Saturday, July 10, 2004

Object Lesson I returned from my decadent, sybaritic Hawaiian loll to my real life late Monday night. The first person I called once we were in our car on our way home from the glamorous Burbank airport (which I heartily recommend as a sane alternative to LAX; Long Beach is good, too) was my adoring, infuriating mom. She moved here five weeks after Dido was born, and, ten days after September 11. It has been both incredibly comforting and incredibly jarring to have her so close by. Most of my life, I've lived thousands of miles away from her. I went away to boarding school at 14, then to college, and spent maybe half of those years' summers in her company. My father died late in my senior year of high school, and because he didn't believe in funerals of any kind, and my mother was so shattered she didn't know which end was up, I didn't go home. I just stayed in New Hampshire, where my dear friends, my first love and my kind teachers did their fine best to keep me together. A couple of years after my dad's death, she uprooted herself from Chicago, where I spent half my childhood, to move to North Carolina. Warmer weather, no relatives, no memories of my dad blowing through every tree. She stayed there for fifteen years, give or take, until coming west, to a completely foreign environment. She loves me deeply, as I do her, and I am her only child, the only relative she speaks to, but the lure was my son, make no mistake. She works out of economic (and probably emotional) necessity, and fortunately, the company she works for as a kitchen designer transferred her here. But adjusting to life in California, and near her crazy, temperamental, constantly exasperated daughter has been--um, challenging? I went back to therapy a year or so ago at the H's urging, and as a bargaining chip to get him to go to couples' counseling with me (which still hasn't worked, but that's another post.) I found, much to my shock, that rather than focusing on my perennially challenging relationship with my beloved, or on the challenges of redefining my identity in the wake of giving up a 15 year career to be a mom, I talked most, suffered most, over my reawakened and fluxy relationship with my mother. Having her here meant that unwittingly or purposefully, I called every idea I held about her into question. Not only that, I viewed all my choices and behaviors through the prism of hers--and in so doing, essentially came up with an extensive list of my flaws that I could attribute directly to her. Not so nice. My shrink (whose memorial service I will attend here next Sunday) laughed about this, said it was inevitable, made it ok for me to struggle almost violently between a deep sense of personal responsibility for my mother's well-being AND a feeling of profoud disappointment that she is not on every the level superwoman I've long imagined her to be. You have to understand the kind of profile my mother creates among people who don't know her quite as well as I, or the H, do: she can do practically anything, knows practically everything, fears just about nothing. It has been crushing to learn that none of these are true. Maybe most kids come to this understanding earlier in life. On some level, I fear that my boarding school experience (one of the most valuable and formative of my life, and one I would never, ever trade) just stopped our relationship from growing--I left as a child, and because I never really returned, I didn't ever go through the growing pains with her that would have shown me her fallibility and vulnerability earlier. Maybe, like the character in Big Fish (which the shrink urged me to see) she was just really, really good at maintaining her personal myth. She speaks to almost everyone about everything with tremendous authority; to challenege her is usually fruitless. And to be fair, she does know a lot, is tremendously well-read, immersed in art and culture, and possesses a range of skills from carpentry to automotive repair that anyone would envy. But she has her flaws, and one of them, one which has had big repercussions for me (and comes from deep wells in her own life) was on display this week. Mom can't let go of anything--literally or figuratively. Grudges or old shirts are held in equally tight grasp. She also is compelled to acquire--I confessed to the dead shrink that I worry about someday finding her living like Steve's mom (brilliantly played by Anne Meara) on Sex and the City--surrounded by piles of papers and old food (wait, she already does live like that sometimes....) The net result of all this acquisition and unwillingness to deaccession is a whole lot of stuff and nowhere to put it. The analogy holds in terms of her psychology as well. And I know, I think,where it comes from in her life--a childhood where she felt that she would never be allowed to keep anything that she loved, whether her favorite blue dress or her pet turkey. (Both --removed-- by her mother--go ahead, let your imagination run wild, it's gross, and you're right.) But when I enter her living space--tasked with helping make sense of the total chaos, I nearly have a panic attack. The good news is that I come home resolved to be better about my own crow-like attachments to unnecessary shiny things. But the process of getting there is excruciating, and frightening for reasons I can't quite comprehend. 7:49:04 PM     comment [] trackback []