[AE.Personal] In which my mother still takes me to school (even when I have a sick day)
Picking up a thread from yesterday's newsletter and from my ongoing life-long process of self-reflection generally: a thing that stops me from writing more newsletters is my tendency to filter myself, which not only has the primary effect of removing the most obvious topics that I have the most to say about -- reader, I can't tell you how many times I've fretted about if I'm in danger of sliding into "her whole life is about having a dead mother" or "her whole life is about having ADHD", or slaloming back and forth between them -- but it has a knock-on effect in that all the things I'm not writing pile up and get in the way of writing anything else.
My father recently quoted me the aphorism, "Writing clarifies our thinking in ways that thinking by itself cannot." after I mentioned in an email that I do my best thinking by doing it "out loud" in writing. It was a timely reminder that it's not actually weird or unusual. Writing may be a best practice for thinkers and thinking may be a best practice for writers.
During the years where I maintained a blog, I frequently titled or subtitled it "Quietly Thinking Out Loud". I currently do a lot of my thinking on Twitter. As I work on redirecting my energies away from social media engagement and towards longer form writing, I expect to do more of it here.
And less filtering.
With that preamble out of the way: this one is going to be about having a dead mother.
It feels a bit tragicomically dark to say that having a cold brought me closer to my departed mother, who died from a chronic lung disease, but it's the truth. The backdrop of a global pandemic that primarily spreads (and presents in part) as a respiratory illness certainly helped there, as in wariness against it I was checking my blood oxygen levels more frequently than I might otherwise have.
The level never once dipped below the normal range. My bone-deep tiredness, thought-clouding fuzziness, and screaming muscle pains were due to a lack of cellular energy, not a lack of cellular oxygen. But no matter how much a part of my life it becomes, I will probably never use or see a pulse oximeter without thinking of her, because I went almost four decades without using one and the "before" and "after" portions of my life on that divide pretty neatly around the pivot point of her illness.
Even if it came from a different source, those symptoms I mentioned also felt like a point of connection. As I said yesterday, they weren't anything new or particularly alarming to me. I did feel anxiety about the possibility that they could be signs of low blood oxygen (why I was checking), but mostly... well, I came into 2022 intending to change how I use Twitter and how I relate to the people and content I interact with on Twitter. My goal was to be better, calmer, more positive and reassuring, and spend less of my time and energy and words and spoons yelling at people to get off my digital lawn, whether I thought they were demonstrably on it or not.
And I have not yet succeeded in that goal, though as I do better on the illness recovery front I find I am doing better on the goal front as well. It's easier for me to quietly move on to something else when I have the energy to move on with enough left over for something else. When I catch myself acting the part of the proverbial senior citizen yelling at the cloud, it's often because I don't have to get up or even look around to do that. The cloud is right there, hanging in my line of sight.
Once, after my mother's diagnosis but before things had progressed to the point where she had given up driving around town or spending the warmer parts of the year living above sea level, we were in the car together driving somewhere. I think it must have been a clothes shopping trip, on the basis of times when it would have been just the two of us; she was probably taking me to Kohl's to get some newer, nicer, and more colorful clothes for an upcoming event.
During the ride, I mentioned something about somebody else's childhood experiences with diet culture, and she cut me off at a certain point and said, "I don't want to hear a word against anybody's mother. People are too quick to blame things on mothers."
Which is true as a general point, but I've occasionally looked back on that moment and wondered if she was worried, then, about her own legacy and how she would be remembered and spoken about by her children. I think it's possible that this is the case. But it's also possibly not the case, and ultimately I'll never know.
Regardless of her past feelings on the subject, I try to be cautious in how I talk about the people in my life online, not just out of respect for their privacy or feelings but because I have found that when I use the internet to vent about someone, even in private and to select circles, it not only gives the listeners a distorted image of that person but it also tends to distort how I see them in turn. I don't think it matters much if a bunch of people o the internet think the worst of my mother, but I would prefer not to. So I don't want to speak the worst of her.
But her illness rendered her not at her best. I don't know what it was like from her point of view or how it seemed from those who spent the most time with her, but from my outside point of view that was mostly from a distance but punctuated with periods of days or weeks where I was her immediate support system, it seems like she struggled with adjusting to a fundamental conflict between her circumstances and her long-standing image of herself.
My impression of her is that before her illness manifested, she saw herself as not just self-reliant but as someone on whom so many others relied whether we knew it or not; if she didn't do it or make sure that somebody else did it, it wouldn't get done, and if she wasn't there to make sure it was done right, it probably wouldn't be.
As her illness progressed, she gradually had to give up more of her self-reliance and more of her ability to be the one who makes sure things get done (and done right), which was hard for her... and no great picnic for anyone around her. She was tired, she was in pain, it was hard to concentrate or think straight or remember things... and so much easier to lash out, to blame, to snap at people who didn't understand what she was saying the first time she gathered enough breath and thought to say it.
While my debilitation was more temporary and less terminal (so far; the one sure thing about the mortal condition is that no one gets out alive), I know what that feels like. And I'm more aware that I have felt that because I have thought about it in terms of my mother.
The thing about the human brain is that even at its most irrational, it is still fundamentally an organ that is arranged for the purpose of rationalizing things. It is a very rare occurrence that you or I or anyone else will snap at somebody and immediately think, "Wow, where did that come from? That didn't make sense at all." We're far more likely to assume that our own actions in the heat of the moment make sense, especially when we examine them in the heat of the moment; this is a strong contributing factor to the ubiquitous human act of the defensive double-down, and also a big part of why it's easier for us to recognize when others are engaging in such an act than when we ourselves are.
I don't know that having identified a pattern within myself after the fact will help me to recognize it the next time it happens, much less stop it or avoid it outright, but it certainly can't hurt, and neither will it hurt to practice mindfulness about it while I'm not a pile of misery and exhaustion.
So if there is some form of my mother who is in some way reading these words, I hope that she can relax secure in the knowledge that I am not rehashing her down days out of a desire for blame or recrimination, but in an act of gratitude. I learned so much from her when she was alive, and I'm still learning things from her to this day.