unsent

a letter to my mother

me and my mother, 1978

Dear Mom,

I received a message from Steph about you. The nurse she spoke to said you’d entered the “transition to dying” phase as the disease you have is wasting your muscles and eventually, your diaphragm won’t support your breathing for much longer. I had known it was a matter of time; a photo Greg shared of their recent visit showed you in a state that reminded me that you are nearing your last days. When you’d first shared that you had been diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, I looked it up; I wanted to know what to expect.

There’s a lot I wish I could say to you. We haven’t spoken in probably two or three years. It’s been like that off and on for the last twenty years. It’s not that I don’t know what to say, but rather that I have so much I want to say, but past experience has brought me to conclude that it’s rather pointless. I’ve felt that our conversations were often one-sided, with pollyanna-ish aphorisms, and at worst, outright denials. And I can’t tell you that. Or at least, I could tell you that, but it would fall on deaf ears, so what’s the point?

I realize, as I write this, that I’m assuming that you wouldn’t be able to hear what I have to say. Maybe I’m wrong. I mean, how would I know? I haven’t spoken to you in so long, and haven’t seen you in seven years. I’d given up being understood. I never could figure out the algorithm for feeling truly seen and understood. I only have my memories and projections to go on. I don’t think I know you anymore. I wonder if I really ever did.

I want to be fair. I want to own that just as I’ve felt that you did not see or know or understand me, that those lenses through which I see you make it difficult for me to see you, to see you as a whole person, who like anyone else, had your frailties and peccadillos and your strengths and goodness. That there were moments of love, beauty, and joy too.

By estranging you as I did, while necessary for my healing and growth, it also lent itself to solidifying certain stories of victim/perpetrator. It was easier to place you in the one-dimensional role of monster mother. I once heard a spiritual teacher say, “Oh, you think you’re enlightened? Go spend time with your family. See how enlightened you are then.” In many ways, I did not want to give up my righteousness, my superior status as innocent victim. It was easier to vilify you. I wanted to maintain the illusion of my own enlightenment.

And yet, perhaps that’s not fair to me. The distance served to provide a space where I could find forgiveness and compassion for you. I was able to see that I would not get from you what I desperately wanted, and to stop trying. And to see that that was not because you were a terrible mother, but because you were not capable, and that even if you wanted to, there was physical and mental illness that stood in the way. The distance allowed me to see a bigger picture; to see that there were greater forces beyond both of us at work.

I have spent many years off and on in therapy. The therapist always wanted me to talk about my relationship with you. This frustrated me. I did not want to constantly re-hash all the trauma; I didn’t see how it would change things to relive all that pain and grief. It was for that reason I didn’t want to talk with or be around you, it felt like a constant stabbing and scratching at a never-healed wound.

I do see that it’s not entirely fair to say that you didn’t really know or understand me. I think you did on some level. You would comment on my sensitivity, and not always unkindly. My sensitivity was why, when I was 6, instead of taking me to the ER for stitches for a gash in my arm, you tended it to yourself. You felt such a thing would be too traumatic for me. You were a nurse, after all, you knew what to do. Your knowledge of my sensitivity was also why you didn’t want me to try out for the basketball team in high school - because I would be crushed if I didn’t make the team (I didn’t and still don't agree with this logic, as it didn’t help me learn how to cope with rejection, but as a parent, I can understand it). You understood why I wanted to play hooky from the new school when we moved and allowed me a day on the couch.

I think it’s fair to say that you probably didn’t know what to do with such a sensitive child, so you did your best. And yet, sometimes I think you used my sensitivity against me, to manipulate and hurt me. That you created jealousy with Anita and me where there was none, or didn’t have to be any. That you were far harsher when a simple quiet disappointment would have worked. That you delighted in singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria” knowing I did not like it. At all. How could you not see how that hurt me??

And, having had my own journey as a mother, and working out healing my traumatic childhood, I know that much of it was reactive and unconscious. I have had those moments myself. That I must have triggered something in you and you had neither awareness nor the tools, to deal with it in any other way that you did. Or that you had the support of culture and society that said it was okay (even beneficial) for you to leave me in my crib to cry it out, or hit me under the guise of “spanking” and “discipline” (though from you, it was never really this, it was in anger, it was hitting, and it was random).

The thing I struggle with the most is your inability to see that you could have been wrong. That you reacted with harm. That “sorry, I was wrong” was not in your vocabulary when it came to your children. Oh, in later years, you could talk vaguely about how you didn’t always get it right, but you were unable to hear or see specifics, to make amends.

I’d long since given up any hope of hearing an apology from you. I have learned that forgiveness doesn’t need an apology as an ingredient. I also have learned that acceptance of what was and what is, without judgment, renders forgiveness moot. But I am not anywhere near that level of enlightenment, and to even say, “well, we are all doing the best we can with what we have” seems a spiritual bypassing of the fact of our human experiences. I want to say that I’ve forgiven and moved on. But I’ve also learned that forgiveness isn’t a bucket list item that one simply checks off.

Mostly, I find myself less angry with you and much more empathetic. There have been times when I’ve felt that others have been unfair to you, and I’ve attempted to find a more empathetic, forgiving view, sometimes being critical of them instead (I don’t think my self-righteousness will ever completely be eradicated, in that respect.) But none of this has made me want to see you, talk with you. The wound has still not completely healed and I don’t know if it ever will. And now, there’s no chance, until we meet again in another life, to know what could have been possible for us. There is only what was and what is.

I want to be able to think of the fond memories - I know they exist. To thank you for the valuable things you did give me through word or action. But I’m not there. Not yet.