For almost as long as I can remember, Christmas has felt a bit depressing. Not because I don’t like Christmas; I love carols and candles and Christmas trees, feasting and going to church on Christmas Eve. The relentless advertisements and shopping crowds I could do without, but who doesn’t complain about that? I feel depressed for the reason I suspect a lot of people do, because the idealized vision of warmth and togetherness promised during this season feels quite out of reach.
“Your family is really sad,” a boyfriend once said to me after visiting my parents’ house over New Year’s.
“I know,” I said, though, as always, I struggled to put my finger on why, exactly, that was. How do you explain a gaping wound that existed before long before you were born? A vague dysfunction that drew two people together and prompted them to start a family?
My parents were part of the same friend group for about a year before they started dating. 10 days after their first date, they got engaged; within 6 weeks they were married. Not long afterward, my mother dreamed that my father was with a woman he had dated before her. Upon waking, she became enraged and refused to speak to him for days. He did everything he could to placate and make it up to her, all for something she had literally made up in her head. This would set the tone for their marriage, and my childhood.
My earliest memories of my mother are of feeling a deep revulsion and resentment toward her. I used to think that this was evidence of something deeply wrong with me until I learned that it is a common reaction in children of narcissistic or borderline parents. Not that she has ever been diagnosed. The last thing she would do is surrender to vulnerability and self-reflection; she has consistently refused to see a therapist even when I or one of my brothers have cut off contact (we all have at various times), or when I finally told her I was no longer willing to listen to her recount her sufferings over and over without doing anything to address them.
I’ve seen terrible cases of mental illness in the hospital, and my mother was never on the extreme end, thank god. No cutting or suicide attempts, no psychosis or dangerously reckless behavior. Just a mild paranoia, a belief that someone else was always trying to scam her, or snoop on her, or judge her and find her wanting. Frequent outbursts of rage or hysterical crying followed by tearful apologies and cloying expressions of love. And always, toward me at least, a subtle undermining. When I was young, I was too skinny, when I hit puberty, I was getting fat. She told me I was pretty, but too conceited about it, smart, but not living up to my potential. I learned to hide any creative endeavors (especially my writing) from her, knowing I’d be offering myself up for ridicule and teasing.
I worry this sounds self-pitying when I tell it now. Who doesn’t have complaints about their parents? Who had a perfect upbringing? When I was 12, my father suffered a traumatic brain injury as the result of a car accident, plunging my family into financial insecurity. My mother managed to put food on the table and to keep us clothed and fed. I never doubted that she loved us, even if it felt like she sometimes resented me.
She is certainly not the worst mother I could have had. Not even close. But she had a black hole of need that none of us could ever fill. A woman with no stable sense of self can never hope to give her children the confidence and grounding they need to make their way in the world. I’ve spent the better part of my adulthood trying to fill my own void, learning to trust my worth and shed my compensatory narcissism; unlearning dysfunctional relationship patterns like picking fights to get attention and affection; developing the skills and habits to accomplish my goals instead of letting life overwhelm me. I haven’t always felt very successful.
Last year, in the summer, I stood on a beach on the other side of the ocean and begged Jesus, Mary, God the Father and all the angels, saints, and ancestors to finally set me free from my mother. I was tired of going through the cycles of her crazy moods; they seemed to be getting more personal, vitriolic, and unhinged. The last time I had visited her in South Carolina, she declared me a witch out to steal from her and “control” her life. Sometimes she’d look at me with contempt and practically spit at me, screaming that the way I loaded the dishwasher made her sick with disgust. My dad would just shake his head ruefully and sigh that I always seemed to provoke her and would never learn. He’d carefully explain all the little ways he soothed and stepped carefully around her emotions as if that was the only reasonable response.
I took the hint and left earlier than intended, but soon she was texting and calling, declaring her undying remorse and begging me to visit her and love her again. I was done with her nonsense, and I wasn’t sure what freedom looked like, but I was willing to never see her again if that’s what it took. I didn’t care if that made me a bad daughter. I wanted out of the emotional tug of war and to be rid of her pernicious influence in my life.
Something very weird happened next. Without a word from me, my mom stopped texting and calling. I finally called her, just to make sure all was well. She was perfectly pleasant and warm when we spoke. My mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the year before, and I chalked some of the change up to her memory. But it was odd. I called her one day and when she asked what I was up to, I told her I was taking voice lessons, because I had always wanted to learn to sing better.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” she exclaimed. “You always had such a good voice.” That was it. No warnings, no digs, no backhanded compliments, no muttering that she never had the opportunities that I did. Just unqualified support. This past summer, I decided to visit again, mostly to help my brother pack up their house and move them to a retirement facility.
