Inside Out(41)

During the eight years we’d been out of touch, Ginny had remarried not once but three times. One of the men had been so abusive she had to be hospitalized after the worst of his beatings. Morgan thought she kept getting married so she could change her name and clean up her credit rating. To this day, DeAnna believes that she and my father never actually divorced, and that all of her subsequent marriages were illegal. One thing seems to be certain: after my dad’s death, no matter who she was married to, Ginny always kept a picture of Danny on her nightstand.

I think that in a messed-up way, my mother’s relationship with my dad had anchored her. I’m not saying it was healthy, but the constant competition to see who could hurt the other one more, who had the most power at any given moment, had channeled a lot of her energy in a specific direction. Without him, she was completely lost and increasingly at the mercy of her addiction and her bipolarity, which had finally been diagnosed. And now her body was giving out.

When she was hurting me, I couldn’t really see past that. I felt unsafe and betrayed and, on the deepest level, devastated that she didn’t love me enough to be a better mother. To not exploit me for money. To behave herself at my wedding. To pick me up from school when she said she would. To protect me from Val. And all the rest of it. I have since come to understand that there is no such thing as someone “loving you enough” to be better. People can only be as good as they are, no matter how much they love you.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that you have the power to hold their actions differently in your own mind and heart. You can choose to believe that your value is inherent, it’s yours, and that the way your mother treated you says something about her, not you. Or you can choose to believe that your mother’s neglect means that you are unlovable and worthless. As long as you keep that wound from closing, you’ll be sore.

When I decided to care for my mother at the end of her life, I began to heal the wound.


THE FIRST TIME I made the trip to Farmington, DeAnna and Morgan came with me to see Ginny at Carolyn’s house, and we were there for a short time. The second time, I got a call that Ginny might not make it through the night, and I rushed back to New Mexico with Bruce and the girls. My mother hadn’t seen Rumer since she was a two-year-old toddler; now she was ten. Scout, who was seven, and Lulah, who was four, she’d never met. I think the influx of all these people and so much energy buoyed her, and between that and the steroids the doctor put her on, she managed to stay alive for another three and a half months.

I stayed for the duration. I lived at my aunt’s. Bruce—who really stepped up and was truly supportive during that period—went back to Idaho with the kids, who had school, and returned with them to visit me many times during the next few months. It was beautiful having the company of my daughters, who were at the beginning of their lives, when I was spending so much time with my mother, who was at the end of hers.

Hunter Reinking, who’d been my assistant since the movie Now and Then, joined me in New Mexico to help out. He took the night shifts with me; we would doze during the day when Aunt Carolyn took over. I still had some of my G.I. Jane muscles, so I was strong enough to lift Ginny into the tub for her baths. My mom was so weak she couldn’t hoist her ever-present Diet Coke, or raise the cigarettes she never gave up, to her lips. There was no reason to deny her the pleasure of smoking at that point: the damage was already done. So I would light her cigarettes and hold them to her mouth while she puffed away. She would take an orgasmic drag and sigh, “Ooh, that was good for me.” I don’t know if it was an act of solidarity or just a way of handling the stress, but I started smoking again myself.

One of the things that had always frustrated me about my mom was her insistence on her own victimhood. When she was dying, for once she really was the victim. In a way, I think that made it easier for her to be her. It certainly made it easier for me to forgive her, to have compassion for her, and to give her the kind of love and attention she’d always craved. She finally got what she’d wanted her whole life: to be taken care of. To be looked after. And really, in our own way, isn’t that what we all want?

I’m sorry that she didn’t get the chance to learn that a feeling of security can come from the inside, from yourself. I know that she never was able to overcome the feeling of being unloved and that she carried the trauma of rejection and blame until the very end. I grasped while I was taking care of her a real sense of the innocence of her soul. And I was able to see that she came into this world like we all do: wanting to find happiness, wanting to feel loved, wanting to feel like she belonged. She didn’t start life with a plan to be hurtful and neglectful. She just didn’t have the tools to navigate out of her own pain. When I consider now how young she was when she had me, I think: My God, she was just a kid. My daughters are older now than Ginny was when she had me—much. And they’re just finding out who they are.

Ginny sounded very much like a kid at the end, lapsing into delusions of being a six-year-old, insisting that she wanted a bicycle for Christmas. Other times she was an adult but didn’t know her father had died, and she talked a lot about his taking her “to the party.” When she was clearheaded, sometimes I’d try to talk about real things that I hoped to get some closure on. There was still the little-girl part of me who wanted answers. Ginny was never truly able to hear it, or take responsibility. The most that she could give in acknowledgment was to say, “I wish it could have been different.” Which, in a way, was a lot. It was a hell of a lot more than nothing. Because it told me she knew that it wasn’t okay. That things that had happened to me were wrong.