Additional birthday thoughts

Whenever I try to think of ways to deal with this kind of issue directly, I remember all the failed attempts, and also how old she is, and how she has never changed, and... well, why should she, now? ever? She doesn't have much lifespan left, and this seems to be solely my problem, not "ours", not hers - everyone else seems to get a positive vibe from her. It's me being picky, I guess... I would have thought if you're going to become somebody's mom (something I have never wanted), surely the first order of business is to fall in love with that baby and teach them through your physical presence how to fall in love with you. I think there are supposed to be hormones and pheromones that help with that. I must have missed out on transcribing receptors for those, or something, because all my life I've been horrified by the idea of bringing yet another human into the planet minus that good start.

All I have ever sensed in my own daughter-mother relationship is a Chasm, my own yearning for it to never have existed, all the bridge-building materials over on her side of it, and her not ever even having had a clue that such a chasm ever existed in the first place or that I had to learn to communicate with her myself, from the far side of it. I do not have enough objective perspective on this to know if it's just my own idiosyncratic Chasm, or if such chasm-ness is commonplace within the whole human primate species. (Something tells me it might be commonplace and that a lot of what passes as "culture" is supposed to hide it or veil it or distract it from awareness.)

This used to bother me a lot more than it does anymore, having had plenty of mom-related therapy, to do with surviving/coming alive after having been her punching bag as a child - this was known as 'spare the rod, spoil the child' in my parents' farm culture/time era. (Religion was all mixed up in it - this was a big motivation for my learning how to live without such ubiquitous mind-f***.)

Our relationship only ever bothers me on occasion, like this time of the year, the most overlapped part of the Venn diagram comprised of my birthday, my mother, me, our very carefully mapped out relationship; all the essential boundaries installed by me quaver a little bit, I feel that quaver more intensely than I should, because maybe I am more vulnerable than usual. There is no escape from this time of the year, or from the uncomfortable juxtaposition of factors. Not while she's alive. Nor while I am, probably. It's insoluble. I deep breathe, feel my/our feelings, keep moving.
 ................

I love this poem, via Art of Europe, sent me by a friend in Scotland.

This be the verse, by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

Happy birthday. I guess.

My 60th. Today.
So, my spry, almost 87yo mother invited me to her place for a quiet, uneventful Christmas dinner on Saturday, which only lasted a few hours (thankfully) and tasted pretty good. She invited me out for a brunch on my birthday, an invitation I accepted, which was today.

No exact time had been set, but I was ready by 10-ish... that's what I'm used to as brunch time.
About 11:30 AM I finally got a call from her;

Her: "Are you all set? I'd like to wait until the mail comes - the mail lady is late today - the last time the mail came was on the 24th, and all there was was a Christmas card from the MLA."

Me: "OK, no problem."

The next call was shortly after 12 noon:

Her: " Are you ready to go? I'm hungry, and the mail hasn't come yet. Let's go."

Me: "OK." 

So off we went for the anticipated Belgian waffle with strawberries and whipped cream at Smitty's. As we ate, I heard all about how she cut her finger, how it felt, how it bled and bled and hurt and hurt, what she ate the day before, plans for New Year's eve (a card party at the neighbour's), what day my brother and his family might come to town for a visit/holiday meal. All the burning topics at the top of her list that she wanted to chat about.

I asked her if she'd heard any rumor about Doctor X (her own doctor) retiring.  She said, no, asked where I'd heard that rumor. I told her nothing about where (from whom) I'd heard the rumor but that I'd heard it, and that it was just a rumor - whereupon she launched into the entire scene with the doctors in the city - who had come here, who had gone, their reasons for leaving, who was married to who, all their children, etcetcetc.

She asked me if I had found a doctor yet. No, I replied. I hadn't. In fact the last time I'd been to see one was in 2004. She seemed a bit shocked.

