Raking Through Tangled Stuff

This morning I thought about my mother while I was raking through tangled dead stuff in the garden. Literally raking out old leaves (the ones I chose to overlook back in November) and clumps of long withered strands of iris leaves.

I didn't think of this at the time, but right now I'm remembering that for several years of my childhood when my hair was long, fine, and prone to tangle, my mother did the work of brushing it out, working through the snags and tangles. It wasn't fun. Probably not for her just as for me.

As I raked I thought about my mother as I struggle in my adult, mid-fifties life to dare to put myself out there in the world. I think of the mixed responses I received from her in my moments of "shining" as a child and adolescent, my achievements at school (that was the realm where I shone most often), even my having a great batch of friends and a sweet, devoted boyfriend when my sister did not.

I don't remember when this started, but I remember clearly her letting me know that my achievements "made my sister feel bad." Sometimes she would compliment me and in the very next breath say something like, "BUT Molly is so wonderful, too. And no one appreciates her."

Plain, simple, unambiguous, untangled, and unadorned praise or affirmation I do not recall. (Did I get that less cluttered praise and affirmation from my dad? Perhaps, in his reticent, Yankee-blue-blood kind of way. At least his praise was not linked up in any way to feelings about my sister. I remember one or two such declarations clearly.)

I was thinking as I raked and tugged out the dead strands and noted the thorny rose canes to be left until I had found my gardening gloves--is that why my siblings seem so much more able to sing my mother's praises to other people, whereas I hold back? Is it because she rarely sang mine? (In fact, I remember her once publicly mocking my idealism when I was in college--at least that's how it felt to me.)

Am I reluctant to sing her praises because I honestly don't see what's there to praise? My mother's gardening artistry, for instance, or her feisty independent stubbornness. Or is it that it just doesn't occur to me to crow about such things to anyone? I am stingy with praise of my mother. Perhaps the way she was with me.

Sometimes I doubt my memory: was it really that way, was she that stingy with her praise of me, or am I making that up to defend myself in my relationship with her as if to justify the way I feel about her?

People outside the family, who knew us back in my childhood, think of me as "the little, spoiled one" and "the one people doted on." But I don't see it that way. The bleakness of the landscape when I look back doesn't feel like that of a "dotee."

It may be that my brothers doted on me at times, or family friends. I was the littlest one: the cute, petite blond, blue-eyed girl with an impish streak on her best days (compared to my sister, who was plump and more often teary and temperamental). I played more games with my brothers and my dad more happily than my sister did. (She would be one of the first to list the injustices she suffered at our brothers' hands and the wounds to her psyche from always being cast in the lesser roles. And over time, she developed a dislike of card games strikingly like my mother's.)

I don't believe that my dad doted on me, but I believe, for all his flaws, he saw me for who I was and appreciated me on my own terms. Not as a wound to my sister's ego (or my mother's ego as it became increasingly intertwined with my sister's).

Several years ago in an all-too-rare conversation with one of my only friends whose knowledge of me reaches back before high school, I was given two small nuggets of her recollections.

"I remember your mother being very hard on you, criticizing you a lot," she said. "And I remember thinking your dad really loved you."

So here's the challenge: to continue to rake through the tangled dead stuff, to trust that my impressions are my true-est version of the past, even allowing for the fact that those impressions might be distorted; and then not to let those impressions and memories color and shape my present in some sort of stuck way, including my present relationship with my mother.

Perhaps my memories can allow me to breathe and make room for self-acceptance and forgiveness as a first step to moving on. To say: "maybe my mother really was hard on me and reluctant to praise me; maybe she really did try to protect my sister's feelings--and her own--at my expense. Maybe I rarely felt she was truly, deeply pleased with me, and maybe (in my small child's self-oriented way) I blamed myself for that. And maybe this partly explains why I'm so cautious about my potential to "shine" and accomplish things I might be proud of. And maybe this also explains why my natural inclination is not to sing my mother's praises."

And only after I have let myself take that in, I mean, really take that stuff in and also express it plainly without denying what feels like the truth of my experience, only then do I ask myself, "Now what?" Now how will I find a way to move on that feels more graceful and less tangled in a struggle with dead stuff?

Because--and here's the tricky thing--although I know that it's in my own best interest to find a way to forgive my mother and move on rather than cling to past injuries, when I think to myself that I "should" be able to compliment my mother in public the way my siblings do, or that there's something terribly wrong with me because I don't feel inclined to, or if I try to move on in a way that denies the memories that are deeply embedded in my body as well as in my mind, I am continuing to devalue my experiences and dishonor myself just as I feel she did (even if she didn't mean to).

Just as I do if I dismiss the distresses of my childhood memories by declaring that I really have nothing to complain about because I never went hungry, was always provided good food and clean clothes.

It can't be one or the other--forgiveness OR remembered experience. Not forgiveness by way of denial, but forgiveness AND remembered experience. Forgiveness AND honoring my own true-est version of the past (not to mention the present).