After a few weeks with them, I remarked to my brother that something seemed to have shifted with her. She was so much easier to get along with. More optimistic and joyful, less critical and paranoid. She occasionally lost her temper, but it was pretty easy to calm her down. I wondered if perhaps the Alzheimer’s had somehow changed her personality.
“Honestly Rebekah,” he began, “I think it’s you. She’s been just as difficult as she ever was, but she’s been different since you arrived.”
“That’s strange,” I said, “I feel like I’ve always made her worse.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so weird.”
That day I stood on the beach, chanting my prayers and spells, was the culmination of a lifetime of trying to heal my mother, to heal myself, my family. I’d done therapy and tons of meditation, spiritual direction and all manner of alternative energy healing. Those things are useful, I would recommend them. But you get to the point where you realize you’re never going to make it right. You’re never going to change the past or make yourself something other than what you are. I think that moment on the beach was the moment I finally let go and let myself be sad and broken. I admitted I couldn’t carry my mother’s pain and decided my own was enough. And I let myself see it for what it was and love it.
Not long after my parents were settled in their new apartment, my Mom was diagnosed with colon cancer. My family has deferred all the decisions to me because of my medical background. I hesitated over whether to pursue treatment, given my mother’s declining memory and her ambivalence and confusion about the whole thing, but decided it was the best course given the pain and discomfort of the disease, which the doctors think is curable.
Her miraculous sanguinity was short lived; the chemo, though relatively benign as these things go (no nausea, no hair loss), has made her weak and tired, progressed her dementia, and her frustration frequently boils over. In those moments I see her as the child I once was, the child she once was, and I try to give her now what I know she never received from her alcoholic father and insecure, anxiety-ridden mother. Patience, steadiness, calmness, unconditional love, boundary-setting, gentle redirection. All the things I’ve been trying to give myself over the years. It feels like in some ways I am re-parenting us both.
I’m not pretending I’m a saint— there are moments I lose my temper, like when she accuses me for the thousandth time of plotting against her or stealing an old sweater she can’t find. But most of the time the barbs pass right through me, because I see them for what they are, and I know none of it’s really about me. I sometimes wish her cancer was more advanced, and we could just let her go. I think it might be easier for her, my dad, my brothers, and me. I have no desire to see her sink further into forgetting. But there are also moments of sweetness and gratitude, and through it all, love.
That’s the funniest thing of all. When I finally let go of trying to heal and trying to love her and trying to forgive her and said screw it all, I can’t do it anymore, I opened the door for something bigger to flow through me. That acknowledgement of my desire to be free from her was a great act of love and forgiveness for myself.
It is very, very easy to forgive someone else when you’ve learned to forgive yourself. When we let go of needing to be good, love shows up, not as a virtue attained through hard work, but as a grace freely given.
Christmas is still kind of sad. There’s no extended family, no next generation. I always wanted kids in a vague sort of way, but I think I’ve been afraid I could barely take care of myself, much less someone else. There’s always a sense of disappointment and buried resentment running beneath the surface of things when my parents, brothers and I gather.
But this year there’s also a sense that the earth is moving underneath my feet, old curses being broken and patterns rearranged. That’s always been the deeper truth of Christmas. At the darkest point of the year, the light breaks through and begins to increase, and you know that one day the cold hard ground will soften and spill forth its gifts. A woman, impoverished and weary, gives birth, trusting that through her steady, faithful, loving attention her child will become something and someone extraordinary.
I’ll leave you with a reading I turn to often at this time of year, from someone who understood the disappointments and promises of the human heart:
Unto you a Child,
a Son is given.
Praising, proclaiming
The ingression of Love,
Earth's darkness invents
The blaze of Heaven,
And frigid silence
Meditates a song;
For great joy has filled
The narrow and the sad,
While the emphasis
Of the rough and big,
The abiding crag
And wandering wave,
Is on forgiveness:
Sing Glory to God
And good-will to men,
All, all, all of them.
Run to Bethlehem.
~ W.H. Auden
So much gratitude for your raw vulnerability and courage in this sharing. I particularly love this, “Patience, steadiness, calmness, unconditional love, boundary-setting, gentle redirection. All the things I’ve been trying to give myself over the years. It feels like in some ways I am re-parenting us both.” Kudos to you for doing this work of the soul 🙏🏼💖🕊
I can relate to do much. Thank you for sharing. I love you.