The Unbearable Lightness of Mother

There are many things I’m sure I’ll never understand in my life. I studied photography, so shutter speeds, planometric composition, not leaving your phone face up in a darkroom so that when it rings and lights up like a Christmas Tree because you always have it on too bright a setting for some reason and it therefore ruins whatever exposed photographic paper you happen to have lying in its vicinity which is really expensive nowadays because it’s a sort of dying art form and there aren’t many retailers around for dying art forms…these things I understand. But if you ask me anything about…let’s see…physics, classical music, international diplomacy…almost anything, really, I'm stumped. I don’t consider myself an unintelligent person, in terms of your basic problem solving, observational awareness, emotional maturity and all, you know, the hallmarks of standard intelligence. I think, at my core, I am quite a capable individual. But there are many, many things I will reach my deathbed without ever having come close to scratching the surface of understanding.

One of these such things is my mother. Or, more precisely, my mother’s…what’s the word…disposition. Her disposition. Her temperament. Her base level mode of being and reacting to the world around her and everything that takes place within it. It continues to baffle me, to positively confound my capacity for comprehension on a very regular basis.

I have seen my mother handle being fired from a job she worked for ten years, diligently, effectively and with the bare minimum of appreciation, by shrugging it off as if she’d misplaced a penny. I’ve seen her arrive to a concert she’d been excitedly anticipating for months, realise she’d booked her ticket for the previous night’s show and laugh at her mistake, genuinely laugh, like it was a great, tickling, cosmic joke she was really lucky to have been involved in, and happily drive us both back home listening to said artist in complete contentment. It was Bruce Springsteen. I was livid. I watched, as a fully, cognitively sentient adult as her and my father divorced, a monumental life-shift that should have left her disorientated and struggling for direction, only for her to nod in sympathetic understanding at his feelings, help him move out and wish him all the best. And, like, really mean it. She really loves him, and him declaring the cessation of his love for her, romantically, at least, did nothing to affect that.

      I’m sure this smacks of something being quite wrong. That she’s burying her pain, bottling it up, and that one day she’s either going to do, what I, perhaps, overly casually, describe as a Chernobyl-ing (you get the idea.) Or that she’s going to get really ill and wilt in a way that I’m unsure can be easily ascribed a suitably apt human tragedy as analogous shorthand. Anyone I’ve talked to about the phenomenon of her imperturbability has urged me to try and open her up, to pry and make absolutely sure that she is OK, that it’s not all a masquerade she’s grinning and bearing her way through in quiet martyrdom. But they don’t know her, not like I do. There’s no act to it. She’s an unfathomably, unfailingly, near aggravatingly, zen individual. Everything just seems to roll off of her, as though her emotional self is made of some hi-tech, hydrophobic like material, repelling human discomfort at a glance like it’s nothing. 

       She’s not immune to pain, like, physical pain, of course. I have heard stories of people born with a condition, must be neurological or something (again, I don’t know much about these things) that means they feel no physical pain at all, and they end up gnawing at their fingers as children or seriously debilitating themselves in careless collisions with the physical world because there’s no immediate feedback mechanism to tell them not to jump off of that roof or to think twice before headbutting that lamppost. I suppose there’s an important point in that somewhere, something salient about the necessity of pain, something about learning and growth and self-preservation. My mother is not one of these people, however. She’s actually quite sensitive, quite a jumpy individual. Give her a good prod in the side with a deviously pointed finger and she’ll jump and yelp with the best of them. It’s just the emotional, the sort of…psychic pain, that seems to wash clean off of her. Just the real painful stuff.

       Having successfully navigated my way through life into my thirties, I felt finally compelled to really try and make sense of this experiential mystery. I’d like to be more like her, of course. I think most people would. Sure, if she’s unfeeling, if she’s fundamentally numbed to everything, then that would not be something to aspire to. Better to ride the peaks and valleys of life in a glorious, locomotive bonanza of contrast and chaos (within reason, of course) than to be rooted to the spot, having everything move around you without regard as you zone out in the midst of it all, cold and disconnected. But she’s not like that. Really, you should see her. She’s so peaceful, so…stable in everything. It’s like she’s mastered the spiritual disciplines somehow, without anyone noticing. I’ve never seen her meditate in her life. She’s never mentioned it either. She doesn’t like incense, though it doesn’t bother her if there’s some lit somewhere.

       I visited her recently, in her little flat on a quiet stretch near the river. It’s weird, sort of painful to me, to see her living in such a small space, having grown up with her and my father in a modestly large house. Seeing her and all of her things compressed into confines less than a third of the space she, and we, previously occupied feels sort of like seeing a guinea pig in an undersized hutch. The paintings and pictures she contributed to the matrimonial, familial nest now all fighting for space, elbowing each other in comparativley postage stamp squares of two-dimensional real estate. It all seems a shame. I wouldn’t blame her for saying she felt like a caged bird or a prisoner or something. But, of course, she doesn’t. She’s quite content. She was buzzing around the kitchen, having to take care, given the size of it, daintily stirring and seasoning her signature goulash with all the cheer of a vicar at Easter.

