Trauma is relative and yet serendipitous, both in and out of the blue

Sort of.

My mother called yes­ter­day evening, and with the caller ID on our new hand­sets (my mother-in-law’s old phone, help­ing me screen calls) I saw it was her.  I took the call.

This is a big thing for me, caller ID.  When I’m espe­cially crazy (as opposed to my base­line func­tional crazy), I hate the phone.  I panic when it rings.  I don’t want the con­fronta­tion (see prior post, we Scor­pios hate inter­fer­ence, much less con­fronta­tion we didn’t pro­voke on our own ini­tia­tive, and oh, yeah, those ACOA con­trol freak things, too, note to self, find new ther­a­pist if your shrink won’t do meds plus ther­apy) of hav­ing to not know who it is and then deal.  Part of me would deal with the world by email and mail for­ever– you have the abil­ity to see who it’s from AND not open the let­ter, unlike the phone, which means you have to check voice mail or call *69, both affir­ma­tive acts in the aftermath.

Scary shit, when you’re still wait­ing for Fairy God­mother Julia Child to leave a big sack of twen­ties on the doorstep.

So– my mother called.  And I took the call.

I last saw my mother at my brother’s wed­ding.  (Yeah.  Busy, busy sum­mer.)  We (my brother, his lovely wife, my hus­band, my aunt) and I were all wor­ried how she would do.  She doesn’t travel well– it makes her regress and as a child I didn’t under­stand why she was so stu­pid. With the ben­e­fit of hind­sight and per­sonal expe­ri­ence of panic attacks about highly com­plex things like phones and work, I’m still hardly as sym­pa­thetic as I ought to be.  And she’s unpre­dictable in large groups– either pas­sive and weepy or inap­pro­pri­ately attention-seeking, telling revisionist/narcissist sto­ries of past glory and beauty that are warped, if out­right untrue.  Since my Dad was obvi­ously going to be at the wed­ding, we were Extremely Wor­ried (use of Pooh Cap­i­tal­iza­tion inten­tional) that she would be on the inappropriate/attention-seeking side of the coin.

It turned out she was fine.  I think she’s prob­a­bly over-sedated by what­ever meds reg­i­men she’s on, but really– she was calm the whole week­end, if tired and lamed up by her weight and her knee prob­lems.  We actu­ally had a strained if nev­er­the­less basi­cally enjoy­able time, and I didn’t get angry with her the whole time for things that I know full well she can’t help.  I was less amazed than sad.  Sad that I’m still so angry.  Sad that she seemed so sedated and old.  Sad that she’s still very much the same about castle-in-the-sky cures for mon­e­tary and med­ical woes.  Sad that she will always be that way for how­ever much longer she lives.  But she seemed con­tent at the wed­ding, not anx­ious, and though I didn’t like how much she had to drink (she does love her Man­hat­tans) she was never inap­pro­pri­ate– she actu­ally was smi­ley and calm and pleased with my brother and his new wife, and peo­ple (espe­cially our lovely new in-laws) were kind and chatty with her despite the low-level but ever-present level of gaga-ness she dis­plays most of the time.

And I haven’t spo­ken to her since then, though I really have been mean­ing (even if out of guilt) to call.

When we talk, it’s strained.  And I know on some level that she’s aware of it.  But I ask her about her life, com­mis­er­ate about the things that are both­er­ing her, try to offer decent advice, and just lis­ten.  I offer not-too-meaningful details about mine.  Some­times she asks ques­tions, some­times she doesn’t.  She means well, even when she doesn’t do well.

Yesterday’s call wasn’t much dif­fer­ent, except at the end it very much was.  She was try­ing to ask about me, how I was doing, and hold­ing her­self back since I’ve told her in the past that she’s hardly one to give me advice.  We were talk­ing about Julie and Julia, since she’d also seen it and loved it in her way.

