LINGERING REGRETS REVISITED
By
Mandy Fessenden Brauer
It is not always easy being honest, particularly when I consider my role as a mother. Now as an octogenarian, eighty-two as I write this, and looking back on my two children’s births over fifty years ago, I so often focus on unhappy times, guilt lurking beside the photos as I ponder what I did and didn’t do, what I should have done and what I shouldn’t have done. Words spoken in anger or frustration still echo in my thoughts. Do those same moments haunt my daughter, and is that why she continues to be uncomfortable with me? Do other mothers feel this way but don’t talk about it?
Peering back to those days, I was so filled with my own unhappiness and depression that I wasn’t as aware of my children’s emotional needs as I could or should have been. I know that this has been the major source of my regrets. Or is it guilt? Perhaps I wasn’t that unaware or that insensitive but am, with today’s consciousness, simply painting myself in a bad light. I wonder if I explore poems I’ve written over the years, many which seem like personal confessions, I will then be able to find forgiveness or compassion toward myself and for my mothering choices and for all too often resenting the role I was expected to play. I wonder if I can integrate the poems into a personal reflection, thus releasing myself from those lingering regrets. I begin with “Pity.”
Regrets, like dumpy unattractive clothes
Wrap around memories of mothering, intensity
Longing for release, failures a heavy burden
Hanging like chains of irremovable necklaces
Too strangling to be worn for comfort . . .
Thoughts are my chains, especially about my failures that sit on the surface, ready for me to pull out and examine. Sometimes they are my constant companions, lurking just on the periphery of my vision, and at other times they are present like an unwanted guest who simply won’t leave. I tell myself that I wasn’t that bad a mother. After all, I didn’t yell or belittle my children or put my needs ahead of theirs intentionally. At times, often in fact, I was so depressed that I often wondered how I could keep everything together. I wonder now, was I really that inadequate? Or am I just beating myself up again? After all, they were safe, they were in school, they were fed and clothed, they had fun times. So, by what standard did I, or am I using now, to evaluate myself? By what standard do any of us judge ourselves? I question myself, but still, there’s no going back, no second chance.
Feelings change, of course, including those about myself and myself as a mother. Being a mother is a topic I no longer think about much, or at least I try not to. At least that is what I tell myself when I am not deeply embedded in reflecting on the past. I can never seem to give myself praise for that role and vacillate from painful memories where I hear myself screaming and yelling critical, cutting remarks and that sound just like my own mother — to almost okay times that bring a smile or half smile as I recall a flash of laughing together with my children as we were driving someplace, or taking a pleasant walk on the beach.
I wish I could say that time has changed my views of what I was and am as a mother, but it hasn’t. I try to rationalize by telling myself I was so depressed it was all I could do to stay alive, let alone be a good mother. When my daughter was a young teen and my son was in elementary school, I even wrote about planning my own funeral. “Remains” gives the details.
Lately I have been planning my funeral,
first calling around to determine prices
but even that is not so simple, not quite
like buying pots and pans, for example,
where material, manufacturer and place
of purchase seem the main criteria for cost
although in this situation there are similarities
because it does come down to container size.
just like saucepans, skillets and kettles, death
divides into coffins, urns or cardboard boxes.
. . . it’s a messy, complicated, costly process
but still, there’s no free exit.
Lived Context
A few important milestones: my parents remained miserably married and raised four children until my mother committed suicide at age sixty. I was raised in an elite boys’ boarding and day school where my father worked and which my grandfather founded. My mother had a sign attached to her bedroom mirror that said, “I like all children except girls.” I suppose it’s not surprising that I’ve had “issues” all my life about not being that preferred male child. I’ve had three marriages and two divorces, two children and two grandsons and I’ve had a wonderful marriage since I was in my forties. Since the late 1980s I’ve lived basically in the Middle East and more recently have been dividing my time between Egypt and Indonesia. My daughter’s father left when she was less than a year. She’s in her late fifties. My son, eight when his father and I divorced, died in a plane crash when he was twenty-nine. My hope in writing is to help others understand and do the job of caring for children with the knowledge, confidence and kindness I too-often lacked, to accept and forgive themselves, something I am still hoping for, and to know it is never too late for growth and change which can happen throughout a lifetime.
