Communication Problems

Ever since I visited my mother more than six weeks ago, I've had problems with my email. Outgoing email only. This means that my ability to communicate easily with my circle and with the "outside world" has been greatly impaired.

I've had several long phone calls with Apple Support--and I'm grateful for those smart, patient, and predominantly good-willed guys at Apple! And a couple of phone calls with my old email service provider.

Here's where things stand: even with a new email provider and account, things aren't exactly dependable. Some days it's working fine, other days not. Some days my emails go out to some people without a hitch but not to others. And there's no way to know which of my missives are reaching their intended recipients and which are not, unless or until someone gets suspicious about my non-responsiveness and wonders what has happened to me and asks.

Maybe it's just as well not to assume that email will always work smoothly. Maybe it's not a bad idea to remember to use the phone instead sometimes. And maybe it's appropriate to be wondering more broadly about my communication with others. Is it always what I imagine it to be? Is my message getting through? Am I being heard, understood, received? and am I offering my best hearing, understanding and receiving attention to others?

I have to say that right now I find it somewhat amusing to note that my communication issues began while visiting my mother. There's so much static within me when I'm with her, it's hard to know sometimes what clear, honest and compassionate communication would be in that context. Does it mean shutting up, because she's 93 years old and doing her best, and what's the use anyway? Does it mean being compassionate towards myself and simply honoring, if not always expressing, what I'm feeling in her presence? what I might wish to say that I've always wanted to say for more than fifty years but have never dared to say? and what  I've tried unsuccessfully to say?

I will say that I've come to think of my mother as one of the true Queens of Indirect Communication. Though she edits herself slightly less than she used to--and that in itself can really catch me off guard!--her inability to speak directly, to ask for help of some kind, to separate herself psychologically and emotionally from the person she is addressing still astound me. Sometimes I get caught in the web and remember only too late that I might have fared better had I taken her statements in some sort of inverse fashion. The audio equivalent of a mirror image.

Smoke and mirrors. She speaks through smoke and mirrors, and most of the time I don't imagine that she does so consciously. Though I could be wrong about that. Maybe she's smarter and more self-aware than I think. When she says, "I'm sorry I upset you," maybe she really knows she would like to say, "I'm sorry you upset me" or even, "You should be sorry you upset me!" But I doubt it. In any case, it sure makes it confusing and exhausting to carry on a conversation!

I had had my suspicions about my mother's quick and adept projection abilities (projecting her own feelings, especially the "nasty" and  "negative" or "forbidden" ones like anger, onto others) for quite a while, but in her presence I would often doubt my own perceptions. Especially since I have so often been with her by myself with no corroborating or more objective witness.

Until one day when I accompanied her to an appointment with a new doctor--a geriatrician who happened to be accompanied that day by a resident intern. The new doctor, despite his "Marcus Welby, M.D." appearance, poked and prodded my mother fairly persistently with questions, trying to get a feel for who she is as well as challenging some of her excuses for why she prefers to spend most of her time alone. He wasn't buying them.

I could sense my mother getting irritated with the doctor, but instead of stepping in to rescue her--which, believe me, it did occur to me to do!--I took more of an observer stance to see how she would respond. Plus, I have to admit, there was a part of me that enjoyed seeing someone push my mother beyond her pretty narrow comfort zone about things like getting exercise and being more social--two research-proven remedies for slowing and even reversing symptoms of dementia. Such p

Finally, though, the doctor caught on that my mother was irritated and really didn't want to be pushed any further, though she hadn't exactly said so directly. So he backed off. A little while later he asked my mother how she was feeling or if she had anything she'd like to say to him, and she said, "I imagine you are glad this appointment is over, because I've been such a bitch!"

The resident lost his doctorly poise. His hand flew to his mouth in shock, unable to stop the words that slipped out: "Oh my God!" His eyes were wide as proverbial saucers.

I started to suggest to my mother that perhaps what she wanted to say was that SHE was glad the appointment was over, because the doctor has been such a bastard. But I stopped myself.

Still, I have savored that moment for a couple of years, the resident's response as a corroborating witness to my eons of speculation. Here was someone else, not my husband, not a member of my family, who couldn't believe the mixed up, inverted communication of this master of projection.

Ahhh, I thought. I'm not crazy. Or, if I am, at least I know why.

Doing the Work

I am trying to take good advice when it comes along. At least what I think is good advice and strong medicine and friendly encouragement.

I'm speaking of Moose's comment on my last post--encouraging me to take on the challenge of posting every day. Because then, she reassures me, it "becomes less about what you write and instead becomes just about doing the work.'The work will teach you how to do it' if you let it."

