Archive for June, 2010
Mothers and Daughters, More or Less.
For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat. And yes, it’s been a record-setting 100 degrees in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity. But yesterday I realized that is not it–not my problem at all.
Allow me to digress.
My oldest brother is a professional man. He was the apple of my father’s eye. My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child”, tried harder. He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.
I am the third child–the only daughter. My father cherished me without reserve throughout my childhood–and worried about me every day thereafter. He fretted over my every deviation from his feminine ideal and expectation.
When our father died after a brief illness, fourteen years ago, my brothers’ loss seemed inestimable. I grieved then, and I continue to cherish the memory of that honest and generous man.
But what I’ve been living in these past weeks, during this hottest of Baltimore summers, is something else entirely. My feelings now are far more complex.
My mother. Inch by gradual inch I am losing my 98 year old mother. No, it has not been the heat that has drained me. It has been the enervating emotion watching my familiar mother become much less familiar.
I am a woman. This is my mother. I stand in front of any mirror and I see her–in my hair, behind my smile. Sometimes it’s a struggle to see where she ends and where I begin.
I have an iconic teenage memory. We are locked in a Department Store dressing room staging warfare over some obscure matter of taste. We enlist the hired help (a saleswoman who foolishly dares to offer an opinion) to help defeat the other in a staged battle over hemline length, ruffles, glitz, color or neckline. We define our relationship for many years by the clothes we refuse to wear–and those we do.
I have an iconic adult memory. I had been a vegetarian for nine years years. My mother makes a thick chicken soup for me when I arrive alone for dinner. She insists, “But poultry is not meat.” This is not an ignorant woman.
I remember, of course, my mother’s vehement objection to both men I married: The first, because “He is not Jewish.” The second because: “You hardly know him.” I remember her caveat to my life as an author. “The only women writers who succeed have rich husbands who support them.”
I could go on. I believe that almost every women can–and does. The songs we sing with our mothers are seldom two-part harmony.
Regardless of the stories, the complaints, the engaging and the disengaging–regardless of the complexities of being the strong daughter of a strong mother–this is the parent who knew me then, who knows me now. This is the person who loved every bit of me (however much she objected). This is the woman who ultimately accepted (and found reason for pride) in my every choice–no matter how far I wandered, or how incomprehensible those choices were to her narrower life experience.
Today–I enter her apartment at the senior community (where she moved two years ago, when we agreed that 96 might be a good age to stop driving)–and her eyes laugh and dance. She tells me: “You have no idea how much I love having you here! You have no idea how much I love you.” Her whole body speaks that truth.
I am losing her. Not like my father after a three month critical illness. My mother lives and breaths and walks (every day more slowly and with increasing fatigue). She remember selectively, and surprisingly. She forgets what she had for dinner, or whether she even had it. She no longer has a ‘yesterday’ or even a ‘this morning.’ Time has disappeared. My mother teaches me still. She instructs me in the absolute value of this breathe, this moment–gone!
This is a woman who has lived life with enthusiasm and zest from the moment she took it on. ‘Mollie with the million dollar smile’ accepts life. She has systematically accepted difficult women among her many friends. She explained them like this. ‘That’s just how she is.’
She accepts too the losses. What has been acutely painful for me to witness–has been far less terrible for my mother to live.
Return Voyage alights here for three hot summer weeks. ‘Iokepa and I house-sit our son’s cats and plants, in a downtown Baltimore neighborhood. Our son and his wife vacation in Cape Town, South Africa, at the World Cup. We’re here for my mother.
Mollie Speert Miller may live to be 105–only God has that answer. Her health is perfect. But her body, her 98 year old body–skin, bones, and brain–is simply wearing thin. I watch my mother and I am helpless with grief. What she accepts, I continue to deny.
Mothers and daughters–there isn’t a more fraught and complicated relationship. I cannot imagine a life without it.
Loyalties.
Each of us cherish certain values above all others. Honesty? Courage? Common Sense? Responsibility? Generosity? What have I missed? The order may fluctuate with the day. We gravitate to people who share our values. Political. Occupational. Spiritual. Ethnic. Intellectual. What have I missed?
At the top of my personal priority list has always been, “Loyalty.” A few memorable times in my life, my heart has been broken by a friend who lacked the guts (at no particular personal cost, that I could discern) to stand up for me, when their voice would have made a tremendous difference to outcome. Instead, they hid out, voiceless. I considered the act a dereliction of friendship–and disloyal.
Understand that I count myself a loyal friend. And yet, I am about to offer the heretical: Perhaps the hardest thing to do in this world, is not (as we might assume) to stand up for a dear friend (that seems obvious, practical, and relatively self-serving), but to stand up to a dear friend. To say, “No” when “Yes” would be infinitely easier; to refuse when we just want to get on with it.
With tongue firmly in cheek, I suggest some familiar circumstances: “Does this dress look good on me?” “Do you think I should marry her?”
What I am proposing here is the possibility that there may be a higher loyalty than that we owe our best and our dearest. And that loyalty is to our own vision, our own knowing, our deepest truth. I am saying: When our loyalty to friendship is at odds with our inner certainty, we are obligated to follow our own.
‘Iokepa and I seemed to have hit a few, simultaneous, interpersonal, obstacle courses during the past week. We’ve been forced to consider this matter.
First.
A dear friend, a writer, agreed to read my book and critique it. Hers is a noble and generous under-taking in the life of a very busy woman. I am grateful. But before she could even turn the first page, she had a dream. Her dream’s editor demanded an entirely different beginning–a good one, with great purpose. My friend told me the dream, and made a strong case for it.
‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I are great believers in dreams. He is from a people who say that when we dream without fear: “The past, present and future open to us.” So, first of all, there was the remarkable explicitness of the dream. How could it not be significant? And second, there was my generous friend. How could I oppose her, when she was gifting me her love and time?
The problem was this. The dream editor’s first chapter (though crafty and attention getting) was not at all congruent with my vision for a book I’d considered now for ten years. I absolutely welcome critique, and potential change–and I feared that I would sound defensive opposing the dream editor. I worried, too, that I’d offend a woman who was giving so much, so selflessly–with no return for herself. I feared, finally, that I had lost my fresh-eyed reader to the dream’s determination.
I wanted to say absolutely nothing.
Finally, however, I found the words–blessedly clear words–to say what I needed to say. She heard them. She apologized profusely for what needed no apology. In sum, she completely understood. She is my old and dear friend. She knows me. She didn’t need to be told: That I am very open to critique and change; that I value dreams; that I am grateful for her gift; that I could not agree to the dream’s edit.
In this same week:
Two valued friends competed for the use of our eleven year old Subaru (sitting, in our absence, on Kaua’i). The first asked us a month ago if his visiting son could use it. We agreed. He’d been using it since then; he planned to use it for another two weeks.
The second friend had an unforeseen need, and assumed that it would be available. When it was not forthcoming–this friend, magnanimously allowed that she would manage without it. She did not want to create any hard-feelings between friend number one, and us. She relinquished her claim.
Remember, this was happening at a six-thousand mile distance. We are on the Mid-Atlantic coast of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States–skimming across Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. For me, at this distance, it would have been easier to let sleeping dogs lie–to do nothing, to say nothing.
But ‘Iokepa saw it differently. He followed his own moral compass, and I had to agree. There were other cars the son could use. The second friend (who housed our car in her driveway, in our absence) had no other. ‘Iokepa helped me craft the loving and assertive email insisting on the switch–immediately. Again, it was accomplished with grace and ease.
Loyalty–if it is not to that which I hold dear, than it certainly is not to those whom I do.