The Unanswerable Remains After Death

Mom's Journal February 16, 1977 (pre-divorce, aka The Big D)

The goals I set are not the answer; in fact, I am hampered by them. When I had so much to do that it couldn’t be accomplished, I was much happier; being on the boat, or in the camper, is rather like that. There is a pattern to the days. I feel I do not know where I am going, and I don’t like where I am. I need a purpose. A cause. I feel overwhelmed with things. A clean sweep; smaller quarters, time for living, not just existing. I’ve lost the joy in the everyday, the sense of newness. Living here is like living in a glass jar; sterile. We are being typecast into something we are not. I am I. Who am I? Only rarely laughing at myself and being the outgoing person I would like to be. No longer can I decide to do something and do it—too many restrictions. A house sitter, a babysitter, the restaurant, children coming for weekends. Sadness today.

I came late to antidepressants. Mom never found them. In my thirties, post-foreclosure and the loss of so much more than a house, my joy was limited, and always I seemed to be muttering to myself, “Nothing is ever easy.” Of course, that became a self-fulfilling mantra what I had to work hard to dispel. Even so, I was a whole generation ahead of Mom in self-acceptance.

It would have been a sign of weakness for Mom to admit to her sadness out loud, weaker still to find solace or reprieve from a pill. But any shrink worth a damn could have helped her, instead of isolating and imprisoning her. Reading her private thoughts, meeting a person much more human and flawed than I ever realized, I wondered, what would her life have looked like if she had found a respectable psychologist instead of Sam?

1979 (the Early days of the Big D)

I am sitting here trying to analyze what went wrong. I guess it is that for years we were well-intentioned, separate individuals clashing with each other because we were moving in different directions without even knowing it. Knowing this helps to erase the anger, and the bitterness, but I am still so close to it that it is not easy to keep this perspective all the time. I am terribly hurt by the assessment H has made of me and is apprising the children of…why don’t they stand up and be counted and come to my defense just once? Is it because they feel that I can cope and he cannot? But I am so deathly tired of coping…will there ever be a time when I can let go, give in, be allowed to be the frightened, inadequate human being I sometimes feel myself to be or must I always appear to cope so that the people around me can be comfortable? I cannot always be strong yet it is expected of me. Somehow, I feel that if I break down, we all will. Who the hell do I think I am? A survivor.

In the past, I always tended the wounded. Now that I am hurt, I can find no one to help me. People get sick and tired of people being sick and tired.

This entry stung; I knew how I ignored Mom that summer after she left. But I also know now, as a mom myself, that we do what needs to be done, to be an example of strength. Thanks are not the goal; protection is. It can be complicated, and we do our best in the moment with what we’ve got. I thought, without mistakes, do we grow? It depends on the mistake.

In another entry around the time of the Big-D, Mom wrote,

I am no longer what I was, but I do not know what I have become. As I became more isolated, I needed more support. The more I needed support, the shallower became the friendships. The more I needed sincerity, the more sarcastic I became. Don’t tell what you feel because if you show a crack you might shatter. Somehow, I imagined that my feelings could ruin me. If I let my feelings show, the person that I had built would cease to be. I am at last beginning to realize that without feelings I had already ceased to exist. There are parts of myself I would like to nurture, other parts I would like to die of starvation. The one thing I can offer to myself is growth. Instead of defensive superficiality I can try to become open, looser, deep. I can try to discover who I am and who I can become. I am who I was, I am who I am, and I am who I am becoming.

It was as though she was healing a little in the early days of the divorce. How did she get so derailed from her path of growth and independence? Maybe in the beginning, Sam was helpful in enlightening Mom to the power of feelings. Perhaps this was the pivotal point when she began to idealize Sam and became a true believer in his theory and therapy; he was a therapist superior to all others. With that, her marionette strings were secured, the puppeteer in full control.

1980

I have never stopped loving you even at my darkest moment. I wish you the goodness and compassion and caring and passionate understanding you have given to so many others and to me. You have the grace and passion of a poet, use it. Write. It will be your salvation. You are the only man I have ever known who is completely free of the bondage of the appropriate. How much I admire and envy that—I wanted to fly with you. I have tried desperately to stay as serene as possible. When I go into that space it is to preserve whatever sanity I have left. I don’t know if I mean that sanity which remains to me or that which I have left behind.

She saw so much—if only she had seen a bit more. Yes, Sam was indeed free of the bondage of the appropriate, and that included the appropriateness of fucking his patient and playing her like a violin. What would Mom have looked like if she, too, had discarded “the bondage of the appropriate”? What enviable prize did Sam have that Mom did not? He was free to be rude, free to be uncouth, but I can’t imagine Mom wanting to be like that. Though she didn’t seek out friends, she wanted to be liked. He didn’t seem to have a conscience. Or decency. If it were about having a lurid sex life, she could have gotten that elsewhere. So what was the lure? What? Like a glutton for torment, I continued reading.