I've also been reading Traveling with Pomegranates, a book by a mother and daughter, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, in which Ann is wrestling with her sense of "calling" to be a writer, something she has doubted and wondered about, especially because her mother is a writer and she has been wary of "doing what her mother does."

This is actually the second book about (and in this case, by) a mother and daughter that I've read in just over a week. While I was at my mother's last week, I had brought with me The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which I'd never read before, though it has been in print for several years.

Having that book with me may have saved me, in fact. It gave me something quiet and unobtrusive to do while my mother did her word search puzzles and dozed off. And I could escape into that rich, warm, moist world of Louisiana (and Seattle, and even a wee glimpse of Portland, Maine) and those lovingly drawn characters.

I could feel myself wishing that I were as alive and quirky as those Ya-Yas on into my own elder years. And I could taste the buried but still lingering hope that I might yet have a chance of feeling more lovingly connected to my mother some day before she dies (or has lost all her mental faculties).

But that's not where I am right now. When I'm with her I am in a swamp of thoughts and feelings, and only at rare, fleeting moments do I sense a sweet gentle wind of compassion, a sense of space, of understanding on my part. Of being able to say to myself, "She's an old woman now. She won't be here forever."

For the rest, there's civil war within myself--feeling trapped, resentful (some of that toward my siblings as well as toward my mother), bored, disappointed, and then hating myself for those very feelings. Back and forth between feeling and punishing myself for feeling. It's exhausting.

And underneath it all, there's still the little girl I was (and still am?) wishing for a connection, a sense of being seen and known and unquestionably loved by the person who mattered most, still hoping yet afraid to hope, wanting to be seen yet afraid to show myself fully.

Why now?

I find myself thinking I might have to explain--whether to myself or to you--why I'm starting this blog now. But when I post that question, "Why now?" I find a ready answer, "If not now, when?"

In other words, I've thought about starting this blog for a long time, and the impetus to stop thinking and start blogging arrived last weekend. I was visiting my 93 year old mother, feeling a bit trapped in her assisted living apartment, almost as if I were imprisoned somewhere far from home with time on my hands.

I did have a laptop with me, and fortunately someone in my mother's building had an "unlocked" wireless network that enabled me to connect to the internet. A message arrived via Facebook from a friend who had just started a daily blogging challenge. At the suggestion of a former editor, Moose had decided to launch a new blog and post something every day for a whole year. (You can gather quite a lot of writing in that time and have a record of what you're going through--for her, marital separation.)

That's it! I decided. I'm going to ride on her coattails and at least start my blog. I don't know that I'm fully there on the post every day for a year thing, but at least I know she's doing it.

So I begin with gratitude for what I'm calling, "Moose Oliver's Blog Momentum Challenge." It got me started, at least for now.

First Things First

My name is Louisa Adams Bradbury, but most people I know and all the people I love call me Lucy. According to family lore, my mother dubbed me Lucy the same day she named me Louisa--before we'd even left the Boston hospital in which I was born.

The story goes that even though my mother had named me Louisa after a dear friend of hers who had moved away, she didn't want to leave my nickname to chance or to the tasteless whims of others. She didn't want me to end up being called, Lu or Lulu or Weezie, or any other variation on Louisa that she feared someone might come up with.

For that I am grateful. I've always liked being Lucy more than Louisa. I don't know--Louisa has always felt somehow like a fussy name, a little too Victorian, perhaps.

Besides, why would I want to be called Louisa when the only times that my "real name" was invoked had to do with parental anger  ("Louisa A. Bradbury, don't you talk to me like that!") or with strangers who didn't really know me?

Except for those times when my father chose to introduce me to some grown up as "my daughter Louisa." Actually, it was sometimes more unfair than that. He would say: "These are my daughters, Molly and Louisa." My sister got introduced by her nickname, and I did not. What was up with that?

To be sure there were times when I received unsolicited advice that it would be appropriate, given my advancing age, to forsake Lucy and become known only as Louisa. Our family dentist was one of the first people to suggest this to me when I was still in high school and he still exhaled stale cigarette breath on his patients when he leaned over us to check our teeth.

Later, in graduate school, I attempted to grow up and "become Louisa." I gave up after several weeks. I couldn't stand the feeling that even the people I lived and worked with didn't really know me. I felt like a fake, as if I was withholding some precious information from these people and as a result, I was closing off the possibility of genuine relationships. What's in a name? It turns out--a whole lot.

So Lucy is who I am. And Lucy is who I choose to be, even now at the age of fifty-six.

PS. I am grateful to Sukie Curtis for the image behind my blog's title. It's a detail from her painting, "Sunflowers Late Summer." Other images can be found at her website, www.sukiecurtis.com .