So, let me travel back in time . . . After getting divorced from my first husband, I went back to school, getting undergraduate and graduate degrees before eventually becoming a licensed clinical social worker. I worked first with foster children and then in medical social work. Somewhat later I went back for a doctorate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children because I was truly curious to know whether early interventions could help unhappy little children. The short answer is: Yes, they can. In the process of studying and working, I learned a great deal about children and parenting. Most notably, I learned the importance of trying to understand how little children feel about things, feelings they are more apt to show through play than words, feelings they themselves don’t understand. And I learned that I was not alone in not knowing much about mothering and that it is not an easy job!
Remembering My Mother
Looking back at when I was a little girl, I remember how much when I wanted a real, live baby. When my mother would take her brood to the department store for anything, I would disappear into the children’s department to look at all the tiny clothes and pick up one of those free baby magazines full of articles and advertisements. I would stare at the baby carriages and bathinettes, imagining they were for my baby. Later, my younger siblings were born, and I enjoyed them when they were really dependent but found them less interesting when they had wants of their own. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time hurrying them through their baths, helping with homework and reading to them before bed. But I had no idea what they were thinking about anything, and I didn’t know I should have been aware of them to that extent. After all, if I had been petrified when my mother was on a rampage, weren’t they? But in those times, because I was hurting so much, it never even crossed my thinking that they might be hurting. It was just part of life.
Of course, I knew I would be the best, kindest, most successful mother, and very different from my own mother whom I later described in “Image of Motherhood.”
Craziness spilled like a pitcher of water
dropped, splashing all over the house,
drenching everything while bits of broken
glass glistened, sparking escape, which
to follow became not a game but necessity
soaking into the image of motherhood
where safety is not found in insanity
nor comfort in chaos. . .
Just surviving in my childhood home became a difficult enough job with my mother screaming and raging, sometimes twisting my limbs but more often with raging putdowns and words that destroyed any self-esteem I might have gleaned. Sometimes she went after my father with a meat cleaver, hurrying upstairs after him and yelling obscenities and phrases like, “God damn it, I want to kill you!”
While I was in high school, working in my free time, cleaning houses, waitressing for small parties, babysitting and doing office work to pay for college, all the time hoping I could get a scholarship, other needs took precedence as I sought to get away from that miserable house. Thoughts of becoming a mother faded and did not really resurface until I was a freshman in college and began discussing marriage with a tall, dark, handsome man who became my first husband.
Husband Number One
I was eighteen when we married, and we immediately moved from the east to the west coast. My husband was in the Navy so was often at sea, and I was like a duck out of water because I had no idea how to cook, how to shop for food or anything else, and I had no idea at all about how to be a wife. I also was a virgin bride and had no idea that any physical pleasure was supposed to happen until years later.
When I finally became pregnant with infertility work, and I miscarried at five months because of an incompetent cervix, I knew it was my physical problem that had caused the miscarriage because I internalized this as a personal failing. The ordeal was very hard physically. I needed two transfusions and stayed in the hospital for a few weeks. Of course, I felt guilty. My religious, hospital roommate fed that guilt saying that because the infant was not baptized, my baby was going to hell. My husband, who professed to know a lot about psychology because he’d studied it at university, told me that unconsciously I hadn’t really wanted a baby, so the loss was my fault. I left the hospital feeling physically uncomfortable and thinking of my baby in eternal hell.
As I write this, I realize I still think of that little, unborn girl whom I secretly named and I still wonder what she would have been like.
At home our dog had just had puppies whose eyes hadn’t even opened. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with their tiny, wiggly bodies, and when my milk came in several days later, I nursed a puppy which I wrote about in “Thank-you Note.”
I once wrote thank yous to those who
understood the agonizing, blinding
pain of an infant born too early
for any future.
My husband said my nightmares
must have killed her.
Dripping with guilt, I attached a newborn
puppy to my breast and wept . . .
About a year after that painful miscarriage and with more fertility work, I gave birth to a healthy daughter. Thrilled and awake for the C-section, gazing upon her, I exclaimed, “She has her father’s big feet and my big mouth.”
Returning home, I struggled as my husband expected me to do everything: cook, clean, shop and entertain. Meanwhile, I couldn’t nurse properly, my breasts stung, and when the pediatrician said she was losing weight and suggested I use formula, I chalked it up to another glaring example of my inadequacies. Not only could I not give birth normally, I could not breast feed either.
