The Things I’ll Never Be Able To Thank My Mom For
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
By Audrey Hyams Romoff
I did not aspire to become my mother. In fact, as a therapist pointed out to me, I live my life in diametric opposition of her. I grew up in a seemingly picture-perfect household. My father was a doctor, my mother a nurse. We lived in a beautiful house in an upscale neighbourhood of Montreal. I attended private school. My wardrobe was extensive and envied. But we were living a lie.
My mother was one of the youngest children to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was two years old when the war broke out. An emaciated eight-year-old, when she and her mother were liberated.
After spending three years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, they made their way to Montreal.
Assimilating into the fabric of Canadian society was my mother’s primary objective, and she succeeded brilliantly. The cracks started showing after I was born. The stakes were very high for my mother, who was determined to protect me from all the potential dangers the universe holds. From the time I was a young child until I fled to Toronto at the age of twenty, my mother unleashed an escalating campaign to control me. There were a number of factors at play. My physical safety was a constant source of conflict.
She deemed many typical teenage activities too dangerous, so I lied to her about where I was going. I fought for my freedom. She fought back. When I wouldn’t acquiesce to her will, she would storm into my bedroom at 2 am telling me that I was an irresponsible, spoiled brat.
For my mother, I was definitive proof that she had eradicated all evidence of her traumatic childhood, except for the number tattoo on her left arm. How I presented to the world directly reflected on her, so my clothes, my hair, and my friends were all under constant scrutiny. I felt like she was trying to crawl under my skin to get a do-over for the adolescence she was denied.
After graduating from university, I was now faced with deciphering what my future would look like and cutting the financial apron strings. I was an unenthusiastic student but discovered when I joined the working world that I was ambitious. My father had an incredibly strong work ethic, which I too embraced. Following a series of jobs in marketing and public relations, I launched OverCat, a communications agency catering to lifestyle clients.
Although my mother was trained as a nurse, she stopped working to start a family. She volunteered as a school nurse and sat on charitable committees, but I had little respect for those activities. I thought she was lazy and should have made a larger contribution to society. I made a very different choice. A few months after I started the agency, my husband and I decided to have a baby. I was working ridiculous hours and battling 24/7 morning sickness. When my daughter was 18 months old, I got pregnant again. I had morning sickness throughout that pregnancy as well. If my mother didn’t achieve anything, I was going to do it all. I was drowning but adopted an Energizer bunny approach to life. Just wind me up and send me out. I excelled at making it look easy. I travelled frequently to New York and Los Angeles working with clients like Victoria’s Secret, Birks and Estée Lauder. OverCat worked on campaigns with A-list celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Shania Twain and Katy Perry.
In her late sixties, my mother’s mental health started to seriously decline. Over a period of three years, she stopped socializing with her friends, grocery shopping, cooking and coming to Toronto. On October 1st, 2008, shortly after my family and I said goodbye to my parents and drove back to Toronto, my mother chose to end her life in the garage of my childhood home. My father died in the garage that day as well, but the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
In the aftermath of their deaths, I became completely untethered and banished them from my psyche. It was what I had to do to survive. And then, fourteen years later, I decided to write a memoir. I forced myself to reexamine my life, particularly my relationship with my mother, which was as complicated in death as it was when she was alive. I was never very generous of spirit when it came to her. I credited my father with arming me with the tools to navigate life. I viewed my mother as a deep well of pain.
With the benefit of distance and a desire to delve into the minutiae of my life, I realized that my mother was so much more than that. She was the one who lit the fuse for my love of fashion by introducing me to Vogue magazine when I was nine years old and taking me on shopping excursions to designer showrooms. She instilled in me a love of reading and made me an avid follower of popular culture.
Both influenced my career path and made me successful.
My life will never be tied up with a pretty bow. The trauma is still too big to absorb, but I am finally able to acknowledge the gifts that she bestowed upon me – the ones that I will never be able to thank her for.
The Ripple Eclipse: Turning The Tide of Inherited Trauma is available at Amazon, Indigo and select bookstores mid-November.
Connect With Audrey
Comments