A healing force
04 February 2012 07:34 PM Categories: The struggle redefined
I was reading through a fragment of a short story I wrote last summer when we were at Berkeley Family Camp. It’s a piece aching with premature loss, advance preparation for the removal of love, for the leaving of the boy. Every connection in life of the main character, a aging mother of one grownup child, is held together with duct tape. Her emotions are brittle things, chipped wineglasses wrapped in tissue paper and stored in flimsy boxes. The boy is gone and she knows very little about his present life, though she holds him close in her mind, her versions of him throughout his childhood clear and familiar, his present self a mystery. The warm, small body that nestled next to hers has become a foreign thing, awkward in its separateness and size. In the first scene, she sits in a lounge chair by a creek, wistfully watching children splash and play, observing their parents strong and present. She remembers.
It’s not that she regrets the lost connection or begrudges the boy his adult life. It’s that the loss felt inevitable from his first steps and the loss feels like (on some internal level) rejection. Dear reader, it may not surprise you that this mother was supposed to be me.
Along with anger, compassion, and forgiveness, I’ve been thinking about abandonment lately, that and what it means to be vulnerable and how being vulnerable for me as a child meant danger, something to guard against. There were times when I was left to handle difficult situations on my own, left to fend for myself, and so I did and learned that to depend was to be disappointed. It always sounds like a cliché to me, but it’s true. It fits. Along with that self-reliance, with that necessary isolation, was the idea that I didn’t deserve support anyway. If I did, then why was I alone in my struggles?
I was talking with my husband about this last night, about how it was somehow more comforting to imagine being rejected as a child for who I was, that there was some actual controllable cause or that I meant enough to my parents to be the cause, than to think that it had nothing to do with me. It was easier if there was a reason -- if only I had been nicer, kinder, less evil, less needy. If only I hadn’t said that one nasty thing. But their abandoments didn't have anything to do with me. It was just where they were at the time. They could only handle so much and were incapable of taking on more.
Making myself the cause of my own abandonment is comforting in a twisted way and it’s also not comforting at all. Of course I don’t sit around and think about how evil I am or needy, how much I deserve(d) to be left alone. Instead, I approach life prepared for the inevitable, steeling myself against the day the people I love go away, or I court it, in the hopes of the problem finally being solved, me being seen, redeemed … forgiven. But this is changing. Slowly, incrementally, I can see how my needs were and are legitimate, that I deserved the full attention of the adults in my life, and that they were incapable of providing for me. I can see that I deserve connection, that I need not isolate myself as penance for my wrongs, for my bad nature and evil deeds.
So often when I write these posts, I feel a release of feeling in my chest, a profundity of emotion, the realness of it all: this is how I feel and it is not going to change. I am trying so hard. I’ve been working on this for so long. And I think I am finally getting there. I’m at the edge of the cave, crawling towards the light, recognizing love for what it really is: a healing force.
Image by Bruce McKay Yellow Snow Photography.
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