Ten Random Things About My Mother

Clearly I have mixed feelings about this blog since I've not written anything since April 10. That's four weeks ago.

To be honest, I do think about the blog and about ideas that run through my mind fairly often. Sometimes I even spend a fair amount of time and energy spinning out various threads that could be written about, lines of inquiry, and things that continue to haunt or to needle me.

But I often lack the motivation to turn those thoughts into a blog post. Some days, many days, I decide I just don't want to spend my time and energy writing about my mother. Especially not mucking around in old feelings, questions, quandaries, and memories. Some days I tell myself that it'd be better just to move on, to deliberately and as honestly as possible put those things on a shelf and leave them there. Even if I have to put them back on the shelf (from within my mind) every single day, and sometimes many times a day.

Well, it's Mother's Day, and this morning I read a little piece that Caitlin Shetterly wrote about her mother for Oprah's magazine. (I didn't know Cait was now writing for Oprah, since I don't read O, but that's great for Cait!) It's about ten things her mother always says to her.

It got me thinking about things my mother always says, and it makes for a strange list, very much impacted by her diminishing memory. Our phone conversations (I call several times a week) are rather formulaic and predictable, unless I have some piece of unusual news to share that catches her interest for a few minutes.

A list of things my mother always or at least often says would include:

"The trees have gotten so big." (even if she has only been looking at these particular trees since January)

"Thank heavens for my word books!" (I agree--they give her something to do and keep her mind engaged; though the way she bends over them to see better doesn't help her over-all physical comfort.)

"I'm kinda tired." (which at age 92 is understandable)

"Well, you're nice to call." (This is one of her ways of saying good-bye on the phone. Or it's at least a prelude to the end of the call, which, with my mother, does not always involve the word "Bye." Sometimes she just hangs up when, I suppose, she feels finished and believes she has expressed some sense of closure. David has remarked for many years that he can tell it's my mother I've been talking to when the phone conversation seems to end rather abruptly.)

"Onward and upward." (This is another signal that she's ready to end the conversation. For me it carries a sense of the stoic perseverance that has kept my mother going. I'm not always sure that she wants to be alive or is enjoying her life, but she most certainly knows how to carry on and keep going.)

So that's five things she always says. Now how about five random things about her?

She likes Andre Rieu. (Sorry, I don't know how to put the accent on the "e" in Andre, but I know it belongs there.) This is something I only learned about my mother yesterday.

When I called my mother last night, she had been watching Andre Rieu on public TV and seemed nearly ecstatic about that! David and I often remark on the phenomenon of Andre's appeal to elders--we just don't get it. But I was glad yesterday that my mother had been enjoying watching and listening to him make music and engage with an audience. She sounded more animated than in most of my near-daily calls. (So, three cheers for Andre Rieu and what wikipedia calls his "melodramatic stage performances and rockstar demeanor!" He gives my mother enjoyable entertainment.)

She still makes her bed every day. Even if some days it is nearly noon by the time her bed is made, it is a foundation of her day.

She taught me how to bake bread--every year at Christmas-time she and my sister and I made yeast bread using a recipe from a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. (The Joy of Cooking was our cooking bible; Julia Child came along later.) I still make the same bread every year before Christmas--sometimes with my daughters, but  more often alone. It's called "Cinnamon Swirl Loaf" and is a basic hearty white bread with butter and eggs in it, and that wonderful swirl of cinnamon sugar.

She loved to garden and would still if she were more physically able and less sore and stiff. I often say (to myself) that by osmosis my mother taught me "the pursuit of beauty." So I suppose that even though she didn't paint or draw and didn't especially encourage me to do either of those (at least not that I remember), her aesthetic sense so present in her gardening lies somewhere behind my painting.

She knows how to persevere, how to keep going, in a mostly positive frame of mind, even if that frame of mind seems largely won by way of repressing rather than processing painful events and emotions. I imagine her many griefs and sorrows, as well as guilt, shame, and anger, largely lie buried in her bones and joints.  As much as my sister and I have at times thought that a compassionate, attentive counselor or therapist would be just the thing, she has never seen the point. That, too, is part of who she is.

Oh, I just thought of something she often says: "At least I still have my sense of humor." Which she does, even if I don't always appreciate her sense of humor as much as others seem to. Still, I'm glad she has it.

"Do I want to spend my time and energy on the past, or on the present and future?" I said to someone yesterday.

I have a feeling it's not that simple a matter, although many positive outlook, self-help types would suggest that it is. That it comes down to a matter of choosing where I want to put my time and energy and attention.

I do know that my feelings about my mother, which are now very much intertwined with and complicated by feelings about my siblings, occupy a lot of my waking thoughts. And usually it is not the friendliest of occupations. I would love to get to as easier relationship, at least with my own thoughts!

But for today, I have a little mother's day offering of sorts. It's not a Hallmark-type glowing and gooey expression of praise, love and devotion for my mother. But it is an expression of appreciation nonetheless. Perhaps what matters most is that it is what I found in me to say.

"Ten Random Things About My Mother"

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.

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 .