I was about to tell her why, about how the last visit had (by total fluke) coincided with a routine mammogram which had coincided with a bit of arm pain I'd been having from too much typing, which was partly breast pain (intercostobrachial nerve, lateral cutaneous branch of T2, which splits, and the posterior branch goes down the medial side of the arm while the anterior branch innervates cutis/subcutis of the breast), how the mammogram tech and the MD had freaked out about this and had insisted on a second (MUCH more painful) mammogram, and ultrasound exam, plus a clinical exam, all of which turned up absolutely exactly nothing, but which had irritated me a lot. Especially because I knew exactly what was (benignly) wrong already, but no one would listen to me. So I had decided to look after my own health care observation for awhile.

Anyway, I had only just begun, with a first introductory sentence about how I had had a sore arm from typing, when along came a waitress, not even our official waitress, but one who has seen my mother in there often, and who apparently didn't register that my mother and I were having a conversation (and it finally had become my turn to speak), wanted to make small talk with her, didn't seem to have any boundaries around what was appropriate waitress behaviour, i.e., be discreet, don't interrupt guests who are talking.

My mother responded to the situation the way she always has (and no doubt always will) - she opted for the novel, more superficial and therefore safer topic/opportunity, gave the waitress her full sunny attention, as if the waitress were some old dear friend she had not seen since forever, while I, and the thread of the conversation we were having, completely ceased to exist.

Conversationally shot down, bumped by a waitress on my birthday.

Story of my life with mom. Social invisibility. Interruption by waitress (or it could have been anything - a cloud pattern, a leaf blowing against the window) takes precedence; any conversation in which my mother has tried to, or has pretended to, listen to my contribution or story for more than a fleeting moment or two, is severed, aborted, never re-engaged. Even back in the car for the short 5-block drive home, she kept the air filled with casual chatter. She has never wanted to know anything about what I think or feel - thinks she already knows everything. Or she finds me hard to listen to. Or both. 

Other than setting up that unfortunate (for me) dynamic, she looked after me pretty well from babyhood to adulthood. I was supposed to be the passive doll and as long as that's how I was/am/acted/act, everything between us is fine just fine just fine and dandy.

I guess every introvert has likely experienced this dynamic in the company of an extroverted, therefore more socially dominating human, be they family member or anybody; only visible when that person decides it's time for one to be visible and then, if they can get some sort of reflected glory out of the deal somehow. I'm used to this. I grew up with this.

I've got a lot more patience with her and a lot less resentment toward her than I used to; but every so often... like, for example, a day when it's my 60th birthday (about which I'm not that excited in the first place) and I suddenly am made socially invisible by a waitress intrusion, and a mother who in a flash decides that small town chitchat is more important in that very moment, and I sit there reeling from being made suddenly invisible for the billionth time in my life, can think of no slick cool way of re-railing the conversation and/or shooing away the waitress ... I am reminded how much I still hate this particular dynamic, in this case, mother/daughter on top of everything erosive and corrosive it already encompasses.So why do I not deal with it directly? The way I do other things in life?

I normally just stay away from people who vex me and with whom I have no business dealing or who have no business dealing with me; but what do you do when it's your own mother, to whom you were born at emotional disadvantage of cosmic proportions, with whom you've been dealing all your life, sometimes more successfully than at other times? I guess if it hasn't killed me by now it has made me stronger - at least I hope it has. I can hold my own in almost every other non-mother circumstance.

Equanimity

Boxing day 2009 - I think I've finally achieved this elusive state. In order to get here, I had to spend nearly 30 years in the dark cave of Vancouver, going with low photon levels in exchange for useful tools and skill sets that are coming in very handy as I navigate life with mom, life in a small city where boundaries are very different than what I became used to, yet eerily familiar at the same time. Who said you can't go back home? I did, and feel much better for it.

Yesterday, I went to my mother's condo at her invitation for a Christmas dinner and present exchange. I gave her, she who loves Christmas bling, a Christmas floral arrangement, professionally produced and delivered locally, way last Monday, on Solstice day. This was my way of spreading the festivity out a bit more so that something important to me (solstice, photons etc.) would be symbolically included in a gift extended by me to her; so that the connection, the buried verb lying within my reach outward to her through a present, could be meaningful to both of us. It was a low montage of cedar and other coniferous greenery, red and white carnations, with a tall red candle sticking up out of the center. She thought it was beautiful and was glad to have it come a few days before Christmas so that she could enjoy it as part of her anticipation of the whole event. Win win.