Feeling like an abject failure even in those first few months of motherhood but having a very easy, placid baby, one day when she was bathing, she smiled. To her I was obviously okay so I decided “to fix myself up” with a few sessions of therapy. Little did I know that I would be embarking on a journey that would last for many years, one that would also set the foundation for my career as a therapist.
After a few months of my own therapy, my husband began to come unglued, and in a psychotic rage, accused me of sleeping with his father, my gynecologist, and a local firefighter. He said he intended to beat me until I told him the truth. The beating went on and on, even involving a gun which I threw done the hillside so he couldn’t find it. I kept believing he would stop, saying to myself, “Forgive him for he knows not what he does,” but he didn’t stop. It was only when he hit me in front of our baby that I scooped her up, ran out of the house, and went to a neighbor’s.
On My Own
My husband flew to his parents on the other side of the country and filed for divorce, something I didn’t want but eventually had to accept. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and spent many years in a residential mental health clinic in Switzerland. Years later, I tried to write about him in “Unpredictable.”
You are hiding but then, you always have,
or maybe that’s just my perception,
you, who had such a pained childhood
and such a wasted life, concealed so well
behind brilliance, wit and paranoia.
I used to ponder what fed your feelings,
what propelled actions that took such
sudden leaps into places I couldn’t follow,
but no matter what I did, you remained
lurking in some sort of darkened corner . . .
There I was, with an infant, no family support since they were all on the other side of the country, with no idea how to do much of anything. I had to learn quickly how to handle a checkbook, keep track of bills, taxes, buy and cook the food, and deal with life on my own with an infant.
I was fortunate that she was a happy, easy baby outside of the frequent ear infections that required me to juggle my budget to accommodate visits to the pediatrician and expensive medications. When she was about six, the doctor recommended a tonsillectomy and myringotomy (tubes in her ears). Her father feared surgery would kill her so took me to court to try to stop it. He was unsuccessful, but the surgery was a success.
Meanwhile, I was so depressed I wasn’t comforted by the fact I had enough financial resources to live on because of part-time jobs and child support. I also had a place to live and had a lovely little daughter. I felt exhausted, anxious, scared and resented the consequences of my choices. I believed everything was my fault. I couldn’t keep a husband, and now, if I were being totally honest with myself, I even resented my daughter. I tried to compensate for those feelings by buying her little European smocked dresses that hung in her closet until she outgrew them. While I have been writing this, interestingly, some pleasant memories are surfacing. We had a wonderful collections children’s books, some from my own childhood, and others we would buy at library sales and thrift shops. Together, we would read them and delight in discussing the illustrations which usually enhanced the story. Later, these books took on a life of their own as my daughter shared them with her own children
Juggling part-time work and parenthood, and since I had only finished freshman year at university before getting married, I decided to go back to university. School had always been the one area of my life where I could receive praise or get some sense of self-worth. But of course, I had to think of my daughter who needed babysitters. First, I hired a trained nurse who was wonderful with children but constantly criticized my parenting skills and various decisions I was making. I suppose, in retrospect, I shared too much about my personal life with her. Trial and error plus time helped me learn how to set such boundaries. Eventually the nurse-babysitter was replaced by preschool, and I would use other babysitters as needed. As I think back on that time, I probably gave little thought to my daughter’s emotional well-being, more preoccupied with the more physical needs.
Things, though, were not smooth. Two of the babysitters exposed themselves to her: one an elderly neighbor and the other the brother of someone I was dating. “Mommy, he wanted me to lick cookie crumbs off his pee-pee,” she told me. My therapist cautioned me about going to the police, saying it would be ineffective legally because a little child’s testimony was so easily destroyed by attorneys, and it would likely be traumatic for her. So, my daughter and I talked about people with “‘crazy thinking’ who wanted to do sick things,” and we talked about how she could stay safe. I also praised her for telling me.
I followed professional advice, but in retrospect, maybe I should have done more, legally or illegally. She didn’t seem upset at the time, but hidden feelings surfaced later. In one of her gripe sessions as a teenager, she said she felt so confused and vulnerable at the time and wondered why I hadn’t done more. “Wasn’t I important too?” she asked. I just stared blankly and said nothing.
