My mediation partner Sig Cohen and I are in the final stretch of a book tentatively called How Do You Want to be Remembered? In some respects this is a “how-to” book complete with its share of lists like, “Ten rules for …“ But I wanted it to be more than practical advice; I wanted it to also throb with the beat of human hearts. In a chapter called ”Letting Go,” I described, memoir-style, my challenging relationship with my mother to illustrate one kind of letting go.
Reframing Mama
We often hear, “You can’t change the past.” That’s true in one sense. The “facts” of any story may be clear and unalterable. But the meaning is not found in the facts. The meaning lies in the life experiences we bring to the facts and the interpretation we take away. There is a way to change the grip of the past. It’s called reframing.
Reflecting on a painful experience can give it a new meaning. Like an old family photo, reframing changes how it looks. New details emerge into awareness. A new frame opens possibilities for forgiveness and reconciliation, for personal growth, and for moving on from a very painful place.
A few years ago I wrote my spiritual autobiography to fulfill the requirements for ordination. In the process I reflected on things that kept me bound to the past in unhealthy ways. At first I asked myself, “Why did this happen?” But then I realized that was the wrong question. Only God knows why bad things happen. The more helpful questions for me were, “What can I learn from that? How can I grow from it? How can I work with God to use it to help others?”
Those are still good questions when stuff hits the fan.
The deepest sadness of my life was that my mother and I never bonded. When I was born, my father was unemployed and my parents were living with Dad’s parents. It was not a good time to have a baby.
My mother was a pretty woman, but from early childhood I remember her disapproving gaze and tightly pursed lips. She did her motherly duty as she saw it, which included liberal spankings, most of which I did not deserve. I could sometimes win her approval by making good grades and getting recognition from others, but I never in all my life felt she loved me. (I did feel loved by my father and grandmother and aunt, so the absence of Mama’s affection was painful but not emotionally fatal.) And as I grew older I really didn’t like her very much. I thought she was lazy. Although she had been a teacher and a social worker before I was born, she did not take a job after I started school. (I was an only child until I was nine years old.) Every single afternoon when I came home from school, the house was a mess and Mama would be taking a nap.
God knows we could have used an extra paycheck. We were working-class and money was always a struggle. We never had a washing machine like the other neighbors because Mama didn’t want to do laundry. Daddy’s work clothes and the family sheets and towels were picked up by a cleaning service and delivered the following week. I learned to hand wash and press my own school outfits. Later Mama washed my sisters’ dresses, but until they were old enough to iron they wore wrinkled clothes to school. Sometimes I ironed them out of embarrassment, secretly fuming. Mama was always “too tired.” Doing what? I wondered.
We were poor but she bought a lot of vitamins from a door-to-door salesman and visited a lot of doctors, though nothing improved. I secretly thought she was a hypochondriac, squandering the money Daddy sweated to earn as a carpenter in the Miami sun. I was full of judgment.
Not until I worked on my spiritual autobiography did it dawn on me that Mama must have been clinically depressed. And one day, long after I was grown up, she confided that the only time her father ever touched her was to put his hand on her head to check if she had a fever when she was sick. I suddenly understood why she liked to visit doctors.
These two revelations, her depression and the deprivation of a father’s touch, freed me to see my mother in a new light. And something else happened.
One day I was in the car alone with Mama when out of the blue she said, “Daddy says you don’t think I love you. Did you ever think that?” (Thankfully, she did not follow up with, “But I do.” Truth-telling was one of her rock-solid values.) The question shocked me. I recognized Mama was making herself vulnerable in that moment and I had no desire to go on the attack. But I wanted to answer honestly.
After a pause I said, “Well, when I was little I saw that other mothers would kiss and hug their children. You hardly ever touched me.”
She said, “When you were nine, one of the neighbors asked me about that.” Her voice broke. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I just couldn’t.”
It might seem hard to hear your mother say she couldn’t touch you, but it freed me to know I hadn’t imagined this! It wasn’t my fault!
I said, “Mama, I think you did the best you could.”
It was true. In that moment I forgave her.
Mama and I never did develop a touchy-feely relationship, but when she was in her 90s with Alzheimer’s, I helped Daddy care for her in my home. And I was glad.
Hi, Carolyn,
It’s wonderful to know you reached a point of forgiveness and reconciliation with your mother; so many people do not. As to the cause of your mother’s unusual behavior, she may have had chronic fatigue syndrome or even bipolarity, although straight depression is definitely a possibility. When I learned to cure our son’s schizophrenia with music, I learned that audio-processing deficits cause a spectrum of behaviors that have depression and fatigue and a general feeling of malaise associated with many of them. Other physical symptoms usually are part of each syndrome, becoming more severe at the high end of the spectrum. I think your mother did not “like” going to the doctor so much as she was turning in the only direction she knew to try to find answers to behavior she recognized was abnormal. Doctors did not know then, and only a very few know yet, that those illnesses can be cured with high-frequency sound (e.g., violin music). The brain is deprived of sound energy by an ear — or both ears — distorting sound and/or failing to conduct sufficient high-frequency sound to the brain. Sound is a form of energy, of course. Sound-deprivation is energy-deprivation and fatigue is one of dozens of symptoms that can result from weak ears. The fact that your mother developed Alzheimer’s is further confirmation of her ear problems. Alzheimer’s patients, even at the moderate to advanced stage of the disease, can reverse their symptoms by singing. You have described a woman very like my sister, who is certainly bipolar (manic-depressive), although she has improved from her steady exposure to music. Thank goodness she never married or had children; her teaching career was fraught with the tension of her inability to cope in exactly the ways your mother could not. She over-compensated in bizarre ways and has obsessions. She could not bear to be hugged in childhood and tolerates very little of that sort of affection even now although she is very sentimental and adores animals. My father’s bipolarity was somewhat different and may have developed later, in his teens, following scarlet fever and in infection that harmed his right ear; these ear problems fall on a spectrum that has yet to be fully explored in terms of the specific frequency deficits that describe particular discrete symptoms. Some progress has been made on that frontier. Meanwhile, people like you and my mother have certainly earned your saints’ degrees! Bless you for all the important emotional work you have done that allows you to minister to others.
Laurna
Thank you so much, Laurna, for such a thoughtful (and helpful) response. The work you do is potentially so valuable, especially with the growing number of people with Alzheimer’s.