Flounder. It’s not just a fish.

Maybe I should just leave the title, and not fill in the details. That’s probably the wiser course. But especially in recent years, taking the “wiser course,” whatever that is, has eluded me.

I was thinking today how badly one of the only things I ever wanted out of life was not to be my mother, not to repeat her failings, not to embody her impressive shortcomings. Even though in adulthood, I came to understand that what was so difficult about her probably — but I cannot say definitively —was not her fault. Does everyone who grows up with a terrible father, a trashcan of a sister, and who is limited intellectually turn out to be a terrible wife and mother? Maybe the answer is that the majority of those people do. I can’t say. And I’m not sure it matters. It just matters that I was determined — desperate, even — if I wound up being a wife and mother, that I would be all the things my mother was not. Alas, life is full of funny ironies.

It’s not that I’ve become my mother. But it is the case that I have a child who hates me the way I’m not sure I ever hated my mother. With my mother it was more about feeling shame and embarrassment, whereas my child is all about hating me. I think soulless monster is a favorite way to describe me to other people. I try not to be hurt by that, as I know it’s connected in some way to this child’s mental health challenges, but still. Even soulless monsters aren’t all made of stone.

I used to think I did my best with my kids, especially given my own limitations. But maybe that’s never been true. Maybe I am just a bad mother. Or at least a bad mother to the child who despises me. After all, it’s rarely the case that each child feels parented equally. There’s always a child who feels s/he has gotten the short end of the stick. I’m not sure how to compensate for that. Nor do I actually think it’s possible. No matter my efforts, the child will not see things as I do. And certainly not experience them as I might have imagined or hoped.

Then there are the glaring, bad choices I’ve made. With words, with deeds committed and omitted. Compounded by this child’s incessant and unforgiving score-keeping. None of which applies equally to the child’s other parent. Only to me.

In my head, this child and I have clarifying, healing conversations and are able to reconnect, to be forgiving, and to commit to trying to do better going forward, even if we cannot undo the hurts of the past. But outside my head, it’s just one disaster after another, it seems.

There are other conversations I’ve had with myself in the past year or so in which I tell myself that I used to be someone who had dreams, who had hopes and aspirations. Not of greatness or of grand achievement. Simple dreams, of laughing with some regularity, of being out in the world and feeling some kind of connection to positive currents, of desiring to do things that would not just fill my time, but feed whatever spirit I might still have. I don’t have those dreams any more. It’s more like, Oh, I woke up again. Now what? And I fill that time haphazardly and often badly, but I try to get at least a few practical things done in a given day. Make soup. Do laundry. Make the beds. Walk the dogs. Feed the dogs. Do the dishes. Put away the laundry. Try to make the paper and mail piles a bit smaller. Pick up some groceries. You get the idea. I tell myself that those tasks matter, as life requires that those things get done. No matter who you are, or who you think you ought to be.

But I think it’s the silence of it all that hits me hard. I should listen to music, but I forget to. So my days are too full of my own thoughts. And they’re often not very good ones. And I’m not a very interesting person to talk to, especially if I’m on the other end, listening. But I can easily get to mid or late afternoon and realize I haven’t heard any sounds other than garbage trucks or dogs barking. And still I might neglect to put on music. I’ll have the thought to do it, get distracted, and then forget.

I also often forget to eat, at least in any “normal” way. I’ll reliably start my day with coffee (which I make at home) and some kind of sweet, whether a spoon of ice cream or a cookie, and then I might look up at 3p.m. and realize that I haven’t eaten since. On days that I run, I try to do better, since I figure I need fuel for my 5K or I’ll regret it. But I don’t run daily, so my eating remains erratic.

So back to that fish. It’s been a long time since I haven’t felt like that flailing, failing flounder. I wonder if my mother felt that way, if she paused to think about who and how she was and why. Her generation wasn’t, I think, encouraged to be self-reflective. I live in a time of endless, constant, everywhere promoted reflection, and self-care, and announcing your needs, and speaking your truth and so on and so on. Does it change the dynamic? I’m not so sure. I was walking through the park this morning with my child’s other parent, who turned to me and said: “It’s amazing how many struggling, lonely people there are here in the city.” “Even the ones you don’t think are,” was my reply. And in my head I said, All these fish, out of water. Just like me.