Suicidal thoughts continued to dominate my inner world. To say I was depressed is putting it mildly. One of my friends said, “You don’t have the luxury of suicide. My God, do you want her father to raise her?” Truthfully, though, I was often suicidal and would fantasize how I could be successful. It seemed to me that I had always been depressed, even contemplating the act from the time I was a small child by jumping off the balcony, but, fearing failure, I collapsed into feeling imprisoned by life, by my failures, and then by my daughter.
One time I even read about a hotel in Canada that had a full-time service for parents who wanted to leave their children for lengthy periods of time. There was no way I could put that into my budget, but I fantasized about it. Looking back at those early years of being a mother continues to be painful for me even more than fifty years later. I was so involved in trying to get my own life together and managing to stay alive that, at times I stepped off the beaten path.
At university I was introduced to drugs by one of my professors who said, “If you don’t, you’re a baby.” I’ve never done well with dares. And, as this was in the sixties – a time of free love, flower children, hippies and “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.” I tried lots of drugs, discarding angel dust which was my favorite because it was so dangerous. Despite what I was doing, I continued to get good grades and had some semblance of a social life, but resentment was there because parenthood was always interfering with the life I felt I wanted to lead.
In my memory, I hear myself shouting and criticizing much more than praising or just planning to have a good time being a mother. And I was an uptight, New England prude springing out of self-imposed constraints or restraints and trying to be less depressed. My life was chaotic and without much caution or discretion. I struggled to let go of what no longer served in much the same way I resisted getting rid of my “Green Robe.”
“Why don’t you get rid of that ugly old thing?’
asked my lovely daughter, pointing in disgust
to a tattered and faded green robe,
complete with a grinning frog on the front.
“You’ve had it since I was a child: it was hideous
then and it’s even worse for wear now!”
How do you tell a grown up child that an old robe,
like an old body, is full of interesting memories?
The frog and I once weekended on a Spaniard’s yacht,
went to the desert with a cat and a record producer,
I thinking once would legitimize the other which
of course, was either naïve or creative rationalization.
Together we wrote papers for ourselves and others,
payment being dinners, dope and sometimes
delicious hours of carnal delights, not suitable
to be discussed with a daughter.
The bulging-eyed frog and I even wrapped up
Together after a rape,
Followed by a suicide attempt,
Fortunately, unsuccessful . . .
Husband Number Two
My daughter found my second husband while I was in graduate school. He lived in the complex behind our apartment and was not the first man she brought home, another being the elderly man who molested her. The real estate broker whom she found and who became my second husband, became her psychological father. He was an excellent father, but we were very different: he, Orthodox Jewish from an immigrant, midwestern family, I, from an old, New England, WASP family. Regardless, the strong attraction was there, and we married.
Shortly after the marriage, when my daughter was about four years, her birth father kidnapped her and took her across the country to his sister and her husband. At my lawyer’s suggestion and with all the papers needed, my new husband and I flew immediately to pick her up. She was traumatized because she had been told she was “now safe from her bad mother.” I later found out I was “bad” because I’d married someone who was Jewish. My daughter adored her birth father who doted on her and was very generous with toys and trips.
My new husband and I both tried to explain to her what had happened by saying that her father had “confused thinking,” but as I look back at that time, I failed to understand how traumatized she was. I did cuddle her and tried to comfort her, but it was difficult for me to “be there” for her. During the plane trip across the country, and I was more worried about the exams I’d missed than what had just happened to my daughter. Again, it was another instance of where I put my own needs ahead of my child’s. Or were my own feelings so intense that I was powerless to integrate her feelings with that same intensity? Or did I confuse worry with guilt? Maybe I am I just beating myself up again?
Years later, in “Daughter’s Father,” I wrote from my daughter’s perspective about the confusion she might have felt at the time about her father. Now, I not only carry my own pain but that of my daughter as well.
The voices in his head
are speaking to him again
and taking over his brilliant brain,
leaving no room for him to listen
to me, his little princess, his child.
Where do they come from, those others
who give him such terrible thoughts?
. . .
Are they from his distant, formal parents
whom he despises, and who look at me
as a result of his momentary mistake
in marrying my mother?
. . .
How can I rescue him from them
so I can have a father?
