No, nobody died, at least not in the way you think, but the current focus of the chronicles are over with this installment. What a ride.
Most of the posts in this series are extremely emotional, somewhat overblown, and very dark. They’re also at least five times too long: if I could edit it down to 20% of what’s there now, we’d all be better off. But the literary flaws mirror the stress of these last few weeks quite clearly, reminding me of the whirlpool that sucked me under and still grabs me in the heart. (Biology is compelling, even in a lie.) There haven’t been many comments, though, probably most people have an intuitive appreciation of sorts, and whether from embarrassment or respect, one feels reluctant to speak up. That’s fine. What would I have to say to a friend who’d just lost an arm in a car crash, for example? The difference, however, is that the Helen Chronicles are revelatory for me, not crippling . The disability comes before, not after.
Without more exposition, one might make the mistake of thinking that the recent period represents a sudden personality change, the kind so many face when aging parents disintegrate before their eyes. There’s that, all right (the decline into an unsustainable state), but this wasn’t really sudden. Helen was always fragile, irrational, and deadly mean when hurting. In between, when growing up, I thought I had a mother and that everyone’s was like her: love ‘em when they’re good and leave ‘em when they’re bad. Affection that had to be earned, in other words. Think about that. What would be left of the emotion by the time it turned up as a temporary ration? Love reduced to doggie biscuits. And if that’s what you have, as lacking as they are, you still learn what to do to get the next one, because you’re always hungry.
So it was in the beginning and then got worse. Progressively, over time, a way of “dealing with it” grew alongside the rising emotional violence. This could be described as learning to expect the worst on any given visit, for example — only, why then go at all? Consciously, because that’s what good sons do, look after their dear old mothers, unconsciously, because I had to be good to get my biscuit, get that mother-love stamped in little Johnny’s passport. You can’t say that I was in control at all, really, continually revisiting the scene of the crime. We’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers anyway: whatever the dance was, it seemed to fit the bill.
And then there was the money, I realize. Ultimately, always, the money, the great big bag of doggie biscuits in the sky. If she mentioned it once, she brought it up a thousand times: what would happen when she died, who would get what, who wouldn’t. On every single visit, every phone call. If I wouldn’t discuss it and pledge allegiance to the creed, there’d be an ugly, crazy-making breakdown in the next ten minutes. On every single visit for over 30 years, at least, though it wasn’t always due to my heartless reluctance to wallow in the “family” muck of greed and fear and counting pennies. A minor therapeutic sarcasm could grow in Helen’s mind into a slight, a slur, a vicious ingratitude for all she’d ever done. Soon I’d be “just like your father” and there’d be nowhere to escape: she’d follow me or my wife from room to room, spewing toxins. You had to take part in the combat or become a mortal enemy. It was for her or against her, or else you ran away and stayed away until the guilt built up enough to make you go back and renew your membership.
Madness upon madness, cranking, grinding, tearing, mindless pain and horror, always though within the “family,” because we were one, sort of, and this was just what “families” did, except they didn’t. Not all of them. And you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to accept this larger, non-approved, alternative truth. (Just ask my wife.) I know now that a mother’s unconditional love reflects a child’s soul back to him or her, and that is how we know we have one. Absent that, it takes whatever passes for divine intervention. Grace, luck, mystery… I don’t know how my siblings and I are still alive, considering.
But the nightmare I found in Tucson finally blew the doors off: that buggy is dead in the middle of the road. I know this, but I still can’t adequately put my reaction into words. This is monumental. Everything I’ve ever done, or dreamed, or tried to do, was corrupted by the greatest lie that ever was. Fundamentally, I never really had a mother. I never got my ticket punched, not for over 60 years! My God, chilluns. My God, my God.
This realization is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m still substantially in shock, but I also feel a kind of liberation, like I’ve been rescued after having been raised by aliens on another planet. So I’m a human being, after all — who knew?! — and I can do what humans do and follow my heart. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT! How can this be? Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.
