Fortunately, my mother threw me out of her house last year — otherwise, I might have gotten upset yesterday. And of course, I promised my brother I wouldn’t write about this. [sigh...] Well, there goes another one. It’s all grist for the art mill, baby, no time to lose!
There I was having my 5 o’clock tequila in the sunshine. It was a glorious Indian summer day, with golden yellow cottonwoods and aspens splashed against an impossibly blue sky. (We get that sort of thing in these parts.) My wife was walking around with her garden shears, whacking off the tops of flowers executed by last week’s 20 degree lows. The cat was looking for rare birds to kill. All in all, a fine early evening in the West, when all of a sudden, my cell phone rang inside the house. Normally, I might not hear such a thing, but I now have a distinctive ringtone: it’s a bull elk bugling, and I think we need to listen to it right now:
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(There, that’s better!)
On the other end of the line was my brother in Tucson. He didn’t have to tell me he was calling from outdoors, because I could hear the cars whizzing by. Sometimes you just have to get things off your chest, and he did, letting me know that a few minutes before, our sainted 88-year-old mother had felt sufficiently provoked by his reaction to her in-transit hounding of one sort or another as he was driving her to Penney’s to leave him standing on the curb while she zoomed off on her own. Apparently he had pulled over and gotten out of the car to cool off, then thought better of it and came back, but by then it was no use, and the old lady pulled a U-turn in heavy traffic and headed off to Southwestern strip mall hell. He was feeling kind of bad about the whole thing, and who can blame him, given that she doesn’t see or hear very well at all and hasn’t driven by herself for years, as far as I know. I let him know I loved him, thanked him for the update, and poured another shot while I waited for the cops to call.
Oddly enough, they didn’t. What the hey?
In fact, about 90 minutes passed before I heard the elk again. (Maybe you should go back and play that thing once more.) I was ready for anything, because Tucson is one of those places where little old men and ladies regularly crash through storefronts and church bazaars trying to find the brake pedal: “The gas just STUCK!” Etc., etc. Miraculously, this was not the case. Instead of the police, my brother was on the line again, reporting that she-who-gave-us-birth [Thank you!] had returned home safely with only a single baby stroller wedged under the transmission.
Well, good. Other than an unlicensed golf cart getting stuck in the rocks at night after pulling off into the desert to avoid a police car, that was the only news. My sister is flying in from Texas today for a visit, and I hope she has a good supply of banana cream pies to toss at anyone who gives her any trouble.
I could use a snack myself right about now, and I don’t mind wiping it off my face, either.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello John,
When you wrote about your mother last year in the series it was some of the most brutally honest writing I had ever read. I felt your pain and anguish as if I was living it and realized you had once again reached something deep inside me that I had been blocking … I grew up hating my mother and spent forty four years of my life blaming her for everything . One day I realized that if she had know better she would have done better. That was a start of journey that would eventually bring us together for the last years of her life with love and forgiveness .. We became friends, two women learning to love and respect each other. I became her caretaker eventually and until she passed I got to practice loving her and accepting her as she was. She was not able to parent me as a child however she did parent me as an adult and teach me how to age gracefully and to be strong and suit up and show up everyday with a grateful heart. She died knowing that she was loved ..
Your latest writing filled with humor and pathos is again a reminder to me to feel my feelings which are often too easily stifled. You write of your brother with love and kindness and I think with some protectiveness too. That is nice to read. I have recently been reunited with my brother who was missing for forty years .. We are getting to know each other at age 69 and 74. It is never too late!
Blessings and light to you dear John.
Patsy
Missing for FORTY YEARS?!? That’s just amazing. Sounds like you need to write a book, or at least an article. Hats off to both of you!
I can hardly express my gratitude for your generous words, as well as my appreciation for sharing your own experiences. I’m also relieved that you “get it,” because that means I communicated clearly. With my own family these days, I’m more able to feel compassion for everyone without experiencing a compulsion to “fix” things. (This works a whole lot better than the other method, which is just a trap.)
Thank you especially for mentioning that something I wrote led to something positive for you. That’s great. I have also had the opposite effect from time to time.
John,
This is as good a time as any to offer one more wandering soul to add to your list of faithful readers who “get it” and appreciate it.
I’ve been reading you faithfully for 10 years or so and it is uncanny how similar our paths toward some kind of understanding have been. There must be a human commonality at work here.
In retrospect, the big breakthrough for me was the forgiveness and sympathetic understanding that came from my realization that my parents inherited and were struggling with the same crap they passed on and that they did the best they could with what they had to work with. That and the realization they had none of the self help language tools of introspection we have available to us today. I doubt they even realized something was wrong. Somehow that realization released me to get on with the daunting task of figuring out who it really is who is being supported by this writhing mass flesh and blood. And what to do with these few remaining years.
