My Ghost Has a Name by Rossalyn Rossignol

Author:Rossalyn Rossignol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

18

Mama; or I Digress

Nearly every time I traveled to Bluffton, South Carolina, I also visited my mother in Augusta, Georgia, where Nell and I grew up. Mama, as I still call her, no longer inhabited the house of my childhood, at 416 Kemp Drive, but, at the time of this writing, had moved into a senior citizen’s high-rise called Saint John Towers. Visits with Mama were not and never have been easy. Mama would always ask me why I don’t go to church and would still tell me I’m going to regret it. Even though my cousin James had been dead for ten years, she would still ask me, back then, “Can you believe that James, a man as upstanding and righteous as he was, turned out to be a homosexual?” and we would have the usual discussion, which always concluded with a question that I found impossible to answer, not because I don’t know the facts, but because the facts are not at all what she wants: “Would you please explain to me how two men have sex?”

What bothered me most about these visits were the similarities I discerned between our behaviors—not that I condemn my cousin James for his sexual orientation. I am talking about my mother’s personality traits of egocentricity, cantankerousness, and stubbornness, which sometimes surface in my relations with other people.

One particular time, when I was at my mother’s just after visiting Beaufort, we were having an especially rough time. This was partly due to the fact that my children and I were, at her insistence and because of my inability to say no, staying in her one-bedroom apartment rather than at a hotel. One night we had an argument in which she accused me of stealing a hideous pink-and-maroon crocheted afghan when we had moved her from her house into the apartment. It was a ridiculous argument, not least because we had had it several times already. Before bed that night, I wrote the following words in my journal:

I feel I want to videotape myself during my waking hours to ensure that I spend most of my time not acting like her. Why, why, why did I have to get stuck with this mother? She is a black hole of horror, an emotional vacuum, an intellectual zero. How can I keep up this charade?

When I read this now, I remember, in particular, when I visited my mom for three weeks in 1995 to help her while she recovered from knee-replacement surgery. Because I was there, in Augusta, staying at her house, she was able to come home from the hospital instead of spending two weeks in a rehabilitation facility. The second day she was home a physical therapist arrived to demonstrate and explain the exercises she would need to do to get the full range of motion back in her knee. When he had finished, he gave me some papers outlining the exercises that also provided helpful diagrams. As he did so, my mother, propped

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