My second husband and I also sought fertility help, and it worked. When I threatened to miscarry, I was on bedrest for three months. When my son was born, I was thrilled. My in-laws hired a baby nurse for two weeks, and I made sure she cooked special dishes for my husband while I took full care of the baby. I adored him from the beginning, relaxed with him, breastfed him successfully and momentarily, at least, felt fulfilled. He was a delightful infant, active, interactive, everything I ever wanted in a child. But still a child. Still needy. When he was less than a year old, I went back to work as a social worker, dealing with adoptive and foster children. My son had a young Guatemalan woman taking care of him. She was marvelous with him, and they adored each other. He became fluent in Spanish, speaking it much better than English for a while. I, however, could not understand him. I didn’t even understand he was speaking until a friend recognized it. Unfortunately, his caregiver was more than caring for my husband, but I didn’t know about that until later. By the time I learned, it was like an unread footnote, of no use.
Social Work Insight
What I saw in my social work caseload was eye-opening. A four-year-old told me about hiding under a table when her daddy and mommy were fighting and daddy shot his gun which went “Bang, Bang and it scared me so I closed my eyes,” she said while hugging a soft toy dog that was in my playroom. “Where is mommy now? Why doesn’t she come to see me?” she asked plaintively. Put yourself under the dining room table with her while her parents were arguing for the last time. Imagine how frightened she was.
Or the boy in residential placement for stealing, whose uncle thought he’d spoiled a drug deal so hit him in the head with a claw hammer, causing brain damage. And the cute redheaded boy who went home after school to find the place empty, totally empty of everything, and whose family left no way for him to contact them. The list of cases of abused children was endless in the foster care system. I discovered that I was not the only person who’d found parenting a difficult job. Why could I hear and see those children’s emotional needs so clearly when it was so difficult for me to see them in my own children?
Was it similar to seeing our own problems clearly in others while we can’t see them in ourselves?
My Son
It is hard for me now, many years later, to describe my son as a little boy. He loved life and doing what he wanted, even if it was dangerous or unacceptable. For example, he was about two when he maneuvered a chair onto the kitchen counter, climbed on it and up he went until he was perched on top of the tall refrigerator. Dangerous! He also climbed a tall palm tree and laughed and laughed until crawling down. In restaurants, he loved to make loud, gleeful sounds and then look at all the people staring at him. I had no idea how to handle him. Perhaps I was in awe of his maleness, I’m not sure. The truth is, I loved his maleness and probably envied him.
But I found him challenging and felt incapable of keeping him safe, let alone getting him to behave. I couldn’t understand his babytalk Spanish, and I certainly couldn’t control him. I would even spank him, but then I started to use a wooden spoon. One day, when he had done something he knew I wouldn’t like, he brought me the wooden spoon, and I was shocked. What was I doing? Was I a child abuser? I was horrified.
A parent in my office once said, “I know it’s wrong to hit them, but it feels so good to slap their soft little bottoms.” I understood that sentiment. It seems that we are all capable of being child abusers. Parenting is hard and confusing, but that is no excuse for hurting a child. Eventually, I took the spoon to my office where it became part of my playroom equipment.
That long-gone son also was somewhat quirky at times. For almost a year he didn’t want to eat anything but white bread and bologna sandwiches, and since he was healthy, the pediatrician said to let him. For a time, he didn’t want to bathe, claiming it took too much time when he could be building with Legos or reading about history. I recall his head smelling slightly sour and fruity, almost like what lingers in an empty locker room. And of course, I remember too well battling and yelling and pulling him into the bathroom for a shower because I was larger than he was and still could.
How I would love to breathe that odor again.
He was an inveterate reader and retained what he read like an elephant, but he didn’t want people to know he was smart. I never knew why. I remember when he was seven, I took him to a local community event against the advice of friends who thought it might be traumatizing for a little child, to see a movie about what would happen if a nuclear bomb fell on San Francisco. His comment to the group after seeing the film was, “Of course it was scary for a little kid like me to know this could happen, but it wasn’t scary enough. They didn’t even discuss the water table which would be radiated for years!” I remember not dealing with the emotional component of what he’d said. Maybe he was scared of what the future held. I didn’t pick up on that. Instead, I commented on his knowing something I didn’t know and was proud of him for that.
When my son graduated from the sixth grade, his father and I sent him to the boarding school where I’d grown up. Less than a month after he arrived, he was on final probation for a year. His crime: “forging” a teacher’s signature so he could use the library. Yes, that was the only reason! I was commanded to fly across the country to meet with the headmaster about this serious infringement, and unfortunately, I supported the school and even expressed great disappointment in my son “who had brought such dishonor on the family.” How I regret my stance! How I wish I had stood up for my son, for his desire to learn. But I didn’t. Who hasn’t made the wrong choice viewed in retrospect? After he died, I mentioned the boarding school in “Objects of Grief.”