‘Can you pass me that little pot, please love? The brown one, by the window there.’

           It was a seasoning mix, a pre-pestle and mortared coarse powder of salt, pepper, paprika and other punchy, tasty things. I shuffled it over to her as she took a spoonful to her mouth and furrowed her brow in contemplation for a moment before scooping a tablespoon of the seasoning into the mix.

‘How are the patients?’ I ask.

My mother’s been working as a counsellor for the last few years, which makes complete sense to me. Even just to be around here is to feel your nervous system dial itself down on the intensity scale a few notches. I have no idea if the people who come to her take that away with them into the rest of their lives, but I can see having a regular appointment with her as being a useful, calming, lighthouse in the storm sort of thing in the midst of an otherwise anxious week. I jokingly call them the patients, as though they’re mad. She finds it funny.

‘Oh, they are as they are,’ she chimes, in true Zen, declarative style, ‘I’ve had two new ones this past fortnight who are still very tense, but they’ll open up soon enough.’

           I bet they will. I’m no psychologist, as I’ve said, but to me it seems like half the art of the whole listening-talking business is just knowing how to make space. Being the space, almost. My mother is very good at being space. Cultivating a relationship where one person sits quietly, openly, encouraging out the thing that needs to be said or cried or felt, whatever’s been stuffed down in there, charming the snake out of the pot with a silent, spacious flute. Not stern. Not intense or anything. Just warmly welcoming. Comfortingly calm.

I think if you look anyone in the eye for long enough, they’ll cry eventually. I think everyone needs it, really.

‘Did you have to have therapy?’ I ask, forging my line of enquiry with drill like subtlety, ‘as part of your training and qualification I mean. Don’t therapists have to do that?’

‘Yes, I did. Once a week for six months, as I was studying. It was really interesting, I thought.’

‘Yeah? How so?’

She stirs the stew, wafting the steam from it up into her nose and positively revelling the experience. The way she holds the lid, the gentleness with which she slides the spoon in silky circles through the liquid, the whole manoeuvre, it’s like some balletic thing, some dance of simple pleasure.

‘Well, I relived a lot of things, looked back at memories I’d put away for a long time. Remembered how it felt to be a child, to be with my father, what it was like to be young in summertime. All those sorts of things. It was very nice.’

Hmm. Not the usual experience of an intensive, therapeutic process. Trust my mother to undergo a period of professionally led, investigative self-reflection and emerge out the other side with a renewed appreciation of the simple joys of her life thus far. Maybe there’s something in what she said that’s somehow telling, like the shoots of a seed of something tucked carefully away, breaching the surface and begging to be pulled on, to be dug up. I’m no archaeologist, but I can dig.

‘What did you remember about Grandpa?’ I ask, all detective like, ‘anything interesting?’

           She takes a moment to recall, ceasing her stirring and looking purposeful. I’m watching her closely, like a detective should, scanning for tell-tale signs of a furrowing brow or a shifting jawbone. A few seconds pass and she smiles, gently, softly, warmly.

‘I remembered going for walks,’ she says, turning to look at me, her head cocked slightly, ‘we used to take the dog out in the woods near the house or down to the beach, when the weather was nice. When I was little, he’d tell me to find the biggest stick I could and so I would run around looking for one and when I did, I’d take it to him.’

‘What would he do with it?’ Would he hit her? Prod her on up at the path, never allowing a moment’s rest? I couldn’t imagine him ever doing anything like that. Not grandpa. He has his moments, like everyone, but he’s a sweet man at heart. I’ve never seen him be cruel. I’ve never seen him hurt anyone.

‘He would take it, appraise it, congratulate me, and then use it like a Wizard’s staff for the rest of the walk.’

            Of course he would. Not that I wanted to find out, in that kitchen, with the smell of goulash wafting around, with my aunt and Grandma in the other room, eagerly awaiting dinner, that my Grandpa, my Mother’s mother, that sweet gentle Gentile (my mother is Jewish, but her father, my grandfather, was not) would be cruel to her. That would have broken my heart, there, in that kitchen. It was the mystery I couldn’t bear. The mystery that would have made some long-entombed horror of my mother’s youth at least revelatory, at least sufficiently explanatory, to be worth unearthing.

‘That sounds like him,’ I say, thinking about my own childhood, how I was always forced out for walks, which, inevitably, I loved, ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t still got some of them.’