(Have I men­tioned here that my first real food mem­ory is Julia’s Boeuf Bournignon, made by my mother and served over egg noo­dles, or that my all-time favorite dish is Saute du Boeuf a la Parisi­enne with home­made pommes frites, cooked every year on my birth­day by my father?  That BB was deli­cious (and I can still taste the Lob­ster Ther­mi­dor she made for my 16th birth­day), and when she’s well, she can be an excel­lent cook.  I learned to love food in part because of the recipes she and my father cooked from MAFC as I grew up.  I find it inex­plic­a­bly telling that despite all their dif­fer­ences, the dis­po­si­tion of vols. 1 & 2 of MAFC (auto­graphed copies, no less) in the divorce remained almost as much of a sore point as their actual rea­sons for divorc­ing.  There was a tense “I need to bor­row vol. X” back and forth, com­mu­ni­cated to the respec­tive par­ents by myself and my brother, that now seems not so much weird as proof of my point that trauma is rel­a­tive, even when it’s just by mar­i­tal con­tract.  My mother still only has her one vol­ume, and it took my Dad years to buy a replace­ment for the one that my mom had, despite the fact that he bought plenty of books in the meantime.)

Mom talked about how she loved the Julia part, and we talked about how I did see episodes of The French Chef on chan­nels 2 and 44 (in re-run by then) when I was a kid on Sat­ur­day morn­ings at my Dad’s house (it was an excep­tion to the not-too-much-TV rule, because if Julia Child isn’t excep­tional, then who is?) and then she asked me straight out if I had a hard time watch­ing the part of the movie about Julie Powell.

Mom knows I blog.  I told her the name of the site.  I don’t know if she reads this (I don’t think I’ve men­tioned the dot net from dot com migra­tion, and she’s weird in how she accesses the inter­net, though she knows how)– if she does, we’ve never dis­cussed it.  My Dad knows I blog, too, and the same can be said of him as my Mom– if he reads this, we don’t dis­cuss it.  Maybe they’re being respect­ful and let­ting me have my say on our past, the one I hope I’m not being revi­sion­ist about.  And I don’t know if Mom read my post from Mon­day– but the serendip­ity of the call and the top­ics of dis­cus­sion weren’t lost on me despite the attempt to men­tally hide with com­mon­place, banal con­ver­sa­tional subjects.

Maybe my rip­ples in the sea of our Jun­gian sub­con­scious (God knows if I believe in God, given the neg­a­tive impact of my mother’s occa­sional psy­chotic delu­sions, but I some­times believe in Jung, that’s for sure) prompted her call.  But it was timely and painful and though I didn’t want to talk too much about it, I did some­thing more than I did the week­end of the wed­ding and admit­ted I didn’t think I’d go back to prac­tic­ing law and that I just didn’t know what came next with my “men­tal health status.”

She’s been doing some REM/Trauma vision­ing ther­apy thing that she feels has helped her– and she did seem much calmer at the wed­ding.  Maybe it has, my own opin­ions on the occurrence/existence of those trau­mas notwith­stand­ing.  After all, trauma is rel­a­tive– if she thinks it hap­pened, then she needs to work through it.  She asked– not told, another indi­ca­tion she’s bet­ter in some ways– if I might look into it.  I was non-committal (I may have grunted instead of say­ing mm-hmm)– and then she knocked me on my ass.  Metaphor­i­cally.  I was glad I was already sit­ting, you see.

“It might help you for­give me for the things that I’ve done to you.”

Talk about thrum­ming like a gong from a hit with a drum­stick whose head is the size of my heart.  I’m still rever­ber­at­ing with– the shock isn’t quite the right word– the impact of that one statement.

She’s never actu­ally admit­ted, unpro­voked, that her actions (and inac­tions, the greater harm in it all, but here I am, inac­tive, so really, I’m one to talk) have hurt me.  And while I’ve never doubted that in her way, she wants the best for me– while I’ve never doubted (and here I am lucky, because so many oth­ers have) that she loves me in the best way that she can (every­thing being rel­a­tive)– it’s the first time in a while that I’ve felt it, rather than told my heart that it’s some­thing I already know.  There’s a self-serving bit in that state­ment.  She wants and needs to be for­given.  But for the first time, I felt it was out­weighed by her want­ing me to feel the lack of anger and angst and so-much-goddamned-drama that comes with doing the forgiving.

The impact of that state­ment?  Well– out of the blue, and with the coin­ci­dence of a blog post about a movie and my mother in law and the mess of my life and a phone call from my mother about a movie and the mess of my life, serendip­ity in its own way or a Jun­gian rip­ple (or maybe her God telling her it was time to call me, delu­sion or not)– I actu­ally want to for­give her.

I want to for­give her.

Yes, I do.

Yes.

At the end of the call, I told her I was glad that she called.

And I was.

It’s another start.