mothers
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28 days into a dark summer
I’m tired. So very.
Jake must be tired–where’s he sleeping?
Did he eat today?
Now, every time I see a homeless person, I think, That’s some mother’s child.
I had compassion before; this is different. Before, I speculated and sympathized. Now I know.
How can I build something good from this?
I’ve started something rough–if you’re interested, you can check out the resource page I’ve started. Just hover your mouse over ‘a little about me‘ in the menu bar near the top of this page. A drop-down menu will show the page I’m working on. (When someone you love goes missing.)
The blog of missing: Day 25
Yesterday started out a little cloudy, but manageable, and then I had an encounter with someone who made me cry. It was nothing monumental; he was just not as kind as he could have been, and since I’m raw these days, it doesn’t take much to undo me. It was the culmination of several unmindful things this person has said to me that was my undoing.
My friend witnessed my distress, and told me, “Just because someone hands you a bag of crap it doesn’t mean you have to keep holding it.” The word picture was perfect; I let it go. Because, y’know, gross.
One day later, we talked about the situation, and when she saw I’d taken her advice, she asked me how I was able to let things go because she was still mad at this guy, and then asked if I could just explain the process I go through.
My reaction:
I always think I should say, The Holy Spirit enables me, or it’s all Jesus.
But I believe it all comes down to conscious choice. I choose what I focus on.
I have the Holy Spirit, which gives me peace and guidance, but I have the choice to shut all that out.
I want to be careful here because I am not a mindless automaton, but the Holy Spirit’s power is a real thing in my life.
I guess it’s a matter of surrender and trust. When I choose the higher path, I’m trusting that I don’t need to retaliate or be bitter.
I can’t figure out how exactly God works in us so that forgiveness and grace becomes part of our regular menu, because frankly, I have forgiven some very hard things that I couldn’t have done without the Holy Spirit. But walking gracefully is a choice. (And if you’ve seen me walk, you know this is a figurative statement!)
I promised her I would blog about it, and I half-suspect she’s asked this as a means of getting my mind off my worries about my son. She wants something practical to try for herself; I don’t know if I can do that yet. This will be a process, I think.
First a disclaimer: I have not let everything go.
And my way of doing it is just that: my way of doing it.
Letting go of something is like getting undressed, only your clothes are disposable.
Off comes the shirt(s) over your head, mussing your hair. Hair shirt! Of course. Because you’re the only one suffering when you hold onto a hurt, right? Into the wastebasket.
The shoes and socks and pants–everything, into the bin.
Just like the process of getting undressed is done one thing at a time, so it goes with letting go of what hurts.
You don’t just jump out of your clothes, and it’s rare that you can just shrug a hurt off.
Not only must you take them off, you must choose where to put them. If you put the clothes into the laundry basket, then you obviously expect to put them back on. So: trash.
My steps:
- Shirt: I take off the first layer by thinking: my stuff or his/hers?
If it’s mine, I own it. (To the best of my ability. Sometimes I get this wrong.)
If it’s the other person’s, I toss it, and move to step 2. - Pants: I seriously consider the other person. What path is this person walking? What’s going on in his/her life that would prompt what s/he did or said?
- Shoes & socks: I put myself in that person’s shoes. How would I feel in similar circumstances?
- How would I want to be treated? Do I want to be forgiven when I’m a jerk? (yes, please. lol)
Dear beloved friend: if you were trying to get my mind off things, you done good. It worked. Thank you.
And I’m going to take time every day to focus on something I have control over. Thank you for that, too.
The blog of missing: Day 24
Today has been difficult.
More than three weeks since I last positively knew Jake was safe.
When I eat, I think, “Is Jake hungry?”
When I go to bed, I think, “Where is Jake sleeping?”
When it’s hot outside, I think, “Does Jake have water?”
He can’t borrow a phone. Is he disoriented?
Is he all right?
Is he all right?
I can’t turn it off.
If this had happened during the time he’d kept me at arm’s length, I wouldn’t even know he was missing.
But he texted, called, or visited nearly every day from late February onward.