We ate turkey breast cooked in the oven in a casserole dish, nestled in a bed of stove-top stuffing, to which she had added mushrooms (real, not from a can, she pointed out), onions, butter (not margarine like they put in the stuffing at the Wheatland, she pointed out); it was tasty for sure. Baked potato, half an acorn squash. Ice cream and apple-pear crisp for dessert. Some chokecherry wine. A lovely meal. Over the meal she reminisced about trips she had taken, funerals she had attended, music she liked, a cremation ceremony she'd been to recently. I noticed something in my brain not just nodding along dutifully, politely, but actually listening for subtext from her. "Do you want to be cremated?" I asked. "Yes," she said unhesitatingly, and laughed. "The church lets people do that now. None of this cold six-feet-deep needed if you're just ashes. At the graveyard the undertaker and the daughter together lowered a little square box into a shallow hole in the ground and put a piece of turf over the top." This led into a long side-topic about how dad used to tease her about how she parked. "He used to say, "You always like to leave a way out for yourself, don't you?"" And then she laughed again at the memory. Her way of parking is to leave a huge space beside her and whatever big four-by-four she has to park beside, even if her car sticks out a foot into a laneway, over-riding, or even parked squarely on top of, do-not-obstruct yellow hatch marks in the parking lot. She simply ignores yellow hatch. When it comes to parking, she appears to be yellow-hatch blind. And ticket-proof! The woman takes her space. Always has. I think she feels a touch claustrophobic at the thought of being in a coffin, buried...

Her boundaries have always been thick and tough. My experience as her only child (for the first 3.5 years at least), with her as my mom, was that approaching her was like approaching a large invisible deflector shield, one I bounced off almost every single time I ever tried to get close. After awhile I didn't bother trying anymore. She was never as approachable as she tried to portray herself as being. She wanted contact only whenever she wanted contact, and I was forced to accommodate myself to her. I was treated as her project, part of her bling collection, something she could dress up and curl the hair of and take out and show off. The rest of the time I was to be quiet and unobtrusive. I learned nothing of how to be a truly social human from her, not really. Anyone reading this will be relieved to learn that I did my therapy time and that this is all "water under the bridge," a phrase she likes to use, and that I won't bore readers with too many details.... long ago I asked for, and received in writing, an apology for her physical abuse dished during my childhood, but to try to explain any maternal emotional dearth she might have also dished is something she would find totally incomprehensible. She is confident that she did just fine, thank you very much. I turned out OK, didn't I? Is that not proof? So we go on.

What can I say, except that I need photons, especially in winter? I did not really need to be around my mother. At least huge parts of me did not. However, that having been said, I'm not one to pass up any last chance to understand, maybe, in retrospect, how life came to feel so pointy and sharp my whole way through it. While I'm here enjoying the feeling of having my personal brain photon tank slowly filling up again, I am cautiously exploring this old, painful, resurrected relationship with the one person in the world to whom I owe everything and nothing, depending upon which side of myself perceives her.

Anyway, so far, so good. Exercising psychic integration could feel worse. Whether my mind frames it as dragon-slaying or merely as sedate familial adjustment, I'm sure it will all be of personal benefit at some point. Something in there is feeling successful about something, and just now that's all that matters.

I opened up a gift from her, a huge box, inside which was packed a slow-cooker. Perfect, because I usually get distracted and burn things when I cook, which is irregularly. Thanks mom. Also, she gave me a set of 24 Sharpies with fine tips. She had seen me admiring them in Walmart. I make a lot of doodle drawings. I go through a lot of Sharpies. So this was a great present.

I gave her a big shiny green gift bag full of edible things - a Christmas pudding, a box of Christmas cake, some candied ginger, some halva (which I remember her enjoying from when I was a child), some boxed truffles, and a set of one-handed salt and pepper grinders I have had for absolute ages, complete with little bags of extra salt chunks and pepper corns for refill. She thought this was all too much. Maybe it was. I've given her nothing but a card for years and years and years, and for a long time before that, nothing, not even a card. So it didn't seem extravagant to me, not for a first Christmas spent together in decades, and just her and me to boot. But I may have over-compensated. Maybe there is still a pocket or two of buried, unearthed guilt to deal with. I'll find and deal with it consciously, rather than continue to buy her too many Christmas presents after buying her nothing for decades.