. . . Pictures of you at all ages
fill and frame long days:
here, on the mahogany table
is one of you climbing a palm tree,
diapers ditched, naked as a jaybird
and laughing as if you’d just
conquered that cage of a crib
while nearby is another of you
wearing a favorite Dodgers cap,
toothless smile well captured,
juxtaposed with a serious stance,
corduroy suit reminiscent of
the hated boarding school,
which I now regret demanding . . .
My Daughter
With the agreement of her birth father and my second husband, my daughter went to boarding school for her benefit and I was able to arrange a scholarship as I later did for her brother. Although I went to public schools, I believed in that form of education, perhaps because I had grown up in a boys’ boarding school where my father worked for his entire life. Also, I was concerned that my daughter was more social than academic, and I convinced myself that this would be no great loss for either of us. Besides, she and I had a somewhat stormy relationship, not to mention I really had no idea how to handle her after she was no longer a cute, little, elementary school pupil. She also was overweight, and since I had struggled for years with weight issues myself, I harped on her to eat correctly and to get more exercise. My approach was, of course, unsuccessful. As a young teenager she sometimes got drunk with her friends, pilfered small items from stores, and lived a life I knew little about. For her sake, I was glad for her to be in a good school, and for myself, I was relieved to have her “out of my hair.”
One time when she was home for spring vacation, we decided “to work on our relationship” by going canoeing on the Colorado River. It was a several hour drive to what seemed like the middle of nowhere where we were given our canoes. It was hot, blisteringly hot, and after a short time, my arms hurt, and I was not paddling consistently. My daughter announced, “If we were a married couple, I would divorce you when we got home!” “Indifference” is about what I felt about my daughter that day.
Indifference is not what I now feel . . .
nor was indifference in the canoe when
our gawky girl-child and I were trying
to communicate on the Colorado although
it may have clung to the gunnels when
I dropped my paddle overboard and
silently watched it drift behind us
like a downed kite drowning . . .
I recall how wonderful it felt as I watched my paddle drift away. It was the least motherly emotion I could have possibly conjured up, but I felt terrific at that moment, even though my arms ached, I was sunburned, thirsty, exhausted and worried that we were never going to see civilization again. As I stared at my daughter, now responsible for getting us to a campground, I wondered why I just wished to be anywhere else with anyone else. What was wrong with me, I asked myself when the guilt kicked in? What kind of a mother was I? Again, with today’s consciousness, I come in touch with her feelings, feelings I ignored. Did I see her as a rival? Do teenage girls see their mothers as rivals and treat them that way. Did she see us as rivals? Maybe.
Divorce Number Two
My son’s father and I got divorced but continued to co-parent both children. Before he went to boarding school, sometimes our son lived with me and sometimes with his father who took him for his first airplane ride when he was six weeks old and taught him to fly when he was old enough to get his license. Both children graduated from college and both stayed on the east coast, my daughter teaching and our son becoming a commercial pilot. I didn’t approve of his flying but knew he loved being up in the skies as I wrote about in “Spending Money.”
Spending money is fun
but usually I try to feed the poor,
help the homeless
or save the whales.
Today I bought my son a necktie,
bright yellow airplanes
flying whimsically across
exquisite, pale blue silk.
No doubt he’ll tell me
it’s a sign of creeping senility
while secretly bragging to his friends
about his mother’s bizarre taste.
Meanwhile, anxiously awaiting
the thank you that never comes,
I wonder if a tie can make up
for so many mistakes.
He flies through the skies
not knowing that my offering
was so much more,
seeing only a tie he’ll never wear.
Death of My Beloved Son
And then came the phone call from his father. “I have bad news. It’s our son . . .” I was home alone since my current husband was on a consulting job in Kuwait. Alone, I paced and cried, screamed, shouted, sank down on the floor and huddled there, making sounds like a wounded animal. The following day I flew across the country to say good-bye to my son and my third husband soon joined me. To discuss how that good man has helped me mature and begin to feel good about myself would be another article.
