Now I Get It

In the Anglican Church where I spent countless Sunday mornings as a child hung a tapestry embroidered with the words ‘God Is Love’. This little phrase, so often evoked by the minister, made no sense to me and I puzzled over it for years. It’s fair to say that it was only one of many things said in church that I found unfathomable.

About twenty years later, a Christmas card arrived in my mailbox from a former boss who signed it, ‘Love, David’. I had never thought of him as anything more than a good friend and his use of the word ‘love’ took me aback. This was a term reserved for family members or people with whom one had long-lasting, deep relationships, and I had been taught that casual use diluted its meaning and impact. While I pondered the significance of David’s ‘love’, that old phrase—the one I had never managed to figure out—suddenly came back to me, and for some reason I turned it around. It became ‘Love Is God’, and then everything fell into place.

A long time ago someone must have decided that people needed to have something concrete to direct their spiritual efforts to—a ‘being’, as it were. Love, which represented the very best about humans, became personified as God. So, in my ‘aha’ moment, I decided that the phrase ‘God Is Love’ meant, well, ‘Actually, God Is Really Love’.

God is, as I have understood since then, the connection between us all when we care for each other, but it is not limited to the committed, long-term love we feel for a child, a friend, a parent, or a lover. Love, or God, also exists wherever there is understanding and complicity, in the kindness of a helpful gesture and in our humaneness when we give of ourselves to others.

My previous definition of love had been narrow and exclusive, but I began to realize that there were all kinds of other circumstances in which love flourished, however briefly. When we recognize need in the hesitation of an old person and offer a hand, when we respond with compassion to a victim of tragedy, when we delight in a momentary, meaningful exchange with a stranger, this is also love.

And it is the manifestation of God, because...God. Is. Love.

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My mother, my daughter, my sons, my lover

Our relationship with our mothers drives all others.

When I read this in a book a few years ago it struck me as an exaggeration, one of those smart phrases that condenses complicated wisdom into a smug sound bite. I was in counseling then, trying to figure out what part of the difficulty I had with my mother was my own doing, and put the question to my psychiatrist. Is this really true? I wanted to know. Absolutely, she said.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I had already started to understand that I wasn’t the same person with my mother that I was with my children or my friends or my husband. I felt off-balance, not entirely genuine. My confidence and assurance slipped away from me, or came out in the form of brittle bravado and a need to be right. I wasn’t really sure of my own identity when I was around her, and didn’t much like myself, either. My other relationships reflected the true me, I thought.

Naturally, the bond I examined first and most closely was the one I had with my daughter. My relationship with her was much better than the one my mother had with me; I didn’t try to impose myself or my views on her, or use the force of my intellect to intimidate her. I was more transparent with her, more honest, more accepting of her differences. Didn’t take credit – at least not overtly – for the person she was. I avoided making comparisons, stepped back from pointing out our similarities. Distanced myself from her, let her make her own decisions. In short, I tried to do things differently, tried to be different – tried not to be my mother. I almost managed to convince myself that she didn’t really need me because the last thing I wanted was to need my own mother. And was brought up short by the fact that my relationship with her was most definitely being driven by the one I had with my mother.

I had seen how hurt my mother could be by her expectations of love from her sons, by their insistence on going their own ways, by their sometimes infrequent attention. My role, as perceived by me and given motherly encouragement from time to time, was to compensate her for what she didn’t get from my brothers. On the other hand, I schooled myself to accept but not expect from my own boys, to take exactly what they were prepared to give without yearning for more. But my mother’s perception of loss became mine, and I secretly feared that the same thing would happen to me. And so my relationship with her influenced those I had with my brothers and my sons.

It hardly seemed possible that my most intimate, adult relationships could be affected by how she and I were with each other. These were stand-alone partnerships, above the fray of family dynamics and mostly exempt from its history. My connection to boyfriends, then a husband, then a lover had nothing to do with how I felt about my mother. But what was I doing by taking over, dominating many of these so-called partnerships? Showing how very competent and capable I was, hiding my self-doubt so that I could be, not just the equal of my mother, but better yet. It took a sensitive man to make me recognize what had been my pattern. He suggested that I did not have to prove anything to anyone, and in that perceptive remark was the re-making of my most important relationships.