She was anxious to open a large box from my sister that had arrived addressed to both of us. We opened it up, and it contained a necklace for her, a framed photo for her of my sister and her husband, and for me a large plastic recycle bin and some home-made chutney. On the card attached to the recycle bin, she had written my name and that it was one of the "plunge buckets" she had used to help her foot feel better, after fracturing a few bones in it last summer, at my urging to do contrast foot soaks. Mom called her, and we each talked to her for awhile. It had a nice connecty family feel to it.

About 9:30PM, the evening wound down, and I packed up my things for the walk home just up the block.

Light-hearted on Dec 25th

This was posted over a year ago, but it's new to me, and I like it a lot, so here goes:



This afternoon I'll be going to my mom's house, where we will have a day together, eat (she's cooking) and exchange presents. She plans to go kneel for awhile at her Catholic church this morning, whereas I sit here typing and adding a topical, a-religious video to my blog. Hey, we each have our own way to mark the day, and we still get along. That's what's great about having clear boundaries. Forward Hohoho.

A welcome time-out

My mother climbed on a bus today, with her cousin (the one whose garage is currently holding my stuff in storage), to go off on one of her regular casino excursions. Earlier this morning she got up and showered and dressed. When she goes out, she always looks well put together. Anything she puts on always matches, and she always puts on a watch from her vast collection of watches to match her clothing. My mom and Joan Rivers, two watch queens. Before she left, she pulled my attention away from my computer to comment on how great she looked, how summery her shirt was, and seek my confirmation of her visual congruence. "Uh huh. Looks nice" I said.

Such a relief to have her be out for the whole day. My inner space can expand outward once more to envelop its surrounds. Mostly it doesn't care what those surrounds are, as long as they are unpopulated by other humans. The only thing still noisy and interruptive around here at the moment is the clock my Uncle Peter built and gave to her as a gift. A Dutch immigrant to Canada long ago, my Uncle Peter is now gone but managed to live a long and healthy life. He married my dad's sister, the youngest in a family of nine living siblings, the second-youngest of which was my own dad. My dad and aunt were from a dirtfarm family, born between world wars, the tail end of a succession of children made to toe stiff lines by parents who were sternly religious in a Calvinistic sort of way. Dour. No fun allowed. Lots of work. So many older siblings. No particular personal attention. Lots of physical punishment. Lots of churchy activity.

My dad rebelled by learning to play music on a violin. He would sneak away and go for music lessons from his high school teacher who lived a few miles away. If he came home after 10 PM he could expect a good thrashing from the stern patriarch of the family, my grandpa Carl, who brooked not even a slight hint of disobedience. From anyone. My dad grew up stunted in many ways from this lovely upbringing he had. I think he was likely chronically depressed from birth, but faked his way through life, mostly adequately. He got away with being stoic and quiet, because when he lived, that is what men were supposed to be anyway.

My Aunt Ella, the one who married Uncle Peter the Dutchman (so handy with tools and able to build anything out of anything), was the closest to my dad in age and close observer of his treatment by his father. On the day of my dad's funeral, when I asked her how she had felt when her own father had died, she disclosed that she had felt quite fine, was glad to see him gone, that he had been a real tyrant. It was then I found out, for the first time, that all my dad's life, pretty much, as a child, he'd been especially singled out to be physically abused by his father.

The things you don't learn about your own family by attending funerals, when everyone's guard has been lowered, or else breached, by grief.

My Aunt Ella, unlike my dad, has been an endlessly cheery person, extroverted enough to keep up with my mother. In fact they are quite good friends, these two old women. Aunt Ella's rebellion was to cut her hair and wear a bit of make-up. Both of which were taboo in her family of origin, and both of which were adopted by only one other female sibling out of five.