The death of a child is a mother’s nightmare. It never goes away and is always present. Sometimes I can’t even think about him without tears coming to my eyes, and other times I can discuss him with almost no emotion. But overall, it was devastating and consumed by my own sadness, once again I overlooked how much his death also affected my daughter who was very close to her brother. I have also never mourned the life he might have had, what he missed out on having. It saddens me that I find it so hard to imagine what he could have done? I know he wanted a family with several children.
I have written many poems about his death, but this one I found almost comforting. Reading “Further Accolades” now, written some three years after his death, I can see us, him driving with his arm resting on the open window, the sun glistening on the car, and when I said the same words as in the poem, I can see his huge grin and still feel his hand reach out to touch mine.
‘I’m so proud of the man
you’ve become.’
At least I told you that
before a plane crash
put an end to any
further accolades.
I burn with a sense
of my own inferiority:
all I didn’t do –
all I ignored.
I could have been
such a better mother
if only I hadn’t had
such needs of my own.
For months after he died, I seriously considered suicide, my old companion. I was sixty years old at the time, the same age as my mother when she chose to die with pills and alcohol. I expressed this wish so openly I was asked not to return to a church-sanctioned, grief group. Later, when I felt emotionally stronger, I met as a licensed therapist with the group leader and her supervisor to discuss how to deal with such similar situations in a more professional and effective way. I also read articles about people who had succumbed after the death of a child and those who had thought about it but made another choice. Words I’d heard sometime, someplace, echoed in my thoughts: “Suicide’s always there, but first check out other options.”
A few months later, I recall sitting in a library and wondering how to make my life worth living. I knew it would involve doing something different, ideally something I hadn’t done before, something that would honor my son’s memory. Since he loved reading, I thought about writing and I then began to crank out stories for young children on a variety of subjects to help children understand themselves and their world better, many of which were eventually published in Arabic and English in Egypt. While I was writing them, I was just enjoying the feeling of being a child again, like reading to myself, but, in retrospect, I realize I was writing to help children understand themselves and their world better. And I was writing to get away from my own grief. Here’s part of a poem I wrote, “On the Anniversary of My Son’s Death.”
I write for you, my son.
Every character has you
As a hidden role model
Rich with authenticity.
Infectious laughter bursts
Indiscriminately, words
Pounding reams of paper.
Just last week you were five,
Today a gawky teenager
Whose bantering arguments
With your older sister
Sizzle across the pages.
Another page to be filled,
Another memory recalled
Partially disguised as fiction
To share you with others . . .
Lingering Regrets
Regrets linger, words spoken to discipline and to belittle and castigate flow to the surface when I write, when I remember parenting both children. But I also realize that I mothering in learned intergenerationally and I did not learn about good mothering from my own. poor mother. I also believe I had impossibly high standards for judging myself as a mother, not surprising given that patriarchy was alive and well as the time. No one is as perfect as I imagined I should have been, no matter what, and I feel a huge disservice was done by those baby magazines we all read when I was young because they did not discuss the difficulties and the almost overwhelmingly profound feeling of responsibility for raising children. They never seemed to have articles about the difficulties. As I attempt to reconcile and forgive myself, I realize I experienced motherhood in a time and place much different from today. Fortunately, that’s changed. But who feels prepared for parenthood?
I take time to remember more good times with my son, and sometimes I can almost hear his laughter. I have also come to understand more why my daughter and I haven’t been close. I see that she is a caring person who has dedicated her working life to teaching in low-income areas. She has long-time friends, a good marriage and is a wonderful mother to two remarkable young men, my grandsons. I can even tell myself that maybe she received some good things from growing up with me after all. Perhaps I didn’t do quite as poor a job as I imagine. As I sit here now, I see that we are more like peers than mother-daughter, and perhaps that is as it should be. “Choices” demonstrates my pride in her independence and her ability to make better choices than I did.
There comes a time to call a halt to dreams.
The fat little girl will never be a ballerina.
The boy with one leg won’t win the race.
My daughter will probably always resent
the mentally crippled father I gave her and
the next one she found whom I divorced
for having more women than his wife
and daughter whom he always protected
from his notoriously blatant philandering.
Now that she’s an adult she sees such issues
as less important than I did at the time
although such matters require choices
and she disapproved of the ones I made,
not realizing all the steps required
to make such magnanimous moves.
She is very sure of herself, my daughter,
and I am pleased that she has the strength
to deal differently than her mother. Still,
no one can truly wear another’s shoes
can they? Her feet are much bigger
than mine anyway.