‘He probably does somewhere.’

           Nothing to plumb the depths of there then. Just an idyllic childhood with a nature loving caregiver happy to indulge youthful wonderment. Sure, that could well be a delicately cropped, defensively selected vignette of a much heavier time. That’s how the mind works after all, isn’t it? I mean, I’m no psychotherapist, but I’ve heard of repression. Of how the mind filters out the worst of the worst, erases it from the hard drive of conscious memory, brushes it expertly into the dusty cupboard of designated non-perception. It’s a bit of a shit tactic, really, like an in-built procrastination. Just don’t look at it, it says, even if it hurts. Even if it keeps hurting, in spite of all the non-looking. Like a smoke detection system that blares loud, entertaining music at the first sight of a fire, so you can at least be pleasantly distracted as the flames lick at you from behind. Needs work, I tell the universe at large.

‘Was there anything…you know,’ I stumble over the words, not because I don’t know what I’d like to ask, but because the stumbling makes asking it easier, somehow, ‘…painful?’

           Again, she takes her time to think about it, this time as she rinses off of the knife she’s used for the vegetables. She’s facing off out of the small window above the sink, looking every ounce of her contemplative, like she’s really thinking about it, like she’s sifting through a prospectors pan with all the calm of someone who doesn’t really need the prize, who does it for the fun of it.

‘Of course,’ she chimes, matter-of-factly, ‘everyone goes through pain. It’s a part of life.’

‘What sorts of things come to mind?’

‘Well, the dog died. Which they all do, in the end. And that hurt. I was only seven, so I didn’t understand.’

‘No,’ I say, trying not to sound exasperated, trying to sound more like her, ‘I mean, in life in general. Was there nothing that came up in the therapy that was…you know…difficult?’

           I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of this. I am no psychotherapist. I am no archaeologist.

‘The therapist asked me this too, quite a few times.’ She takes the goulash off of the stove, nodding to herself in a way that suggested she was satisfied it was the moment to do so, ‘I never seemed to have a good answer for him, either.’

‘What was your answer?’

‘Well…’

           She stops what she’s doing (she’s stood at the sink again) putting down the chopping board she’s been caressing back to cleanliness and fixing a peaceful stare out the window. I think I see her sigh, her chest moves a little, though she’s not annoyed. I think she just knew I wouldn’t understand what she was about to say.

‘I had an…experience…if you can call it that. When I was little. Ten or so, if I remember.’

‘Right?’ I brace myself to hear of something unsettling, something bizarre, like a UFO encounter or a visitation from the Angel Gabriel. Oh God, I think, to myself…is my Mum a closet Evangelist? Oh God.

‘We were in the car. Driving somewhere, to visit someone, I think. We drove past the town near the house, past the square, and I remember looking out at the crowd. I can’t remember what was on but there was something, a small fair or something, maybe a summer solstice sort of thing. I was looking around at the stalls and the decorations and the people and I remember, very clearly, seeing the other children my age, the other parents with them, the other grandparents and the dogs. All of the families just like mine. All of the kids just like me.’

           She pauses, leaving me on the edge of a seat the kitchen was too cramped to contain.

‘Yeah?’

‘And I realised, in this moment of what I suppose you could call…clarity, really, that I was no different to those children. To the adults. The dogs too, really. That we all come from the same place, and the only reason I was sat in the car, and they were out there, was because I’d ended up in this body, with my parents, my name, my red hair, my dog and all those things that made me, me. But that, really, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t deeply real. It isn’t. It’s just a temporary thing. Me is much bigger than that. It’s you too. It’s everything and everyone. And it goes on forever. After that it became pretty hard to be really upset by anything. Not for long, anyway. Who was I being upset at, really? Any sadness, any pain, all of that, it was part of it. Part of me. Just a different flavour. And it’s all so delicious when you see it like that.’

           I don’t say anything. What could you say to that? I worried for a moment that my Mother was actually quite mad, that she’d spent her whole life in the throes of a psychosis that had somehow fortuitously manifested as a marvellously benevolent ease of being. But then I looked at her, I remembered her and, even though I knew I couldn’t hope to understand it, I knew that that wasn’t the case. That she was, perhaps, the sanest of all of us, through and through. I still don’t understand it, I never will, I think. I’m no sage, after all. But I trust her, I trust whatever it was she understood in that moment and ever since. And that’s enough for me.

           With that she went back to the stove, lifted the stew to take it over to the table and dropped it, almost flinging it straight into the middle of the hard floor, shattering the pot and dispersing our delicious, meticulously prepared dinner at high velocity in several directions at once.

‘Ha!’ She laughed from her belly, delightfully amused by this play of herself, ourself, all disguised as gravity and hard stone kitchen tiling, ‘well then…back to square one.’

*