After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.) I have the rest of my life, be it long or short, to do things differently and start again. Stunning and disorienting. Life-altering. Absolutely, totally, completely, mind-numbingly huge.
I feel like I need to go climb a mountain, curl up under a ponderosa pine, cry for a week, then sleep for a thousand years…
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All this perverse stuff you were subjected to (in terms of being taught to crave those doggie biscuits of affection and approval and the big money-pot at the end of the rainbow) reminds me of the last interview I saw with actor Richard Harris before he died… the interviewer asked him if he was worried that one of his last roles – Prof. Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies – was what he might be remembered for after such a brilliant career. Harris sighed and said: “Look… you’ve GOT to believe me on this… I don’t care if I’m remembered AT ALL.”
It sounds like you’ve gotten to that place, my friend! I give you joy! I wish I could get there, and you have my envy (with love, of course) as well. Congratulations!
Perhaps, John, this is what drew you to el Norte. Because the arms of our Mother are so strong there.
KarenK: AB-SO-LUTE-LY!!! And I’ve only begun to make my acquaintance…
Chipper: I’d probably still like to be remembered, for whatever happens from here on out.
But that IS a sideshow.
Getting to where you feel the love, where everything’s forgiven and always was, is a goddamned perilous trip for some of us. Maybe it has to do with being a real artist. The crack, the missing pieces, being fucked up, etc. etc. are all clues to where the OTHER stuff is: you walk around in shit until you bump into the gold. I doubt there’s any other way.
Whatever really hurts us is ultimately a gift, I think, for those who dare to go there. Not that that’s the only way to get to know the unconscious, far from it! It’s certainly the hand that I was dealt, at any rate, and now I get to see what else there is for me to play with.
In Helen’s case, I finally asked myself: take away the money, and what IS there?
[crickets]
I hope my siblings get a handle on that. It’s really, really hard to take in, though, the hardest thing there is. If you can’t, you can’t. No blame.
My friend, what draws me to your blog is the honesty of your self-depiction. Each of us is a remote and mostly impenetrable kingdom. But you send us messages from yours – call it your heart of darkness, with apologies to Joseph Conrad. That’s more than most of us can say.
These human messages from the interior, whether yours or anyone else’s, make me marvel at the varieties of the human soul. “Psychology” is too trivial a term for it. A description of the differences isn’t a critique but an appreciation (in the technical sense of understanding the import of a thing).
Take this sense of yours of Creation as a benign surrogate mother. You’ve written often in that way, often very movingly. Yet that general concept always makes me scratch my head in wonderment. It’s such a different sort of way of looking at a thing which for me is and always has been emotionally neutral. Nature is capable of being experienced in many sorts of ways but is it something (a spirit? a principle of being?) that cares for us as individual humans? Is it something or someone to depend on? At best, it’s capable of giving pleasure or awe – and provoking thoughts about our littleness and lostness in the universe (terrifying thoughts, for the most part).
If one’s human parent is capable of withholding acceptance, how find it in this remorseless thing? Humans can torment us, but they can also love us, befriend us and teach us. We can’t get that from a glacier, a tree or a hummingbird.
True, these things can interest and move us. They have beauty or power, and that’s no small thing. We probably crave the inhuman as much as the human, but for different reasons. They pose different challenges, they are incommensurable.
But there’s one constant: No human, just as no force of nature, is ever going to give us complete acceptance. That’s why people have dogs. I prefer acceptance to be a hard-won sort of thing, not unconditional, based on having done something to deserve it. I like dogs but find them sort of embarrassing. They’re too damn undiscriminating.
I hope the chronicles are not over. Many people will tell you about a bad father, but few will admit to, much less tell you about, a crazy mother.
The day my mother died I felt relief. It was a long, long…
Sometimes I go and dance on her grave…
Lilly, I thank you for your understanding. I intend to keep writing about the effect of this toxic relationship, and I was going to start using a different title for future articles, but perhaps I’ll keep them going the way they are, so people can find them.
I love the dancing on her grave bit. Good for you! And what a good point about people not talking about this.