate to demand more and more. I try to stay away from its allure, and so, when I feel it coming on (particularly when its source is my mother), I seek alternatives. I begin by going the route of Marx or Freud: my mother was working class, the child of immigrants, her young womanhood lived out against the backdrop of the Depression. Or: her childhood was difficult; she was the oldest of nine children of a harsh mother; she was stricken with polio at the age of three, an affliction which made it impossible that she would love her body. She was a single working mother, a widow, living with her grief-stricken child, her demanding mother, her jealous sister: she of the gimlet eye and viper tongue. And so, finally, I push both Marx and Freud into the background and settle on a simpler explanation: She was worn out. She was tired.
    One of my mother’s most treasured ways of identifying herself was to let everyone know that she wasn’t like other women. She spoke of everything connected to the traditionally feminine with a lacerating contempt. Th e decoration of houses, the preparation of food (even the discussion of food), hair, makeup, clothing—all these were the property of a category she referred to as “lightweights.” I have come to understand that this was a complicated defense against what life didn’t give her, what she couldn’t have. Her polio meant that her body would never be acceptable by conventional standards. It was probably easier for her not to look at it too closely; buying clothes would have required this kind of self-scrutiny, a scrutiny that was, for her, a very bad bet indeed. Better to say she was above all that, beyond all that. To relegate that to the “lightweights.” As she relegated cooking and interior decoration because she never had the kind of marriage (my father earned no money; his contribution to our financial life was to get us into debt) that would allow the kind of leisure that attention to cooking and decoration might require. So she relegated the domestic realm to lightweights as well.
    What was the opposite of a lightweight? It wasn’t a heavyweight. It did not mean a person who was earnest or even serious. Th ese people were rejected out of hand as “sad sacks” or “pains in the ass.” Humor was the coin of the realm. Its prod ucts were her treasured capital. 
Jokes were important, jokes were essential; a satiric commentary on the follies of one’s fellow humans was a pearl of great price. Some things, though, were of critical importance. Anything having to do with the success and superiority of the Roman Catholic Church was always welcome. Anything pointing out the inferiority of the Republican Party was just fine. But jokes, religion, and politics—where could you buy them? How could you wrap them? What color would be preferable? Did you want them large or small? All the things my mother prized, being incorporeal, did not make themselves available as gifts.
    You may wonder why my mother didn’t buy me books. Th e answer was simple: she didn’t trust her taste. My father was the reader and writer in the family, and she realized when I was very young (my father taught me to read at three) that books were his province, his and mine. We were the superior inhabitants of a