A letter to my mother
Dear Mom,
Twenty-seven years ago today, I lost you. As trite as it is to say so, it is hard to believe that many years have passed. Now that I have a daughter, I have a different kind of context for understanding that day, and what happened before, and what came after.
I know now that children who experience trauma tend to get stuck at the ages of that trauma, to return to old coping mechanisms they used at that time when things get hard, to view the world always through the lenses of that trauma. And sometimes I still feel, at 40, like that 13 year old girl who pushed her way through to the office that had turned into a makeshift sick room and demanded to know where you were. The one who, the night before, wanted to see you--had to see you--so she pushed her way in and held your hand and realized for the first time when you opened your eyes and tried to focus on her and couldn't that you were definitely going to die--and that you were profoundly sorry.
But I'm writing to tell you that although the last year has been by far my most challenging as a parent, I am OK. Although I've been bitten and hit and scratched and screamed at, although my hair has been torn out of my scalp, although I've had to spend hours advocating for even the most basic services S needed, and hours more holding her while she wept and screamed and regressed and repetitively returned to a few key obsessions when she couldn't handle the realities of her life, I am OK. Sometimes when I am in the midst of her violence or grief or inexplicable obsessing I remember the screaming and violence that happened in our house after you died, and I have to tell myself I am the adult now, not that child. I have to pull her toward me and hold her and make things right again--and to do that, I sometimes have to push that scared 13-year-old girl out of the way.
I'm writing to tell you that although I've had to rethink what friendship is, I am OK. Sometimes, I am back at school on the Monday after you died, my first day back, and I am watching the world around me and realizing I know so much more than anyone in it--that I've experienced so much more. (Of course, that wasn't true, and still isn't--there was hidden grief and violence and horror everywhere, but my grief was too big to see that). In this memory I am angry that nobody looks at me, or that people look at me in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons, or that people say the wrong things, or that those who had once been my friends don't know what to say and do.
It is like that now--has been, actually, since the first-year honeymoon with S ended. I think we remind people of how selfish they are, or how lucky--we remind people that they want their lives to be easy and happy, full of small dramas but not large ones, and also that they feel guilty about this--and so they keep their distance. It is not that simple, of course, but through the 13-year-old lenses, that's what I see. I long for the deep kind of connection I was finally able to have with those 13-year-old friends when, in the end, I wept and demanded it, told them I needed them. I've tried that. At 40, it doesn't really work. It is much easier for people to hear but not listen.
I am writing to tell you that today I started my day by having breakfast with a group of women my age, something that does not happen very often anymore. I managed, somehow, to make small talk, and I did my best to stay connected to the conversation for the one hour they had, and I was able to be grateful for that time without the 13-year-old girl in me demanding more and deeper conversation. It was a start, and I was proud of myself for getting up early to do it, and grateful they'd invited me. And I continue to be grateful for the people in my life who do show up, regularly, for wine or weeping or the deep listening that can happen only when the hours are spread out in front of us--even if they aren't always the people I expected to show up when I started this adoption journey almost three years ago. You had unexpected connections like that, I remember, too.
I'm writing to tell you that although I've lost the two most important mentors I've had in the last 10 years, and one of my students, and, of course, Pamba, I am OK. 2010 was a hard year, full of grief I couldn't fully feel because I didn't have enough hours to myself, because S needs me at every moment she is awake, and when someone else is caring for her, it's because I have to be at work. But if JG and T taught me anything it was to love the people more than the job and to always work hard to help the underdog, whoever that was. To find creative ways to solve problems--especially when doing so would open up other people's worlds and lives. To stick things out, do what's right, even if things are tough, and even when the powers that be don't agree with what you're doing.
If M, my student who died, taught me anything, it was that there is still in me some fear of difference, some fear of having to commit too much--and that I need to actively fight that part of me if I want to become whole. I also learned from his death that I need to pay attention to my own sadness, my own overwhelm, and take care of myself. And, finally, that I must stay committed to those who are hurting--to actively invite them into my life, to nurture them, but never at the expense of caring for myself.
From all of them I learned that most constraints (time, money, energy) are human-made, not real. That I can live the life I want and must sometimes sacrifice for the sake of healing and love. That my life will not be, well, "normal"--and that this lack of "normalness" is what will make me whole and happy in the end.