I am bereft of the son I just got back.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a long, dark summer.
The blog of missing: Day 23
Today’s a bit of ok. I’m gliding on the surface, not dwelling on what freaks me out. I’m dwelling instead on this:
“Beneath the garments of the world is joy.
A miracle is a gift of light, not a gift of worldly goodies. It shines through the world I see. Each new crack in the scenery tells me there is something else going on behind this play I think I’m in.”
–Hugh Prather, Spiritual Notes to Myself
Beneath the garments of the world. Huh.
I find that incredibly moving.
I was reading back over my journal from the past year, and this date last year I was grieving over the rift in Jake’s and my relationship. Here, incredibly, is what I wrote that holds true right this second, if I could just remember it:
“Here is what I know:
I am not in control here.
He’s God’s, not mine.
I can trust that whatever happens, I will be ok, and so will Jake.
I don’t know where the wind blows. I know tiny human things.”
What finally gave me peace: Matthew 9: 16-17.
Our old relationship could not work. We must be transformed in God’s image.
Last year at a Mother’s Day banquet, a speaker said, “We mothers get in the way because we don’t let go.”
I’m sick with worry for legitimate reasons, yet I recognize he must find his own path without me.
I do not like this place I’m in, Sam I am.
Last year for Mother’s Day, Jake dropped off flowers when I wasn’t home. He told Tom, “Give these to your wife.”
I did laugh. I was delighted to be remembered. He came by! Scowling and sullen, but present, if only for a wee moment.
And when he apologized for the past two and a half years, he just kept bringing me flowers. I’d already forgiven him.
Eventually he got it, I think. I don’t know. I hope so.
More than ever I understand that the past doesn’t matter. Only right now matters. I am in the perfect place. I can’t be anywhere else. I ache with mother empties. I don’t know what’s wrong with my son. But.
Everything’s led here, and if I truly believe God has this, then all is well even in the tumult.
Blog of Missing: Day 22
When I wrote my memoir, I prefaced it with a story called Babes in the Wood, a story about two tiny children who were left by ruffians out in the woods to die. I learned to read on this story and others like it; my mother was big on folk tales. The abandonment resonated in me because my mother and her sisters had put 5 of us children into foster care. I’ve thought of the story as a harbinger that my mother unconsciously used to warn me of the dangers I would face, and lately I’ve been revisiting this from the standpoint of a mom.
I have been reading a book on Gestalt psychology, and I am struck by the idea of transactional analysis. I don’t know if I created a steadfast narrative of how life is when I was a child, and I don’t know how much weight I will give this theory. But I think it’s interesting that my earliest memory of reading is of a book about abandonment. And now I wonder what my sons’ narratives are, and how I contributed to them.
I’ve fought all their lives to break the chains of abandonment in our family story. Is Jake’s wandering in the figurative wilderness part of our family narrative?
I’m also reading books about baseball and I’m pretty sure that baseball is saving my sanity.
I went to my very first major league baseball game in April, when the Padres played the Cardinals. Tom, my husband, answered every one of my baffled questions with patience and delight. (I’ve never been interested in baseball, and was only there because I knew how much he would love it. It was the Cards, after all.) I asked about acronyms and stats and weird rules. (Dude. The infield fly?)
It was the infield fly that got me. It sounded like a bizarre rule, and it reminded me of English and how wretched its rules can be. English delights me, so of course baseball would, too. I have to know everything. So: books. heh
So now I’m on a search for my favorite player. Tom wants to get me a jersey, which I have never been remotely attracted to before and now must have. I’m leaning toward Molina, the Cardinals’ catcher. (Has to be Cards; I’m married to a St. Louis guy.)
The stats are my favorite, which is hilarious. Stats=math, and I am accustomed to giving it the stink eye.
So the obsession is engaging a different part of my brain and it helps me not to wallow in grief and fear. I confess, too, that it makes me laugh a little to think of the line, “How ’bout them Dodgers?”
