Can a mother be true to herself?

A thoughtful post on blue kimono about the state of women’s happiness raised some familiar questions that still have no clear answers, despite years of debate and exhaustive analysis.

The essential issue was about whether women can succeed on multiple fronts – career, family, personal growth – without compromising the quality of any one of them. A recent article in a Canadian newspaper about women in law is an illustration of the hostile environment that can face women who try to combine motherhood with professional success, but even for those of us who don’t deal with this level of challenge, the underlying issue is the same. If we are mothers, can we also be true to ourselves?

I can’t count myself among those who had difficulty establishing a balance, mainly because I had neither the ambition nor the education to be driven to a profession that demanded more than I could give. But on a much smaller scale, I have struggled to determine the formula that would allow me to define myself as a good mother without losing what I need to maintain my individuality.

Several years ago there was an excellent series in that same newspaper about women who did not fit the conventional slot society has reserved for mothers. One woman’s story was particularly unusual. Mother to two children, she had realized when they were still very young that she just didn’t have the nurturing personality that she felt was essential to good motherhood. Simply put, she had not been made to have children of her own.

With the valiant understanding of a husband she loved and wanted to stay married to, she moved to a house of her own a few streets away. The children visited whenever they wanted to, and she dined at the family home on a regular basis. Her relationship with her children was much better, she believed, and she was released from the overwhelming stress of trying to play a role she felt completely unqualified for practically and emotionally. The children were learning to adjust to their mother’s new situation.

The liberal, non-judgmental person I’d like to think I am admired her for her honesty and her creative solution. The critical, product-of-my-society person that I am more often couldn’t comprehend how a mother – a mother! –could leave her children like that, even if they were just down the street. Could she not have just stuck it out – taken some parenting classes, got a nanny – for their sake?

This is an extreme example of a dilemma that women with children face on a regular basis. When is what I want detrimental to what my children need? The lawyers who work punishing hours, the clerk at Wal-Mart invited to a quilting retreat that conflicts with her child’s sports tournament, the full-time mom whose dream of getting a master’s degree means a lengthy separation from her family – these women have to decide where to place the line separating self-fulfillment from flat-out selfishness.

A few years ago I began to spend significant amounts of time an ocean away from my children, who then ranged in age from 18 to 23. They coped with my absence with varying degrees of relief, resentment, and grief, and although I frequently went back to be with them for lengthy periods, guilt kept a strong grip on my gut. Did I have the right to put my desires ahead of their feelings, which I could not separate from their needs? Did I feel at ease with my decision? Yes, and no. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

No matter how many friends encourage us to ‘do it for you’ and despite all the articles we read telling us that it’s okay to look after ourselves, that self-care is the essential component of other-care, many of us do not easily make the decision to follow our own path. We may be in complete theoretical agreement with the idea of putting ourselves first, but when it comes down to the crunch, few of us shift our priorities away from our families without a little or a lot of accompanying angst.

And therein lies the rub. What we accept intellectually as reasonable is not always so comfortable emotionally. And for every time that we are able to draw the line, it shifts and resists on countless others.

Read More

On the ultimate decision

Last week, an old friend got what she wanted most. Death was her wish, and it arrived in the way she had hoped it would — in her own bed in the apartment where she had lived for more than fifty years, the person she loved most in the world at her side.

A year ago she had tried to end her life, and the intervention that saved her was not welcome. She had always been fiercely independent and the thought of becoming increasingly reliant on the small community in which she lived was untenable to her. Her vision of her situation was realistic and pragmatic. With no living children to care for her, she was adamant that she would neither move from her apartment nor become a burden to her only relative, the grandson she had raised for most of his childhood.

Her home was a walk-up apartment in central Nice that she had shared with her lover for 40 years –they married only shortly before his death – and she would not consider any other, under any circumstances. She gauged her ability to cope with her advancing age by the frequency with which she was willing to go down and up four flights of stairs – over the last few years it had dropped from four times a day, to once, then to only a few times a week, until finally she had only enough energy to leave the building when absolutely necessary.

The first time she spoke to me of suicide was several years ago, when she revealed that she had accumulated enough medication to deliver herself a fatal overdose if and when she reached the point where life was no longer livable. My first reaction was shocked rejection of her intention. In remarkably good health for someone in her late eighties, she walked to the shops every day, went to the cinema regularly and treated herself to a weekly restaurant meal. She was keenly interested in politics, changing societal mores and the influence of the internet, and her plan to choreograph the end of her life seemed completely incompatible with the person she was.

But over many discussions with her, I began to see how suicide could be considered the reasonable act of a rational person who refuses to be taken hostage by diminishing physical capacity and declining health. She was clear-eyed about the future and would frequently remark that at her age, there were no miracles left.

After she failed in her first attempt a year ago, suicide became a frequent, almost obsessive reference in her conversations. She still went to the hairdresser once a week, still watched the evening news, still took an interest in what went on around her – but she had started down a path from which she would not be diverted.

A few months ago her eyesight began to fail rapidly and although she was willing to undergo treatment to try and save what was left, the effort so exhausted her that she stopped it after the first session. We had lunch together a few weeks later and she talked of her distress at no longer being able to read a newspaper, a bank statement or even to watch television. She knew of ways to put an end to her life but candidly admitted to her fear of suffering pain in doing so. It was difficult not to protest her single-minded intention, or to offer her empty reassurances, but I had no basis from which to argue that her life could be improved or would even be bearable.

All I could give her was my attention. As much as I could try to put myself in her shoes, it was impossible for me — forty years younger and in very good health — to imagine how hostile her future had become and how untenable was the prospect of needing help to function in her daily life. I believed she had the right to do whatever she chose with her life, and that it was not mine to moralize.

In the end, she tried again. She didn’t succeed, at least not immediately, but during the brief period of hospitalization that followed her second attempt a cancerous tumour was discovered. She refused both treatment and nourishment; her beloved grandson acceded to her wishes and took her back home. I don’t really know if I, or others, failed her, but I doubt she would think so. I only wish she had been carried off by a heart attack in her sleep and so been spared her terrible decision.

If ever I get to the age she was, I might then truly understand her determination to live — and die — on her own terms, but I could not admire it more than I already do.

Read More