None of this was my mother’s fault. She was not the introspective person I am, and preferred not to discuss nor even to examine, as far as I know, her own issues with self-esteem, of not having lived up to her own billing. I used to wish that she could just let it all go, those layers she had wrapped protectively around herself, so that I could really get to know the very human and imperfect woman underneath. But she did the best she could, and her best was driven by love and a desire for her children to be happy. Isn’t that the same for all of us?

There are stories I read by women whose mothers nearly destroyed them, who manipulated them with cruelty, or failed in their mothering through ignorance or their own inflicted wounds. The imprint of their experience is indelible and devastating. My story is not theirs, but only a small examination of the enormously significant role we take on as mothers.

With thanks to Friko for having planted the seed for this post, and with admiration for the brave and excellent writer of Shattered Into One Piece.

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My mother, myself.

My mother died tonight.

In fact, her essence was lost to us several years ago, when Alzheimer’s began to wreak its terrible toll on her mind. For the last year it was doubtful that she knew her children had once been the most important beings in her life, and the delight with which she usually greeted us was dispensed in equal measure on perfect strangers. People who have not experienced the non-recognition of a parent think this must be a dreadful thing, but our capacity to convince ourselves that, on some level, she couldn't not know us was greater than the evidence that she didn’t have a clue who she was talking to.

But this is not about Alzheimer’s, and how it destroys and kills so cruelly. This is about coming full circle – reassessing and forgiving what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible to accept. I am the only daughter of my mother, and inherent in our relationship was complicity and conflict, initially more the latter than the former, then the reverse, then swinging back again, to come to rest finally in the way that it should. We daughters struggle to understand and be understood by our mothers, to be accepted and to accept, to love and be loved.

Before I go further, I must explain that I had a mother who thought I was clever and beautiful, who supported me in most of the decisions I made, who never criticized how I raised my children, who loved me unreservedly and unconditionally. If all daughters were as lucky as I am, there would be no market for books on how to survive one’s mother and therapists’ appointment calendars would be half-empty.

Nevertheless, we had trouble with each other. It didn’t really start until I was well-grown, when I had children myself and could not deal well with the dual role of being a mother and a daughter simultaneously. I was an adult, responsible for the well-being and education of three very dependent human beings, a competent and capable woman who, for some odd reason, could not bring that confidence into my relationship with my mother. For various reasons — and I’ll spare the analysis — I wished to assert my independence from her, but in doing so, was so afraid to hurt her that I ended up hurting her more than I could possibly have imagined. Suffice to say that my wish for independence made me feel bad, and that bad feeling became blame, and the blame landed squarely on my mother.

We both tried to avoid a wall going up, but neither of us was skilled or prescient enough to find a better way to communicate. She still came for Sunday dinner, we still talked on the phone, but the gulf between us yawned wide and empty for the better part of ten years. Then it got much, much worse, and only in hindsight did I realize that her encroaching dementia had had a devastating effect on her behaviour and my reactions to it.

What saved us was a combination of things. One was the realization that my fear of being a bad daughter, my almost continual self-flagellation over my lack of compassion, had not had and would never have the desired effect of making me change my reactions. It simply made me dislike that part of myself so intensely that the wall got higher, and thicker, and became the symbol of everything I lacked. Once I stared that particular issue in the face, I could begin to dismantle the wall.

The second thing that brought us back together was my awareness of the increasing disintegration of her mind. My almost constant mantra over the ten lost years had been: What if she dies and we’re still like this? Well, she was dying, little by little. The person she had been was taking her leave, unwillingly, unwittingly, irrevocably. This person, whose opinion I had been so afraid of, was slowly losing everything that made her who she was, becoming a diminished, lost soul who I could only love again, unreservedly and unconditionally.

And so it was not too late, for which I will always, always be grateful. I wrote of my mother in my first essay for this blog, and had she known that her daughter would finally make the decision to write - well, and often enough - she would have been fiercely proud. I am sorry not to be able to say to her, ‘Look Mom, this is for you’ because she would have understood and forgiven and just been glad that I do what I do.

I have come full circle.

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Maybe it's a ghost story...

The south-eastern corner of British Columbia is a mountainous, thinly populated region known for its rugged beauty, abundant natural resources and a rough-and-ready past. Running parallel to the Canada-US border is the Crowsnest Pass, location of two of the worst mine disasters in Canadian history, the cataclysmic, murderous collapse of Turtle Mountain, and a reputation as a wild and lonely place. It was also the setting for the strangest experience of my life.

