Finding Mother
Because alcohol is toxic to our bodies, we have the word intoxicating; and because that oily, viscous formula we put on our lips rapidly dyes and dries, we have the word lipstick. And because it is the tannic acid that binds so quickly with collagen in leather, we use the term tanning leather. That same sort of history follows the naming of the ball-point pen.* Such hidden meanings in grammar have always fascinated me with their backgrounds because so much of what we take for granted actually does have a reason for being. And yet, as one can see with such words, we often don't dig any further than the surface. This was the topic my wife and I brought home after an evening of conversing with some friends, an evening pretty much filled with the typical chatter of such gatherings. But looking deeper once we were home, both of us realized the despite all of the laughs and the good times we once again shared with our friends, we actually knew very little about them...or that of our parents.
Okay, I should back up a bit because that doesn't sound quite right because who doesn't really know their parents. I mean, they're your parents after all. But what were their childhoods like, and their teenage years? What dreams and aspirations did they harbor before, well, before you came along? Did they go to war, (or if they did, ever talk about it); did they wish they did something else with their lives, something that they loved? And if so, what was that, or what were those things? Did they date a lot or hardly at all? Did they have regrets...about careers, about each other, about you? Would their lives have been totally different if they met years later, or had lived somewhere else? And then there's you. Some of us will be fortunate to have known their parents well into their 80s and 90s, while others may have lost their parent/s while still a child or at an early age. Some of you may have been adopted or were raised early on with a step-parent, maybe losing the role as the surrogate man or woman of the house in the process, even if you were just a teen. And then there's the reality that some of us didn't want to know our parent/s. And some of us perhaps had a parent or parents who didn't want to know us (or made us feel that way). And for some of us, losing a parent had nothing to do with the physical side of things, but one due to dementia. And then there's that other scenario...**
Author Steph Jagger, in her book Everything Left to Remember, described how she felt as her mother faded away, even as she stood proudly beside her: Although she remained unmoved, standing beside me, I felt some part of her fall. I sensed a crumbling, as if some invisible part of my mother was now lying on the ground inside of herself. Is she sad?, I wondered as I reached for her hand. Is this her sadness? I knew there would be no words, especially now, especially with the Alzheimer’s. To understand what was happening I had to feel it, I had to sense it and fill any gaps with a rough translation. It's what I'd always had to do. I'm not sure what my mother needed from her mother. I had never asked, and she had never told me. But in that moment, I understood that she too had learned to split off from herself. I watched her forget and then remember that her mother was gone, realize and then re-realize that she had no person to return to, no shore to call home, and I felt it. The way she held herself together at the same time as letting a part of herself go. The way she sat and waited for a wave to come and carry her out to sea. I knew that feeling. I knew it well. Had my mother cried alone in her bedroom? Were we both lost at sea? Rocking gently in a boat somewhere -- back and forth, back and forth. Perhaps we were more alike than I thought -- a notion that was both comforting to me and completely unbearable.
Some days it feels to me as if the universe guides us in a certain direction, even if we don't know it. And although Mother's Day was still months away, I kept noticing books and films and articles about mothers and the mother as parent. There was first The Good Mother, although this movie was a jumbled mess, even leaving critics scrambling like rabbits to "explain" the non-ending which is usually not a good sign (and I tend to love everything Hillary Swank does). Ironically, the next day found me watching my first Jennifer Lopez movie which happened to be called The Mother. I'd heard her name but relegated her to a Kardashian-like category (like Jennifer Aniston) and never felt any reason to delve further (anyway, wasn't she a singer?). But this film, all fluff and action aside, displayed those deep and tangled bonds that men can never know...that of the maternal bond. Okay, I've written many posts about my mother (type "mother" in the search bar and you'll see just how many), including a reflection of her when she passed; but then, I was one of the fortunate ones to have had a mother who lived a long life. But looking back, I found that I still couldn't answer any of those simple questions asked above?...her childhood (I knew a few blips but nothing extensive), her first loves, her true calling, her strength and stubbornness (okay, those I got). Both my wife and I have many videos of our moms together, dancing away in our kitchen or laughing while dining at the buffets in Vegas (when buffets were still there). Our moms got along great, which was another blessing for both of us. But did we ever think to sit down and chat with them about "meaningful" stuff? Or did we just think they would be around forever and that there would always be time? It seems that only now, as we recognize that our own ages are climbing up there, do both my wife and I find ourselves thinking of our parents and saying that phrase that haunts so many of us, "I have so many questions I wish I would have asked."
