I don't know whether outward events are helping me look at (and understand) specific events in my life, or vice versa, but speaking yesterday about my Dad's inability to react to or discuss important topics brought my mother into sharp focus. If it was devastating to me to have a father who could not communicate and had no heart, late yesterday the enormity hit me of how this affected my mother -- married to him day-in-and-day-out for nearly half-a-century. If I have touched on some of this before, please forgive me.
Throughout my childhood (and until all three of us left home), my parents had a habit of closing the kitchen door during their "cocktail hour", from 5 to 6 pm. We kids had to play, or do homework, or (me) practice piano, or whatever, until the door opened at 6 and it was dinner time. It provided structure, that's for sure, and most of the time I had no awareness of tensions between them. By about my junior year, though, I became aware of my mom desperately posing questions, and dead silence on his part. I wasn't a fly on the wall, only hearing muffled voices through the door, and I can only look back now from my own experience with him to draw some conclusions. I suspect that when the topic of their discussion was something relatively impersonal -- the news (no shortage of that during the '60's and early-to-mid '70's!), events at church, their children's good grades, local politics -- their nightly check-ins were reasonably civil. But it was probably when my mother asked the sorts of personal questions that a true partner would have deserved an answer to that Dad clammed up. "How can we afford that?" "Have you gone into debt?" "Why are you borrowing money from your own teenage children?" Later, after he left the corporate world, I had gone off to college, and they were living in the Adirondacks, I assume her anguish must have been nearly constant: "Why aren't you looking for work?" "Why are we living in a barely winterized cabin?" "When I drove Liz back to college, they almost kicked us off the campus. Why didn't you tell me that you hadn't paid her tuition?" "Why don't you care enough to provide for us?" I think they had only one car during this time, and were miles from stores or conveniences. In a different era, she would have been the one working and functioning in the world -- she would have taken the car and driven an hour or so every day each way, leaving him reading his newspaper in the wilderness. But I grasp now that she was afraid of him. She was a woman of her era, and couldn't take over his provider role for him, even though he wasn't providing. After a few teary questions, she, too, would clam up, for her own safety.
When I would come back for visits, I was so confused by their reality, I didn't know what to do. I'd "lend" Dad what small funds I had earned at a campus job or my first job out in the world, and try to be helpful in other ways, but Mom was (of course) a good actor. This was some kind of bizarre new normal going on, and at times they both seemed so much like they always had that trying to understand not only went nowhere, but sometimes seemed unnecessary. Mom coped in the way many women of that era did -- she smoked heavily (which is what killed her in her 70's), took to drinking almost as much as my dad, and disappeared into their room to read early in the evening. I'd go and sit on the edge of her bed and try to talk with her, but she, too, was silent in the face of hard questions. She couldn't explain what was going on, why the two of them (not hardy outdoors people) were living in the woods with barely a roof over their heads. During that stretch, she was crucial to the survival of their tiny Episcopal church as a lay reader and leader between rectors, but I think overall, it was a dozen years of hell. When she finally inherited enough money for them to move to a small college town, she returned to "life", getting involved in the local Episcopal church, working in an art shop, helping in community projects, taking alumni college classes. Those hard years had disappeared into the past...
Or had they? Of course, probably not. Her life's meaning had come mostly from outside her, not from within or from her relationship with my dad. Even toward the end, she was unable to talk with me about the black hole she had had to operate around, and to my shame, I still at that point didn't understand it enough to sympathize or communicate effectively. Overall, she preferred the company of my brothers, who presumably never probed, and their children...my introspection and sensitivity had always been, well, awkward, not welcome. And yet...with me around, she didn't die as quickly as expected in 1999. The eighteen month-or-so reprieve was a blessing for both of us, time that wasn't as "deep" as I might have preferred, but it was broad. For the first time, both of us were in a close relationship that became comfortable and reasonably honest. Warm. We were a team in trying to keep her going. I can't explain it exactly. All I can say is that I am eternally grateful that I chose to be with her during that time, to have that closer connection. It may have been the start of my genuinely understanding the energy of the Great Mother, within myself and her. I love you, Mom. If I didn't tell you often enough when you were alive, please know it to be true, still.