In the mid-seventies I was one of a small group of casual friends whose common interest was motorcycling, and early one summer evening we left Calgary for a few days of fun riding through the mountains, heading across the border and through Idaho. Our ultimate destination was Spokane, about five hundred miles to the south-west, give or take a few extra miles of detours to take our pleasure on sinuous secondary roads.

By the time midnight was several hours gone, we were well into the Pass, and it had started to snow. Our pace slowed, both for safety and comfort. Riding at low temperatures is an exercise in bloody-mindedness and the wind chill factor at even 50 mph makes it feel like the high Arctic. We were also getting tired, and I was not the only one nervous about losing control on the increasingly slick road. The Crowsnest Pass highway is dotted with the remains of once-thriving coal towns, some still clinging to life, others virtually abandoned, and we decided that at the next one we would call it a night.

Soon enough, out of the blackness came the relief of a neon sign, blinking wetly in the falling sleet. It announced a hotel, a clapboard structure that looked cheap and a little rundown but we didn’t care; all we needed was a place to dry off out of the cold and to get a few hours of sleep. We pulled off the road into the empty parking lot, unstrapped our gear and hauled it up the wooden steps to the hotel entrance. Light from the lobby spilled through the glass-fronted doors—a good sign at two o’clock in the morning—but but there was no one at the front desk as we went in. We rang the bell for service and waited, chilled to the bone.

Across from the front desk was a dining room, and after ringing the bell again and waiting for a few more minutes with no response, we peered through the doors to see if we could raise anyone. The lights in the room, which held about twenty tables, were full on, but our calls went unanswered. Somebody remarked that the food must be lousy as nearly every table held the remnants of a meal, with plates half-full of food and untouched glasses of beer. Cigarettes had been left to burn down into sagging tubes of ash. Chairs seemed to have been pushed back hastily and some had toppled over. Uneasy glances passed between us; the place felt eerie, hurriedly abandoned.

A narrow staircase led up from the lobby and we moved towards it in unison, bunched together and laughing nervously, a little too loudly. I figured I’d be safe with four guys but they sounded as apprehensive as I felt, and it wasn’t at all reassuring. On the second floor, rooms led off the hallway, some with closed doors, some wide open, lights on. Clothing was scattered everywhere, beds were unmade, messy. A red negligée lay puddled on the floor of one room and somebody wisecracked that the place must have been a brothel, raided in full flagrante delicto.

But the negative vibes were strong and we didn’t want to spend any more time up there speculating about the possibilities. No one wanted to stay, but going back out into the freezing night was not only unappealing, but risky.

Back downstairs, we tried to make light of it all. There must have been a police raid either for drugs or illicit sex, and that would explain everything. Someone pointed out that there had been no cars in the parking lot. Surely if the hotel patrons had been arrested, they wouldn’t have been allowed to take their own cars? What would make people leave so suddenly? And why did it feel so odd, as if the air were heavy with dread?

After a low-voiced consultation we decided to hole up in a corner of the dining room with a good view of the doorway and try to get some sleep on the floor. We arranged ourselves to be as close together as possible, and I was grateful for the chivalrous offer of an inside position. We hunkered down, all except for Pete, who sat upright against the wall and, to my consternation, drew a 9mm Luger from his pack to rest on his lap. No damn way he could sleep, he said. Too f-ing weird in here.

We slept fitfully, and just after dawn we were up, hastily pulling our stuff together, not willing to spend another minute in the place. In the gray, chill light we roared away one by one, leaving behind a nameless, deserted town and an enduring mystery.

This experience came back to me when my son returned a few days ago from a road trip that took him through that same part of the country. He and his girlfriend stayed at a hotel that seemed all right when they checked in, but once in their room he was taken over by a sense of foreboding so strong that he became violently sick to his stomach. In the morning his girlfriend woke up with the same feeling and they couldn’t get out of there soon enough. In Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ he writes of our instinctive and sometimes unconscious reactions to events, people and situations—messages that we often ignore, sometimes at our peril. What were we reacting to? I have often wondered if the place I stayed in was haunted, and my son is convinced that his hotel room was.

What about your stories? Have you experienced something odd that had no rational explanation and was left to float in the vague, unsettling realm of the paranormal?

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