My mother was like most mothers, a defender, something I knew from way back even as I acted tough and full-grown and full of all the I-got-this attitude a male seems to carry through life. And when I peeked at Philippa Perry's book, I sensed a glimpse of how my mother's feelings perhaps matched those of one patient's letter which had "stayed" with the psychotherapist: I will drop everything to be by their side whenever necessary. This also impacts my husband, who provides the finances, and though he is extremely generous, he cannot understand the bond I have with them and why they turn to me so much (he doesn't have children of his own and would not have dreamed of calling his own parents in such circumstances as my children call me). That father role was the one held by my stepfather who had walked into a home with two kids aged 9 and 13 and was asked to be a "dad." It's not unique; that role of becoming a step-parent can go both ways...but generally, the "original" mom stays mom, as does the dad. This was the premise of the Lopez movie, her being an elite assassin which meant she had no time to be pregnant and thus, ended giving up her baby...but once her "baby" was threatened, she found that she possessed that motherly something and who would now defend her baby. That maternal bond had never left, and admittedly, Lopez's character plays a pretty tough role and was not a person you'd want to make angry. In many ways, my mother was more the silent warrior, the subtle pushing of me into areas she felt I was showing potential, and yet letting me follow my own path once she knew that I was okay. This quote from Joanne Anderson's Writely or Wrongly and her witty take on grammar may appear off-track but when I read it, it seemed to sum up my mother's view as I stuck to my goal of writing: For all the many words I encountered in my school days, grammar terms were scarce. I learnt the basics of what nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives were, but along with millions of others, I don't remember diving in much deeper than that. The definition of a preposition? Maybe. Compound predicate, split infinitive, participle, modal auxiliary? Certainly not. Maybe a pronoun here and there. Pluperfect tense, predicate nominative? Stop swearing. I've read about them since, but keeping my distance still comes naturally. The odd grammar term will appear in the following pages, but not unless it's on its best behavior. No muscling in without explanation, no hogging the limelight...Readers may find slip-ups on my part. They're deliberate, added as a sort of non-treasure hunt anyone can undertake. OK, they're not deliberate, but I'd be obliged if you think they are anyway. My mother was a teacher, primarily of special ed students, so she was no slouch to grammar; and yet, I can't recall ever being chastised or encouraged, as if she was simply and subtly letting me know that she had my back.
So all of this swings back those Freudian searches and answers about missing those we love, that questioning both inward and outward when we stare at a photo of our loved ones, even our pets, and wonder what happened to them, and where are they? Pictures make them look so "real" (and often, us so "young'). Slide into a somber mood now and then and you wonder (if you happened to be close to them and perhaps even cared for them in later years), did you do enough? And of course that phrase, "there's so many questions I wish I would have asked." Some of us find that relatives or animals appear in our dreams now and then and admittedly, I am always surprised when that happens...or doesn't happen (and I tend to dream a lot). A good friend of mine (old college roommate, among other times we shared) has come to me in several dreams, but another friend has never done so. Were he and I simply not as close as I had imagined? But then many of my relatives, and pets, have also chosen to "move on," my polite guilt-free explanation of feeling that there must be other things more important since they've never "appeared" in my dreams, not even in the background, dang it. And really, maybe they did and I just forgot (although generally when such a person or animal you knew appears in your dream, it really stands out). Here's how cartoonist Roz Chast in her book I Must Be Dreaming "explained" it: Ever since I was a kid, I was interested not only in the content of my dreams, but in the fact that one dreamed at all. Why didn't I switch off when I fell asleep, like TV channels did at the end of their programming day? What was this mishmash of stuff that projected itself into my head like my own weird theater that showed nonsensical movies on a nightly basis?...There's an added problem: attempting to tell one's dreams as one remembers it is almost impossible. We're imposing our waking consciousness on something that is very different. Dreams are not only notoriously ephemeral, but they have a different kind of logic, a different kind of language. I think of them as raw material. I'm pretty sure I've been dreaming since I was born. Zillions of dreams later, I still don't know for certain what dreams are, whether they're a way to do or say or be something our working egos don't want to admit to, or maybe a way to connect with the collective unconscious, or perhaps messages from our ancestors -- or maybe they're just a mishmash of ignorable nonsense, an all-you-can-dream buffet of impressions, worries, and old TV shows. What I love most about dreams is how every night, without conscious effort on my part, these off-the-wall movies unspool and I have no idea why or how. If I'm the director, why don't I know what's going to happen next? Why do I torment myself with nightmares, or dream about a celebrity in whom I have zero interest. There probably is a psychological reason ("royal road to the unconscious," etc.). But for some reason, I don't think that's the whole picture -- "the jury's still out," as they say. Dreams remain a mystery. As John Lennon summed up: Always, no sometimes, think it's me. But you know, I know when it's a dream. Lucky him...