The blog of missing: Day 21
I feel a certain tenderness toward people who witness when grief visits me unexpectedly. Grief is a rude fellow, with no appreciation for proper timing; he gives no figs about propriety in any circumstance that I’ve noticed.
Mostly people look like they feel cornered.
One guy asked about the situation and the minute he heard the catch in my voice he put his hand up and said, “No, no. You don’t have to explain.” Sheer panic in his voice. It’s ridiculously endearing. I don’t know, maybe it should annoy me that I can’t express myself to people, but it really doesn’t. This isn’t about me. It’s about my son.
Tonight I heard that Jake was seen by a woman who visited the Circle K in Imperial. Apparently he (or someone who looks like him) asked to use her phone. She refused, which I understand. Jake’s big, and he may look scruffy.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that she didn’t call the police when she learned he was a reported missing person.
If you’re not directly affected by things like this, it may not really strike you as necessary. You don’t know the anguish. None of us do unless we’re in it. Grace!
I am only able to be in this place because of my husband. He said, “Honey, we don’t know that this was Jake. You have to be prepared for a roller coaster till we find Jake.”
Actually: much longer conversation than that. I was a basket case. I’m getting better at truncation, eh.
So today I was helped by two angels in disguise: both passed out flyers and their paths intersected while they were helping me. Just regular people who give a damn. This is why I have hope. Love will find a way.
ps: I’m on an Amy Grant kick 😛
NaNoWriMo: Day 7
I found a letter from my mother dated April 12, 1989. The date meant nothing at first read, then I read, “No, I don’t think your father will ‘go to hell’ (grin)” and I remembered that my father died in early April of ’89. I’m not sure why I would have asked Mama if I thought he was going to hell. I was sure of it.
She further writes, “I think, rather, that he will be busy learning differences in the types of love that there is. I believe that he is just fine. Instead my concern lies in anyone who could see what happened to him and yet continue to surrender to those forces that shaped his unhappiness.”
This—and the rest of the letter—makes me nuts. I’m incensed that she wrote about him learning different types of love (I sneer here) when she knew what he did to me. It’s a crap thing to say to a daughter who felt the ‘love’ from that man. And the letter sounds so…reasonable, even with its roundabout finger-pointing at Dad’s mother , the mild terminology (Dad wasn’t unhappy; he was miserable,) and the complete lack of acknowledgement of my truth.
She writes, “Sometimes people make choices, act a certain way, do certain things for unacknowledged ends. They live by and within a set of rules with the expectation that their compliance will ensure a set outcome, whether it is money or returned affection or a gathering of objects or maybe the fending off of loneliness. Perhaps it is a combination of all these things. Then, after years of minor and sometimes major compromises, the person doesn’t get whatever it is that he or she “purchased” with the prescribed actions. What then? Maybe the person interpreted the “rules” incorrectly, maybe something else—but the changes in the person are accomplished anyway, the goal is unattainable, and the perceptions of the person are so altered by the day to day compromises that he or she has forgotten the rules of living according to inner clarity. A fine mess. Oh, well, I guess it is pointless to say any more on this. (smile)”
Actually, it’s brilliant.
And I’ve re-read the paragraph before her comment about Dad learning about different types of love. I’m busted again—I still skim my mother’s letters because they’re so hard, so painful, to read word for word. She writes, “I’ve been reading about incest…and…the conclusion I’ve come to is that there seems to be many kinds of incest, not all of them physical. Perhaps it can all be crystallized into the concept of a failure to love, or a failure to understand the nature of love—how to love—“
This makes her no-hell comment less inflammatory, but I’m still angry. Part of it is that I want to be, I think, but I’m also puzzled/peeved that she was reading about incest 25 years after the fact, and she spoke so dispassionately of the matter, like it had never touched her. Like I was a friend she was counseling. Gag me, ok.
Finding this letter is a blessing. It’s opened a vein, not of gold but of molten lava that I’ve tried for years to access. I’ve been unable to feel anything other than baffled grief regarding my mother, and I’ve known that it was superficial, that mere pain didn’t do justice to either of us.
I miss —having a mother. And sometimes I miss her.
D5 Creation