From Pamba I learned what kind of parent I didn't want to be--the kind that screamed and felt sorry for himself and thought of himself before others always and always felt he didn't get enough credit or attention. I have been humbled by realizing that, in the midst of my grief, I became, at times just this kind of parent. But, I also learned from him what kind of parent I want to be--the kind who can ask forgiveness, say he's sorry. I learned about my own capacity for forgiveness. And self-forgiveness. And moving forward, finally.
I want you to know that now, I take the time to see and learn these and other lessons. I want you to know I am slowing down, paying attention. That this past year has been a year of stagnation and grief and fear--but that I'm moving past those things now. After breakfast, I went to T's home, where his family and friends had packed up all his books, which he'd donated to the library. He had at least as many, if not more, than I do. Today I stood in the library with two first-year students who showed up to help and ran my fingers over the spines of the books he'd once held and read. I could imagine each era of his life, could picture him in his office reading them. I felt at peace. And then, I went to the coffee shop to grade for awhile, and finally, after that, went home to be with S.
We sat quietly on the couch, leaning into each other and reading. I read through my devotions, one of which asked me to write down the deepest desires of my heart. After writing about helping to usher S into a good future, I wrote about Healing Ranch. And kept writing. And kept writing. I imagine the dead know everything, but perhaps I'm wrong. In any case, please send me whatever energy and love you can to help me bring these dreams into fruition--if they are meant to be. And if not, give me the strength to go on anyway.
But I've gotten off topic. When I started this letter, I was writing to tell you, first and foremost, that I know now that when you clenched your hand in a fist a few months earlier and promised me you would do whatever it took to "make it," that you must have been going through the most horrible pain. I'm not talking about the physical pain, or even the general I-have-cancer-and-might-die kind of pain, but the specific I-might-have-to-leave-my-daughter-forever kind of pain. I can't imagine looking into S's eyes and feeling that. I can't imagine.
I know mother-love now, and so I can look back at the years you were sick, and the years before that, and understand. How even though I tend to remember you as incredibly patient and gentle, you were sometimes angry and, yes, even mean--though not often. And I forgave you, as I know S will forgive me. And the rest of the time, you always made me feel I was the center of your world. Even when you were taking time for yourself, humming and staring off into space, gathering up your reserves to keep going forward. Even when you were snapping at Pamba, finally at the end of your rope at his neediness and self-pity, at all the ways he held you back from the life you wanted. Even when you were dying.
And so I am striving to give S the same kind of love and attention. I will need your help with that, too. It is difficult to sustain sometime--and was especially difficult with all the losses of this last year. But now, I am moving forward.
After the Healing Ranch dreaming, we went to the gym. I remembered you trying here and there to lose weight, and now I understand both how hard it must have been and how caring for others at the expense of your own care takes its toll on one's body. I don't want to suggest the stress in your life caused your cancer--but there is some connection, no doubt. And so I resolve to care for myself--to be careful about my eating, to keep up the exercising, to give S these same gifts. She is getting better, slowly, about eating and exercising, now that I'm back on track. And I am remembering again to cherish, as you did, my time in the kitchen, to work at making healthy meals, to make sure we sit down together. I will need your help to keep this up.
In the evening, we went to a dance performance then on campus. It was a risk, because, if the dead do indeed know everything, you know that S is obsessed with dance to the point that it is holding her back from moving forward. Afterwards we came home and talked a bit about the performance. Then, she asked what I'd been writing all that time when we'd been cuddling earlier on the couch. I told her I was working on the Healing Ranch dream. She wanted to read my notes. She laughed at the messiness of them, at the lack of organization, at the cross-outs and side notes in the margins. And then, she said it all sounded good, and she added her own notes to my margins.
After that, she picked up a horse magazine and looked through it, saying, "I remember how, before, I used to love horses." We talked about Honey, the horse she loved who died around this time last year, and about death, and about what it was like for me to lose you.
And then, she said, "I think I don't want to be a dancer anymore. I think I want to work on Healing Ranch with you, to work on healing people. Maybe through dance, or maybe some other way. But I think that's what I'm supposed to do. To heal myself so I can heal other people."
She was so earnest, staring into my eyes from her perch next to me on the couch. I tried hard not to get too excited, or to jump too far ahead. I know by tomorrow she may have forgotten this entirely. But when she moved on to planning the decor in each of the rooms I'd sketched out for the main house on this property that, at this point, I can only dream of affording someday, I wondered if maybe this time it would stick--that she's not meant to be famous or tutu-ed or stage-d but her authentic self, always in the process of healing and being healed.