I am proud of the way she has lived her life and have told her so. I am not sure how
she hears me because she usually jumps to other subjects. Nevertheless, I am glad I have shared such genuine feelings with her as I am glad to remember sharing warm feelings with my son.
Becoming An Octogenarian
Two years ago, when I turned eighty and was residing in Indonesia, I wrote about that chronological milestone in “Reflections on Turning Eighty.” I am surprised now when I read it, that I made no mention about being a mother. None. Isn’t that odd? I thought of trying to add a verse about being a mother, but I decided that would not be as honest as if I left this the way I wrote it. I also think it is significant that I left out that part of my life entirely. But I did. Maybe, though, it has to do with my mothering days being essentially over. Maybe it has something to do with unresolved feelings about my own mother, or maybe I did not feel I had the right to claim motherhood at eighty since there was still so much left unsaid. One child has her own life, the other is long dead. I am still a mother, of course, but now my role is more concern and curiosity than active engagement. I see this as an improvement of the seeming indifference much of my active mothering years.
Turning eighty was a milestone I didn’t expect.
At first it was rather depressing; looking back,
all the mistakes crowded to the present and
what I’d left undone didn’t seem interesting.
Then I glanced at the near future, seeing
decrepitude creeping ever closer, like several
college friends slipping off the curb as dementia
or Alzheimer’s become constant companions.
Time, time is running out I moaned, wallowing
in my misery before an inner voice was heard:
“Get busy, make the most of now. Otherwise,
your work will die when you do.”
No longer racing to Tijuana on the back of a Harley
or sleeping with strangers met in a parking lot,
I sit with my husband, a cat purring on my lap and
contemplate which project to do next,
making the most of what I have, not focusing on
incipient forgetfulness, sagging skin or opportunities
lost, but on the now, what’s around. It isn’t that
the future’s present but what I’ll do flounces forward
and there isn’t enough time to write all I want,
to read what is already piled up and slipping out
of the overflowing bookcase. But that’s alright.
Each breath, each moment, is mine to take,
to shape, to waste, to do with whatever I choose
and, like the cat, I live immersed in the now,
smelling orchids, fragrant frangipani, endlessly
watching small rice shoots mature
and finally, as an octogenarian, I’ve decided
at last, no matter what happens, I will accept,
enjoy, leaving depression in the bag outside
the thrift shop because I am, at last, acceptable
even to myself.
Being a mother for me is a chapter already written, whether I like it or not, am proud of it or not. For me life has moved on, and writing this personal essay has helped me realize that I did the best I could, and it was what it was. I also have come to understand through writing this that my children were satisfied with the lives they carved out for themselves. My daughter has a fulfilling, happy life and I shall continue to praise her for the wonderful mothering job she has done. My son loved his life as a commercial pilot which gave him the time to do what else he wanted, like read, fish, hike and visit his sister. As I mentioned elsewhere, they adored each other, and I now understand her sense of loss is as painful as mine. We have been getting closer by talking more about her brother and grieving together.
I think I am still, and will likely always be, trying to nurture and heal that little child in me who was so hurt. Gained from a lifetime of struggling, I wish someone had better understood my needs as a child because, like all children, I needed to be treasured and reassured, listened to rather than lectured to. I wish someone had told me mothering was hard work and that we do the best we can. I wish someone had told me it was okay to be selfish sometimes and that mothers need time to relax and refuel. And I really wish we were taught to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we will surely make, as I am learning to forgive mine.
Most importantly, I hope that as I finally learn to forgive and accept myself that this is not lost on my daughter so that together we will be able to work on both of us helping the other to heal, not just by discussing and understanding the past but by tackling some of the greater problems where we think alike and can work toward a common cause to make things a little better for everyone, such as realizing that all mothers need help, including our “Mother Earth” as described in this poem.
Oh, mother earth,
What is happening to you?
Day after day your body is abused
And your sagging tits no longer
Drip with thick milk. Your scarred belly
No longer holds the promise
Of tall sons and fertile daughters
Bursting forth from those hidden
Places from which all bounty emerges.
We have accepted without question
Your endless gifts, arrogantly believing
We can sup forever at your battered table
While we gorge without ceasing,
As if mothers are meant to be ignored,
As if all we desire will flow forth
Forever.