Thank you for being John H Farr,
John
Another amazing and generous comment! Thank you so much. I agree with the human commonality observation. I think the damage, the disconnect from universal love, that even mildly dysfunctional family relationships engender is more widespread than people realize. We do this to ourselves through our culture, religion, and education, too. Aarghh.
Yes, WHO IS IT supported by (or generating!) “this writhing mass of flesh and blood”? Just asking that question blows out walls, and hardly anyone bothers to ask!
Thank you for hanging in there with me, BTW. I’m feeling a lot better these days and should be cranking out a ton of good stuff in the days to come.
cooking bison black bean chili on a rainy Maine autumnal Sunday, got a little Cazadores on the table, sit down to catch up with Farrfeed-
wham
like the proverbial car wreck, it is impossible to look away from the pathos as well as the love and humor. To do would be the slow turning from humanity.
toasting you John
Do you realize just how far you have travelled emotionally since your first posts on your family disfunction? You have developed a strength and peace that I didn’t see in your earlier posts. Good for you. I really think that all families have some sort of weirdness but if we are really lucky, we turn out ok in spite of it. I think your brother should be nominated for sainthood (or a straight jacket) for trying to take care of someone who needs full time professional care. I had a next door neighbor in Texas whose mother was totally bedridden and senile. She couldn’t talk, she couldn’t care for herself. My neighbor fed her, bathed her, cleaned up her diapers and loved her unconditionally until the day her heart gave out. My neighbor said it would be wrong to put her in a home after everything mom had sacrificed for her. Guilt or Love, who knows? But, she did it willingly and never complained.
I just got back from visiting my mom in Texas. She is a widow in remission from cancer and is very fragile. She gave up driving when she became ill because she had too many stress fractures and the drugs made her loopy. So, while I was there, she had me give her a driving lesson. Total ironic part – the only place she felt safe enough to practice was at the cemetery. So, we cruised the tiny empty cemetery roads in Midland, Texas. I told her that dad could just sit by and fuss and she didn’t have to listen. He never liked her 2 footed driving style. Fortunately for the other drivers in west Texas, she isn’t going to be out terrorizing the roads anytime soon. She would definitely be the one who would drive through the front of the beauty shop.
Rebecca, many thanks for the toast. Haven’t been to Maine in a long time! And what a fine comment.
I must be doing something right.
MtnRed, yes, I do realize… The key is in my “Art Guilt” series. In the last week or so, it’s like I got my self back — took almost my whole life so far, but here I am. Midland! Oh my. I went to junior high and half of high school in Abilene, you know. Developed my own two-footed driving style there at age 14, learning to rev up the automatic with my foot on the brake and then peel out.
Oh my, did someone say pathos; humor! I laughed literally out loud. I have a great ability to visualize lots of things, but when someone is as lucid in writing as you are, I just have a heyday in my head. I am picturing all of it as some kind of animated comic in cells with large conversation bubbles filled with exclamations and you just sitting in the sun, taking it all in with your afternoon tequila as your wife decapitates the flowers and the elk call in the distance.
There’s a whole huge generation that can relate so well to the experiences you are writing about. The thing is, it has been this way since the beginning of time but we were too self-absorbed previously to realize that at some point the shit would hit the fan with our aging, not-so-perfect, parents and we’d be holding the fan! You should write another book, John.
With tequila in hand, Cheers! Nancy
We’re holding the fan, all right. And with my mother, that’s all I can do. She needs care, but the laws of AZ “protect” geezers by making it extremely difficult to have them declared incompetent.(Unlike, say, Texas, where it’s super-easy…) I guess that’s a good thing, but there’s no way to weed out the truly wacko ones. The bottom line is that there’s absolutely nothing I can do except laugh to keep from crying.
If she were in any other state, I could have her declared incompetent and get her into a good nursing home
Dear John,
How lovely that your writing brings so many of us to together to share our experiences without fear of being judged.
I believe any growth I have had with my daughter is directly the result of Not Trying To Fix Her. It took me a long time to see my part in the play and thankfully change that before it was too late.
If I could write like you John I would write my book.
Thanks for all your sharing.
Patsy
Patsy, that comment needs to be on billboards everywhere. Our part in the play, oh yes, Not Trying to Fix Her, OH YES. I think there are about a dozen people in the country who are hip to that. (I’ve only just now begun to figure this out, so I’m not counting myself.)
You ought to write your book anyway. It would come from the heart, right? That’s 95% of what’s required.