I wonder sometimes what you learned from being my mother. My memories of our time together are spotty. Sometimes I have glimpses, actual glimpses, of you among your sisters and nieces and nephews, laughing and joking, working side by side with other women in the kitchen. Or I remember a few key times when you stood up for what you thought was right at church, with your friends, even when others were afraid to do so. Or the times I saw you genuinely connect with other women in that we-don't-have-to-worry-about-time kind of way.
But mostly I remember the times we were alone together. We had some serious talks, albeit brief and few and far between, about life and family-love and hope and wonder. These stick in my mind--the poignant moments like the time you clenched your fist and said you'd do anything to make it. And I remember how I never had the urge to run away. I could be in the presence of your pain, or your anger, or your wonder. I wasn't afraid of any of it.
But after you died, I became afraid of everything, and every big decision I've had to make required me to push that 13-year-old girl out of the way, to trudge on in order to get to where I knew I was going. But now I see that it was the little girl herself who was leading me. She would take a few steps forward and look back with her big sad and attentive eyes, daring me to follow her. And then, when she was sure I was heading in the right direction, she laughed a little and skipped out of the way.
Now I see that I have to embrace her rather than trying to get rid of her. She just wants the attention she stopped getting when you died. She just wants to be able to sit with the pain and not have to hurry through it. She just wants to have the kinds of conversations that go deep and aren't rushed. She wants to understand whatever is happening around her--anger, violence, even motionless-ness, even grief. Most of all, she knows how to love fiercely and deeply in the forever kind of way.
And so I'll find a way to be 40 and 13 at once, and I'll let S be whatever age she is from moment to moment as she tries to come to terms with the little-girl dreams she never got to dream and the grown-up dreams she sometimes glimpses. And I'll be patient--one thing everybody who knew you always says as soon as they get to talking about you is how patient you were. I'll do what I can to be patient and to make it--which means I'll be courageous, and take the 13-year-old girl's hand.
I'll need your help with that, too, please.
Love,
Argie
Twenty-seven years ago today, I lost you. As trite as it is to say so, it is hard to believe that many years have passed. Now that I have a daughter, I have a different kind of context for understanding that day, and what happened before, and what came after.
I know now that children who experience trauma tend to get stuck at the ages of that trauma, to return to old coping mechanisms they used at that time when things get hard, to view the world always through the lenses of that trauma. And sometimes I still feel, at 40, like that 13 year old girl who pushed her way through to the office that had turned into a makeshift sick room and demanded to know where you were. The one who, the night before, wanted to see you--had to see you--so she pushed her way in and held your hand and realized for the first time when you opened your eyes and tried to focus on her and couldn't that you were definitely going to die--and that you were profoundly sorry.
But I'm writing to tell you that although the last year has been by far my most challenging as a parent, I am OK. Although I've been bitten and hit and scratched and screamed at, although my hair has been torn out of my scalp, although I've had to spend hours advocating for even the most basic services S needed, and hours more holding her while she wept and screamed and regressed and repetitively returned to a few key obsessions when she couldn't handle the realities of her life, I am OK. Sometimes when I am in the midst of her violence or grief or inexplicable obsessing I remember the screaming and violence that happened in our house after you died, and I have to tell myself I am the adult now, not that child. I have to pull her toward me and hold her and make things right again--and to do that, I sometimes have to push that scared 13-year-old girl out of the way.
I'm writing to tell you that although I've had to rethink what friendship is, I am OK. Sometimes, I am back at school on the Monday after you died, my first day back, and I am watching the world around me and realizing I know so much more than anyone in it--that I've experienced so much more. (Of course, that wasn't true, and still isn't--there was hidden grief and violence and horror everywhere, but my grief was too big to see that). In this memory I am angry that nobody looks at me, or that people look at me in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons, or that people say the wrong things, or that those who had once been my friends don't know what to say and do.
It is like that now--has been, actually, since the first-year honeymoon with S ended. I think we remind people of how selfish they are, or how lucky--we remind people that they want their lives to be easy and happy, full of small dramas but not large ones, and also that they feel guilty about this--and so they keep their distance. It is not that simple, of course, but through the 13-year-old lenses, that's what I see. I long for the deep kind of connection I was finally able to have with those 13-year-old friends when, in the end, I wept and demanded it, told them I needed them. I've tried that. At 40, it doesn't really work. It is much easier for people to hear but not listen.
