I’ve been back from Arizona for a week now, still exhausted, sometimes reeling from the backwash.
What’s happened is a terribly difficult thing to accept, because we’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers. Few can probably even conceive of a situation where the reverse isn’t automatically true, but it happens. With Helen, I realize, the contract has always been broken: she doesn’t love her children… That’s the chilling thing, the part that terrifies a child and stops a grownup in his tracks. It isn’t natural. It’s a denial of who we are. It really isn’t completely human.
With relish and conviction, she tells my brother in Tucson: “Johnny will be investigated, you’ll be investigated, you’ll ALL be investigated!” Us? We who by all rights should never had made it this far? What for?
For looking in on her virtually every day for years? For coming from the grocery store with fruit and frozen Chinese dinners so she’ll have something in the house to eat? For walking her calmly out of the bank with a shit stain spreading on her skirt? For driving 600 miles to pick up the pieces and getting chased out of town?
It’s like looking at a huge crippled insect, pincers waving in the air.
So don’t mutter platitudes at me or judge. I’ve been there and I know different. I AM there, and now I understand my father better: what do you do, when you find out, when you’re an Air Force officer in the ’50s and you feel the fear? What does it take to hold it all together? What kind of life do you retreat to? He took the coward’s way out, with booze and womanizing in his own little world where kids were a distraction. But at least I understand, a little.
The mystery is that I am whole — the question, then, is why?
Comment by K.J. Webb
1 August 30, 2008, 9:06 am o'clock |
Do you want a conversation about any of this, John? Some of your commenters might have experiences on this front which would be both interesting and helpful. Most of us didn’t act like saints and didn’t have saintly parents. The story of a life (yours, your mother’s, your father’s) isn’t in my mind about judging but understanding. Our stories are the only things we have, and the most interesting things we have. You tell yours pretty well, my friend.
Forgiveness - of self and parents and even obtuse commenters like me - comes into it too. If these are platitudes, I stand convicted. Convicted of many things, actually.
Comment by John H. Farr
2 August 30, 2008, 9:45 am o'clock |
Converse all you like! I’m not arguing, though, and will simply continue to write…
With Helen, forgiveness isn’t an issue. There’s no hatred in my heart, just the realization that a lifetime of pain was based on a lie. This amounts to a great shuddering, rising awareness of something that had its tentacles in every aspect of my past existence. And now, with more transmutation through art, I am finally free. It literally catapults one to wholeness, the missing parts delivered through quite another Source.
Helen, in other words, is not my spiritual mother. (Well, in part, she is of course — there are no dividing lines in nature, but I have to make a point…) There is nothing TO forgive! It would be like “forgiving” a bullfrog for eating her tadpoles.
We call this “realism.”
Comment by K.J. Webb
3 August 30, 2008, 1:40 pm o'clock |
If one expects a human mother to act like a bullfrog mother, then forgiveness doesn’t come in to the equation. But that isn’t something you believe, of course, and it sounds like forgiveness in fact, if not the word itself, is what you want to give your mother. If she were able to do that also for you in the limited time left to her, it would mean a lot to you and her both, don’t you think? She may have moved into territory where none of this is possible. But don’t give up on her, man. You’ll regret it.
You wondered how a whole person could come out of such family torment. Let me take a guess. You must have been looking all your life at your parents’ lives as cautionary examples of how not to live. That’s not a bad way to become an adult - just go the opposite direction from what you saw as you grew up. I’d like to say it was the way I did it, but I felt and feel lots of remorse for my own misconduct. That way has its own power. The parable of the Prodigal Son may be an exercise in wish fulfilment, but like all old stories, contains deep truths. Most lives end up with a bit of both truths - with parents who often treat their children stupidly and cruelly, children who in turn treat their parents thoughtlessly and dismissively. Then sometimes understanding sets in on both sides, and the old wounds get somewhat healed. Children grow up and get to see how being an adult and a parent isn’t so easy. Parents come to have regrets about failing their children on account of their own inner demons…. Or sometimes neither of these things happens, and parents and children just keep putting one foot in front of another without much thinking about the past, and the children become parents who make the same mistakes and push the misery down another whole level. And on and on it goes.
I’m a realist, but not a cynic. It doesn’t have to be that way. Indifference to one’s own past seems like an awful waste to me. I will take torment over anesthesia. Forgetting isn’t good for the soul.