Monday, April 19, 2010

Mother

In his epilogue, David sounds pretty forgiving of his mother, seemingly attributing her horrible coldness to her health problems and secret life as a lesbian. Do you suppose this is a coping mechanism? Or a just a very mature show of empathy?
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7 comments:

kc said...

I think it's both.

I thought David had just undergone that process that many of us do as we age — in which we're able to see our parents as people with individual identities apart from being our parents.

When we're able to see them in that more objective way, as simply flawed human beings struggling with their own hardships, it's easier to understand some of the painful things that went on in our lives and to take them less personally. Maybe that's what you're getting at with the suggestion of a coping mechanism. It allows us to say: This person treated me that way because they were really screwed up, not because I deserved it in any way.

I think his empathy helped distance him from his mother, too, in a healthy way. It allowed him to stop wondering why she treated him the way she did, why she didn't love him and to stop feeling so personally wounded by it. It gave him a kind of peace.

I liked that his empathy was mainly about understanding, though, and not undue warmth. It always strikes me as sad and hollow when adults desperately strive in an active affection for someone who isn't worthy of it and can't possibly return it. That's what I think was "mature" about his empathy. It had healthy limits and was grounded in honest assessment.

It was a turning point for him when the psychiatrist just bluntly told him that his mother didn't love him. (She didn't seem to love anyone.) It was an ah-ha moment. Some people just have parents who don't love them. It's a hard truth that allows him to make sense of things and move on, instead of endlessly and futilely trying to redeem the tragedy of his childhood.

1:13 PM, April 20, 2010
kc said...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that dutifully "loving" your parents just because they're your parents isn't a virtue in and of itself. David's mother had an undue regard for her own mother long into adulthood. When David as a frightened little boy told his mother that his grandmother was "crazy," her response was to silence him and deny it. If she had admitted the truth about her own mother, she could have not only saved Henry some pain, but also could maybe have gotten some real help for her mother and steered her away from her eventual fate.

6:04 AM, April 21, 2010
kc said...

D'oh! I mean David, not Henry, in that last sentence! I'm still stuck on our last book.

6:50 AM, April 21, 2010
cl said...

I think kc is right-on about the appropriate boundaries the author had to put up to relay that story, more empathy than a coping mechanism. She wasn't well, and he understood that eventually. (Or perhaps even at a really young age.)

The important distinction, I think, was his retelling of a dream at the end of the memoir about the house and the garden path his mother was sweeping, which you might think as a pleasant ending, but he realizes it's the institution where the grandmother was housed and, in effect, they were inviting him in to claim that link. And it was important enough to add, in his own words, that he didn't. So he may have accepted his mother's failings in her life, but he could keep that distant enough to lock it out of his own life.

I wouldn't want to say anything presumptuous, but I wonder whether it can be kind of damning to realize you may share some damaging tendency or trait of a family member. You know, you could either decide it was meant to be that way and that it was beyond your control, or you could use it as an excuse to not live up to your potential, or maybe in some way that trait (such as abusive behavior) may have hurt your relationship with the relative at one time, and in a way, having that trait yourself helps you connect to them in a way that love or genetics couldn't.

4:33 PM, April 21, 2010
kc said...

Yeah, that's interesting, cl, about family "traits," especially in a case like this where it's not entirely clear what is the product of genetics and what is the product of environment. The grandmother seemed to have a certifiable illness. But the mother's case seemed more ambiguous. Maybe she inherited some kind of anger disorder, but she also had the repressed sexuality issues and grew up in a terrible environment herself. And maybe there's the possibility that some people are just not very caring human beings, no matter what their genes or environment. David's dad certainly wasn't an exemplary parent. He had guilt over the X-rays, sure, but he consistently failed to offer David the love he needed and to protect him from his mother's tyranny. All the odds were against David becoming a healthy, productive, warm adult, but he did it.

I found a few things about the mother kind of confusing. If she were such an awful person, how did she snare the surgeon's wife, who seems like a decent person? I mean, at least that lady cared enough to insist that David see a doctor. What are we supposed to make of the fact that a person who seemed to have a lot to recommend her became romantically entwined with David's mother, who is painted in such relentlessly dark hues?

And another thing is the fact that she herself clearly enjoyed her sexuality and indulged in a relationship that was certainly adulterous and illicit at the time, and yet she tried to make her son feel like a pervert for admiring "Lolita"! That seemed strange to me. I mean, I know it's not unusual for conservative Christian types to be total hypocrites about sex, but this seemed like something different. I just found her terribly perplexing.

10:38 AM, April 22, 2010
Erin said...

I found the mother perplexing, too. I also wondered what the surgeon's wife saw in her, but then David did say that his mother became "a different person" during their bridge parties. Maybe the surgeon's wife had no idea what she was really like.

(The most horrible part of the mother for me was how she kept telling David that his medical treatments and counseling cost too much. It's hard for me to even imagine such callousness toward a stranger, let alone your own child!)

I was impressed with David for having reached such understanding for his mother. It seems like so many adults can't think of their parents as real people. They cling to memories of how their parents screwed them up without considering what kind of personal stuff their parents might have been going through at the time.

11:35 AM, April 29, 2010
kc said...

The cost thing was horrifying! Especially considering that they are the ones who made him sick! And considering that they treated themselves to new furniture, etc. He was left with the impression that they did in fact have money but didn't find him worthy of spending it on.

1:06 PM, April 29, 2010

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