I am writing to tell you that today I started my day by having breakfast with a group of women my age, something that does not happen very often anymore. I managed, somehow, to make small talk, and I did my best to stay connected to the conversation for the one hour they had, and I was able to be grateful for that time without the 13-year-old girl in me demanding more and deeper conversation. It was a start, and I was proud of myself for getting up early to do it, and grateful they'd invited me. And I continue to be grateful for the people in my life who do show up, regularly, for wine or weeping or the deep listening that can happen only when the hours are spread out in front of us--even if they aren't always the people I expected to show up when I started this adoption journey almost three years ago. You had unexpected connections like that, I remember, too.
I'm writing to tell you that although I've lost the two most important mentors I've had in the last 10 years, and one of my students, and, of course, Pamba, I am OK. 2010 was a hard year, full of grief I couldn't fully feel because I didn't have enough hours to myself, because S needs me at every moment she is awake, and when someone else is caring for her, it's because I have to be at work. But if JG and T taught me anything it was to love the people more than the job and to always work hard to help the underdog, whoever that was. To find creative ways to solve problems--especially when doing so would open up other people's worlds and lives. To stick things out, do what's right, even if things are tough, and even when the powers that be don't agree with what you're doing.
If M, my student who died, taught me anything, it was that there is still in me some fear of difference, some fear of having to commit too much--and that I need to actively fight that part of me if I want to become whole. I also learned from his death that I need to pay attention to my own sadness, my own overwhelm, and take care of myself. And, finally, that I must stay committed to those who are hurting--to actively invite them into my life, to nurture them, but never at the expense of caring for myself.
From all of them I learned that most constraints (time, money, energy) are human-made, not real. That I can live the life I want and must sometimes sacrifice for the sake of healing and love. That my life will not be, well, "normal"--and that this lack of "normalness" is what will make me whole and happy in the end.
From Pamba I learned what kind of parent I didn't want to be--the kind that screamed and felt sorry for himself and thought of himself before others always and always felt he didn't get enough credit or attention. I have been humbled by realizing that, in the midst of my grief, I became, at times just this kind of parent. But, I also learned from him what kind of parent I want to be--the kind who can ask forgiveness, say he's sorry. I learned about my own capacity for forgiveness. And self-forgiveness. And moving forward, finally.
I want you to know that now, I take the time to see and learn these and other lessons. I want you to know I am slowing down, paying attention. That this past year has been a year of stagnation and grief and fear--but that I'm moving past those things now. After breakfast, I went to T's home, where his family and friends had packed up all his books, which he'd donated to the library. He had at least as many, if not more, than I do. Today I stood in the library with two first-year students who showed up to help and ran my fingers over the spines of the books he'd once held and read. I could imagine each era of his life, could picture him in his office reading them. I felt at peace. And then, I went to the coffee shop to grade for awhile, and finally, after that, went home to be with S.
We sat quietly on the couch, leaning into each other and reading. I read through my devotions, one of which asked me to write down the deepest desires of my heart. After writing about helping to usher S into a good future, I wrote about Healing Ranch. And kept writing. And kept writing. I imagine the dead know everything, but perhaps I'm wrong. In any case, please send me whatever energy and love you can to help me bring these dreams into fruition--if they are meant to be. And if not, give me the strength to go on anyway.
But I've gotten off topic. When I started this letter, I was writing to tell you, first and foremost, that I know now that when you clenched your hand in a fist a few months earlier and promised me you would do whatever it took to "make it," that you must have been going through the most horrible pain. I'm not talking about the physical pain, or even the general I-have-cancer-and-might-die kind of pain, but the specific I-might-have-to-leave-my-daughter-forever kind of pain. I can't imagine looking into S's eyes and feeling that. I can't imagine.
I know mother-love now, and so I can look back at the years you were sick, and the years before that, and understand. How even though I tend to remember you as incredibly patient and gentle, you were sometimes angry and, yes, even mean--though not often. And I forgave you, as I know S will forgive me. And the rest of the time, you always made me feel I was the center of your world. Even when you were taking time for yourself, humming and staring off into space, gathering up your reserves to keep going forward. Even when you were snapping at Pamba, finally at the end of your rope at his neediness and self-pity, at all the ways he held you back from the life you wanted. Even when you were dying.