Anyway, Uncle Peter came along and managed to charm the old patriarch, Carl, with an old-fashioned approach - asking for Ella's hand in marriage from her father, maybe even before he asked her. Uncle Peter cracked, then translated into English, coded messages during the war for the Allied forces. He was highly mechanical, understanding heavy equipment well enough to be able to maintain a whole isolated prairie power station, himself, for decades, employed by the province. In his spare time he built things, useful items, from scratch and from kits.

The clock he gave my mom is one of his many constructed contributions to the world. It doesn't run on time anymore, as he is no longer around to maintain it periodically, but it still sounds nice, chimes out the hours abut 10 minutes before the actual hour. A clock like that is nothing I'd ever have in my own place, as I would find it too intrusive, but my mom likes it because she liked Uncle Peter a lot, and because she likes noise. She's extroverted. Noise feeds her brain. Her brain organizes itself around externalities whereas mine organizes itself around the still place in dead center of its own quiet world, inside its own inner space. Which, when I live alone, I can easily find and orient to. Living with my mom, not so much.

Temperamentally I am more like my dad was, although outwardly I'm like a carbon copy of my mother. She is a "field-marshall" type, in the Myers-Briggs sense. Me, I'm more an INFJ. What I find irritating is her need, compulsion really, to organize every breath I draw, in advance, as though I was still 3 years old. She always has. It has taken me a very long time and a lot of space between her and me for me to find a good boundary to erect between my life and her version of it. Staying in her spare room for three weeks has been quite a test for that boundary - it's still holding but I can hardly wait to move into that place of my own on Saturday, and I'm so happy to have this day - this precious day, to myself. Well almost, except for the clock sounding, reminding me every 15 minutes that this is not my space.

My new place

Somehow events transpired to permit a barely 5-year-old, two bedroom condo, gently used, to fall straight into my lap, for a very very good price. I didn't hesitate, not even for a moment. I bought it as fast as I could. It will be perfect. It faces west, is on the fourth floor, plenty of sky (sunsets) to watch. I move in just a week, out of my mom's spare room.

It's been interesting, living with my mom, age 85 and still going strong. I do not feel as invaded by her anymore, have more patience with her, can see all sorts of similarities we have. However, she's extroverted and I'm introverted. Right there is the origin of most of the issues I've ever experienced in our relationship. She talks almost non-stop about everything, including topics as diverse as who might belong to the truck parked outside to making gingerbread cookies to the best way to make Saskatoon crisp, has the soap opera going on TV while the country music is still playing in the kitchen, wears dual hearing aids but still doesn't hear very well. I don't hear all that well myself, and am used to living in a completely quiet environment. So we are joking about having to yell everything at each other twice.

She endlessly ruminates aloud, I figure, to keep her own brain organized. She drives too - a nice fancy new car ("not a Cadillac, but the next thing to" she commented), even if her destination is only two blocks. "My car needs the exercise!" she declares. I realize she needs to keep driving or she might lose the ability to do so. She carefully parks in the underground, not letting her shiny car bump into anything. She wants to drive me around Weyburn, which is a real pain, because I like to walk, am used to walking everywhere, kilometers a day, and here the downtown core is a mere six blocks in diameter, and we are living right on the circumference. Yes, I'll be glad to move out. Again.

The last time I moved out I was just seventeen, and it was to go to university. This time, I'm pushing sixty, but I remember exactly how I felt over 40 years ago. What a gift, to be able to revisit that ground.

I will be living just down the block from her, on the same block actually, but on the other side of the street. We can see each others' balconies from our own. I can keep an eye on her without having to be directly in her space. She can phone me everyday to let me know how she's doing, and I can write my brains out while looking at ferocious prairie skies. At least that's the plan. For now.

Somewhat unfortunately, the weather here isn't how I remembered it. This year south Sask. weather has been cloudy and cool, more like Vancouver weather. The good thing, though, is that the sky is so big there is still lots of light even with thick cloud cover. Yesterday we were out shopping at Canadian Tire, where I bought four new bookcases and some new clothes (in Weyburn, Mark's Work Wearhouse and Canadian Tire are under the same roof). As we walked back out - to the car - we noticed that there were patches of blue opening up. Mom remarked, "My Aunt Hattie used to say, if there was enough blue to mend a Dutchman's pants, the sky would clear." And there was. And it did.