Which may just mean that getting this stuff out of me and into a blog where it can be witnessed by others (as opposed to sitting in the pages of my private journal) is just the right kind of way forward. Not telling my truth in order to blame my mother and hold her past behavior responsible for all that ails me now, but telling my truth in order first simply to honor it and then some day to be able to move on.

It's Not My Job

Awake in the night several days ago (an all too common phenomenon for me from 2 to 4 a.m.), after my  mind had run through topics like where my daughter might go to college, how I will earn a more substantial income, and whether I should just get up rather than wait to fall back asleep, I finally came around to my mother. As if that topic is always waiting.

Not just my mother but my relationship with my mother. And the words more or less rolled out of my head as if in a sentence on a page: "What it comes down to is this: when I'm with my mother, I feel like a bad person." Tears quietly spilled out of my closed eyes and ran down my cheeks until I wiped off my cheeks, blew my nose, and tried, unsuccessfully, to go back to sleep.

When I got up that sentence was still clear within me, and eventually I got around to writing about it. More or less in the following way:

When I'm with my mother, I feel like a bad person. Maybe even a terrible person. What do I mean by a terrible person? A bad daughter. A failure as a daughter.

Good daughters are supposed to "love" their mothers. By which I think I mean they are supposed to feel warmth and affection for their mothers, not simply to act lovingly toward them. Keep her happy. Be minimal bother and stress.


Those italicized lines got my attention! My adult mind knows it's not anybody's job to make someone else happy or keep them happy. Nor is it usually anyone's God-given life calling to "be minimal bother and stress" to someone else. Clearly I was tripping over those old, very tenacious beliefs that I'd absorbed early in my childhood, that I've tripped over plenty of times before (and may even have thought I'd left behind).

I can only imagine that when I was young it seemed that my life, or at least my mother's, went better when I created minimal bother and stress for her. Maybe I took it upon myself at an early age to "keep her happy"--an impossible task for one person to keep another happy, no matter what the circumstances or who the personalities! Failing at that task, I learned to do the next best thing: to be the source of minimal burden and stress, by keeping the noise down, tamping down my energy and enthusiasm, being a "good girl," not honoring my own needs.

I'm sure my mother herself never modeled directly asking for her own needs and wants. (She's one of the Queens of Indirect Communication, remember?) Maybe that's enough reason right there for me to have failed at that lesson myself. And maybe now's as good a time as any to master it!

I continued to write:

My life and her life don't seem to fit well in the same space--for me to inhabit my life in her presence--is that the rub? I've tried it both ways: bringing my life and my energy with me and withholding it. Neither seems to work. (I notice a lot of withholding, holding back, not sharing of myself when I am with my mother, especially when compared to some of my siblings.)

I go through the motions of being a caring daughter, and truly, I don't wish my mother harm. I just sometimes kinda wish my mother were dead.

There, I said it. Sometimes I wish that my mother were dead. She has already lived a long life--93 years!--and her mind is going soft and spotty on her, which she hates and finds both extremely annoying and terrifyingly confusing. Some days she lives in a fog of disorientation and discombobulation sprinkled with moments of simply looking out the window thinking of...? I will never know.

Somehow it's tempting to think life would be simpler if she were dead. In rapid succession I recognize, slightly enjoy, then am horrified at and no doubt ashamed of my feelings. But I don't banish them.

I wonder later from the safe distance of my own home: Have I felt this toward my mother from a fairly young age (a major psychological conflict for a young child!) and buried the feelings and the conflict deep, deep in my body?

And what of her? Did some part of her ever wish that I, the youngest, had never been born? I've wondered that many times, but I know she would never admit to such feelings even if she had access to them. Or did I intuit her lingering, unexpressed grief for my brother and imagine that I was at least not the "right child?" Not the one whose death had broken her heart (and my dad's too).

No wonder I end up feeling at war with myself when I'm with my mother, and no wonder the fleeting moments when I genuinely appreciate the woman in front of me are such a relief. Like the balm of a cooling breeze on a stifling hot day.

My attention is snagged once again on that line about going through the motions of being a caring daughter. Going through the motions is better than nothing, I suppose, but it doesn't feel great. But there's more to it than that.

One of my brothers told me not long ago that once, years back, when he had asked my mother how she managed to raise four children after my oldest brother, my parents' first child, died, he reported her reply as: "I went through the motions. I just did what I thought I was supposed to do."

I bounced this off of a trusted mentor who said, "The child of a mother who is going through the motions feels as good as abandoned, because the mother has abandoned herself. Just as you are abandoning yourself if you are 'going through the motions' when you are with her. You are leaving most of yourself somewhere else."

Finding a way through this pattern to something more whole and healthy feels essential but also immensely difficult. The pattern I know with my mother has been in place for so long.

But perhaps I can start by repeating to myself for as long as it takes: "It's not my job to make my mother happy. My job is to be myself, to honor myself rather than abandon myself. Or hope." (Funny, on that last visit with my mother, I even found myself musing on Dante's "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" as an invisible sign over my mother's door.)

And there's also Martha Beck's wisdom to remember: "All God really wants from us is an unshakable commitment to our own happiness." Amen to that.