For the second time in my life, I stand on the other side of a door eavesdropping on my mother. I am 56-years old. I should be ashamed of violating her privacy, but I am desperate for a window into what it feels like to be her, some hint, if not admission, that she’s also heartbroken. She cannot get dressed on her own. She can no longer cook or read books or carry a glass of water across the room without spilling or grabbing for the counter to catch herself. When I ask her how she feels, she says, great. She does not complain about the nubs of rotted teeth in her gums, the strain of breathing, her impaired vision, the incontinence. She is always, every day, great.
Through the closed door I hear her narration. This is new– talking to herself as she walks herself through the process of trying to get dressed.
“One sleeve left,” she says. “Only one last sleeve and then you’re done.” There is a pause. And then, “Oh, the hell with it.” I laugh quietly. My mother never curses. Nor does she ever express frustration or impatience. But this nod at surrender is a relief. I may finally know how she feels.
I hear her say, “You can do it,” and my heart seizes. Whose voice is this “you can do it”? Is this my vibrant, pre-stroke, pre-dementia mama speaking to a frail, old woman? What does this voice sound like in her ears? A parent’s voice of reassurance, of faith? You can do it. These are the words I spoke to my children when they hesitated before flinging themselves across the monkey bars at the playground. I heard and saw their determination. I also recognized their fear of falling and wanted them always to hear my voice in their heads. Part of my job was to instill in them this confidence, so that the voice they heard would ultimately be theirs. Not an external voice, a boss’, or society’s. But their own voices in the darkness of solitude. Their own voices offering reassurance in a desert of fear.
I always felt my mother’s joy in me. I knew I was loved. But we did not talk about emotions. I would never have gone to her to say, I feel x and need to talk about it. Feelings were meant to remain invisible, experienced privately, within our walled selves. I wouldn’t say it was explicitly not okay to share. I just understood this was not how our family operated.
When I was little, and my grandfather was dying, I overheard my mother and aunt whispering in my father’s childhood home in Chicago. My mother told my aunt, “I can’t let the kids see my cry.” I shrank into my hiding spot in the shadow of the mahogany staircase. The gleaming railing prickled with the smell of furniture polish. Above, the door to my grandfather’s study remained close. I could picture the long bench in front of his desk piled high in books. I imagined a blanket over the hulking shapes and wondered if this was where the adults were hiding his dead body.
What did my mother fear about letting us see her cry? What was the worst thing that could happen? We would cry too? And then what? We would be scared? Sad? I was already scared and sad, but I was also alone. Perhaps because it is too late now, I wonder, what was the best thing that could have happened if she let us see her crying? She might have shared her sadness in losing the father-in-law she adored? She could have held me? Reassured me it was okay to feel scared and sad? She could have opened the door to his study and lifted the blanket to reveal the piles of medical textbooks. Instead, I remained out in the hallway in my hiding place, she in hers, and we never spoke about grief or what we had lost in the man we both revered.
Something had been modeled for me in that moment of eavesdropping: a prohibition against feeling, and the paramount need to protect others from our feelings. If we needed to protect other people from our feelings, then feelings were not good. They were scary. Weak. Shameful. I understood that no one needed to know what I was feeling, not my parents, not my friends. Not even me. The thing was to keep doing. I could ignore what it felt like to be me. I could focus on achieving hard things. That was who I was. What might be happening inside was not relevant, or appropriate.
I began to practice hiding. I tunneled deep under the braces of my brother’s built-in desk and hid for hours in the dark, waiting for someone to find me. But no one knew I was hiding, so no one came looking. Still, this practice felt critical. I think now that my young brain needed to make sense of the need to hide, which was why I told everyone I was planning to be a spy. Here was a reason to keep quiet. I spent hours in that dark hiding spot, feeling victorious in my patience and silence.
As an adult, I am still cultivating an inner voice that says it’s okay to feel, okay to speak these feelings. This requires practice because I need to give myself permission to voice this voice, to name and accept the emotions. It should be easier, I often think, to know what I’m feeling, like distinguishing between thirst and hunger. Sometimes when I’m driving, I turn off the radio, and hear myself say to myself, “you doing okay?” It is the text I send to my children and my friends. The question is a reminder to myself to listen to how I’m feeling and not barrel ahead into the next thing, or look away.
I worry a lot that I am too late in nurturing this voice. Like my mother, I didn’t model expressing emotions. And as a mother, I watched my children spare me their feelings for fear of worrying me or making me sad.
Dropping my youngest off at college, I turned in the back seat of the Uber to wave one more time, only to see her huddled over her phone. She was texting her sibling who sat next to me in the car. “Don’t tell mom how sad I am,” she wrote to her sibling. As if I didn’t know. As if she didn’t know I knew. As if she might not have glimpsed how my heart hurt so much that I dug the heel of my hand against it to create a new hurt because anything would be less painful than saying goodbye.
Years ago, I was grateful to my children for sharing the mental health motto, it’s okay to not be okay. It is a far healthier mantra for our family. We do not have to suck it up. It is okay to let each other know we are hurting. Our hurt will not destroy one another. We can cry in front of each other. We will not cry ourselves to death. We will not collapse on the floor in tears and never stand again. I worry I am too late to this realization. What my children have overheard and witnessed in my husband’s and my steeliness did not serve any of us. It kept us apart. There are still things we don’t talk about. Incidents that I revisit in my dreams and spend mornings stumbling around thinking, it’s too scary. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to hurt.
Before my mother opens the door from the bathroom, before I dart into the laundry room, so she doesn’t know I’ve been listening, I hear her gasp. I’m ready to fling open the door, make sure she hasn’t fallen. But then I hear her say, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This is gonna…” I wait breathlessly. What?! It’s gonna hurt? Be hard? Be impossible? Are you ready to give up, mama? Because if you are, it’s okay. I want to tell you that I see how hard this is for you every single day, and you don’t have to be brave. In fact, could you please stop being brave, so we can talk about the fact that you’re dying, and I still need you?
The door opens and she emerges smiling. Her nightgown is on backwards, one sleeve trapped under her armpit.
“How was your shower, mama?” I ask.
“Oh great!” she says. “It was divine.”
Then, she stumbles headlong into the bookshelf. I reach for her, take hold of her elbow and steer her back to her cozy chair and blanket. And she goes back to her hiding spot, and I to mine.
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