“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
— Norman Cousins
During the 2020 COVID 19 crisis, I find myself really missing my mother. I yearn to hear her perspective; I miss having her as my roommate. I know that it would have been more fun to have sheltered in place and social distanced with my mother Betsi as my wingman; or me hers.
We would not have bickered or tired of each other’s company, since in the year she lived with me we became friends.
Mothers and daughter are not always so close. My mother was a strong, independent, fiercely loving, and often judgmental person. She was generous until you abused her trust and then the relationship was ended. I am a chip off of the old block and carry forward both my mother’s strengths and lessons from her flat sides.
I admired her and she me. However, our relationship was complex and rooted in a narrative that she created. I joined a broken family as the last born child following the tragedy of the loss of the first born son. The marriage was irreparably damaged, with each of my parents going inward and away from each other. My elder sister, who was three years old at the time, lost her older brother for whom she was a shadow follower. And, she lost the presence of her parents who were distanced by the grief. It is still a curiosity to me how I was conceived in the chaos. I am not a love child but maybe a life boat. I came into this world and jumped into the dysfunctional family assuming the role of gluing back together the pieces of broken pottery.
I have played this role my entire life. It has influenced all of my relationships for good and not so good. It has influenced my choice of career. And it is the fabric of who I am today.
I am a helper.
My mother needed a helper. I became her first lieutenant for helping to support my sister. My mother quickly labeled me as the extrovert, doer, and right hand for any special project. I was to grow up strong, independent, and responsible. Later I learned she wanted all of these things for me because she did not want me to feel powerless in a relationship that she could not exit, in a world where women were second class citizens.
To grow me strong, independent, and responsible was a boot camp of projects (summer food canning, building a brick patio from scratch, music lessons, summer camps, house hold responsibilities, and any assigned duty). It was both good parenting and preparation.
So strong was her desire that I be ready for the world and any situation that she entertained guests from around the globe and encouraged my application to become a foreign exchange student as a senior in high school. I consider this one of the most formative experiences of my life and draw upon it even now.
I spent a year in Sydney, Australia, where I was a one of a handful of American visitors. A place so distant a letter took six weeks to arrive and another six weeks to return. Because I was far from the supervision of my parents and free from the role into which I had been cast, I was to come to learn what values I had as my internal compass. I now recognize what a gift this opportunity was in my development — to live with a nuclear family without the tides of my dysfunctional family, or the responsibility to play my role. It took many months to ‘melt’ the type-A me and for me to spread my wings and try to find my authentic self. I appreciate my host family for supporting my evolution – into which I had no sense I was engaged.
For us all, I was just a teen growing up and preparing for young adulthood. My mother knew that this would be a great way to help me to experience new things and become independent. My host family embraced me as I was. And I grew up some and incorporated the best attributes of everything ‘Aussie’ into my being.
My college experience further cured me into the young adult I was to become; still responsible, strong, and independent but clearly becoming her own person.
And yet, I was to be my mother’s First Lieutenant for the rest of her life— until she died and I retired the job.
It is this push-pull relationship that made our mother-daughter relationship fraught with conflict. She didn’t always acknowledge that I had grown into an adult, and I struggled with all the responsibility of our larger family that she wanted to shoulder with me. And with the pain of her unhappy marriage that she needed me to share.
I loved my mother and she me. And yet we were not always loving, kind, or friends.
As a colleague and I were talking about how we were coping with social distancing during the stress of the threat of a deadly virus, I shared that I missed my mother. I wanted to hear her very commonsense wisdom. I know that she would encourage me to make the best of each day and be a contributor. We would have debated the politics of the moment and yet would have settled into strong agreement about how to be safe and well and helpful.
She was not scared of most things….and I am not either. She was fierce in the presence of fear and I turn my fear into love and action.
I am also grateful that she does not have to live through this challenging time or risk the effects of COVID. I shared with my colleague that today, I am so very grateful that we had the year together—the last year of her life. That she came to see me as the adult I had become, and I to appreciate, respect, and give her unconditional love (which she had never had experienced). I let go of any childhood hurts and forgave our past. And she reconciled hers.
We became true friends. What a gift
Leslie
“The more a daughter knows the details of her mother’s life the stronger the daughter.”
— Anita Diamant