And so I am striving to give S the same kind of love and attention. I will need your help with that, too. It is difficult to sustain sometime--and was especially difficult with all the losses of this last year. But now, I am moving forward.
After the Healing Ranch dreaming, we went to the gym. I remembered you trying here and there to lose weight, and now I understand both how hard it must have been and how caring for others at the expense of your own care takes its toll on one's body. I don't want to suggest the stress in your life caused your cancer--but there is some connection, no doubt. And so I resolve to care for myself--to be careful about my eating, to keep up the exercising, to give S these same gifts. She is getting better, slowly, about eating and exercising, now that I'm back on track. And I am remembering again to cherish, as you did, my time in the kitchen, to work at making healthy meals, to make sure we sit down together. I will need your help to keep this up.
In the evening, we went to a dance performance then on campus. It was a risk, because, if the dead do indeed know everything, you know that S is obsessed with dance to the point that it is holding her back from moving forward. Afterwards we came home and talked a bit about the performance. Then, she asked what I'd been writing all that time when we'd been cuddling earlier on the couch. I told her I was working on the Healing Ranch dream. She wanted to read my notes. She laughed at the messiness of them, at the lack of organization, at the cross-outs and side notes in the margins. And then, she said it all sounded good, and she added her own notes to my margins.
After that, she picked up a horse magazine and looked through it, saying, "I remember how, before, I used to love horses." We talked about Honey, the horse she loved who died around this time last year, and about death, and about what it was like for me to lose you.
And then, she said, "I think I don't want to be a dancer anymore. I think I want to work on Healing Ranch with you, to work on healing people. Maybe through dance, or maybe some other way. But I think that's what I'm supposed to do. To heal myself so I can heal other people."
She was so earnest, staring into my eyes from her perch next to me on the couch. I tried hard not to get too excited, or to jump too far ahead. I know by tomorrow she may have forgotten this entirely. But when she moved on to planning the decor in each of the rooms I'd sketched out for the main house on this property that, at this point, I can only dream of affording someday, I wondered if maybe this time it would stick--that she's not meant to be famous or tutu-ed or stage-d but her authentic self, always in the process of healing and being healed.
I wonder sometimes what you learned from being my mother. My memories of our time together are spotty. Sometimes I have glimpses, actual glimpses, of you among your sisters and nieces and nephews, laughing and joking, working side by side with other women in the kitchen. Or I remember a few key times when you stood up for what you thought was right at church, with your friends, even when others were afraid to do so. Or the times I saw you genuinely connect with other women in that we-don't-have-to-worry-about-time kind of way.
But mostly I remember the times we were alone together. We had some serious talks, albeit brief and few and far between, about life and family-love and hope and wonder. These stick in my mind--the poignant moments like the time you clenched your fist and said you'd do anything to make it. And I remember how I never had the urge to run away. I could be in the presence of your pain, or your anger, or your wonder. I wasn't afraid of any of it.
But after you died, I became afraid of everything, and every big decision I've had to make required me to push that 13-year-old girl out of the way, to trudge on in order to get to where I knew I was going. But now I see that it was the little girl herself who was leading me. She would take a few steps forward and look back with her big sad and attentive eyes, daring me to follow her. And then, when she was sure I was heading in the right direction, she laughed a little and skipped out of the way.
Now I see that I have to embrace her rather than trying to get rid of her. She just wants the attention she stopped getting when you died. She just wants to be able to sit with the pain and not have to hurry through it. She just wants to have the kinds of conversations that go deep and aren't rushed. She wants to understand whatever is happening around her--anger, violence, even motionless-ness, even grief. Most of all, she knows how to love fiercely and deeply in the forever kind of way.
And so I'll find a way to be 40 and 13 at once, and I'll let S be whatever age she is from moment to moment as she tries to come to terms with the little-girl dreams she never got to dream and the grown-up dreams she sometimes glimpses. And I'll be patient--one thing everybody who knew you always says as soon as they get to talking about you is how patient you were. I'll do what I can to be patient and to make it--which means I'll be courageous, and take the 13-year-old girl's hand.
I'll need your help with that, too, please.
Love,
Argie
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