So from here I jump to the accompanying subject of grief. In the book The Grieving Brain by Dr Mary Francis O'Connor, she wrote about how in a totally separate area of our brain we create "object-trace" cells, a map of sorts for our life. It's why we don't bump into our beds late at night when we get up, but it's also a map of the world we navigate through in everyday life. She cites the study by three Norweigan neuroscientists who noticed that certain neurons may be "encoding the history of experience." Added O'Connor: If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved ones to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives. Is it any wonder that it takes many weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again? Professor Yiyun Li had a different take in a piece mourning her son's death in The New Yorker (she was explaining Virginia Woolf's use of brackets to explain detail): Some days, that pair of brackets of Woolf's continue to baffle me. Other days, they feel just right. The predicament when writing about a sudden, untimely death: the more you remember, the more elusive that death becomes. A sudden, untimely death is a black hole, absorbing all that you can give, not really clamoring for more, though is a black hole ever to be fully filled so that it can cease to be one? Has anyone been able to define, capture, or even get close to a black hole? [In September, 2017, our older son, Vincent, died by suicide, at sixteen.] [On that day, we put down the deposit for the house. Deposit, death, in that order, four homes apart.] In a novel, I would never have put the two happenings on the same day. In writing fiction, one avoids coincidences like that, which offer unearned drama, shoddy poignancy, convenient metaphor, predictable spectacle. Life, however, does not follow a novelist's discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is often tamer than life..."Dilemma," from its Greek entomology, means two lemmas: double assumptions, double propositions. But death is definitive; death does not lead to a dilemma.
Losing someone, no matter how much time has passed is not real to us since they remain in our memories. Perhaps time and those neurons may have us recall them less and less, or perhaps we come to find that we've had to reorient ourselves to head in a new direction, that rest stop where we find the road ahead washed out and are forced to detour. As Robert Macfarlane wrote in his book: Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save...He then goes on to explain another "map" we cannot comprehend, that of what holds our world, our universe, together at all: What these observations and others like them suggest is that only around 5 percent of the universe's mass is made of the matter we can touch with our hands and witness with our eyes and instruments. This is the matter of stone, water, bone, metal and brain, the matter of which the ammoniacal storms of Jupiter and the rubble rings of Saturn are made. Astronomers call this 'baryonic matter', because the overwhelming share of its mass is due to protons and neutrons, known to physicists as 'baryons' A little over 68 per cent of the universe's mass is presumed to be made of 'dark energy', an enigmatic force that seems to be accelerating the ongoing expansion of the cosmos. And the remaining missing 27 per cent of the universe's mass is thought to be made up of dark matter -- the particles of which almost wholly refuse to interact with baryonic matter. Dark matter is fundamental to everything in the universe; it anchors all structures together. So basically, all of what we know and touch and remember --even those object-trace neurons-- make up 5% of what exists, so far as we know.
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| Photo of salicylic and lactic acid crystals: Shyam Rathod |
But there's another closer "world" we also cannot see, at least not without expensive and sophisticated instruments, that of the microscopic. National Geographic and papers such as The Washington Post featured a few photos from this microscopic world. And the image above, the crystal formation of a somewhat common wart remover, shows the beauty within that world, one which exist beyond not only what we can see, but perhaps beyond what we can even imagine. The image came from Shyam Rathod who told Olympus (which sponsored the competition): Microscopy is a good way to utilize your time on this planet. It opens the window to the microworld. Everyone should have a chance to look at the microworld while busy in the bigger world. We have already spent a lot of resources to create elements with the potential to destroy. Microscopy is an affordable solution to observe the process of creation. I believe it can regenerate good in the world, as different minds may discover different findings that could enrich the knowledge of humanity...The fact that ‘nothing is constant in this universe, it’s continuously evolving’ can be observed during the crystallization process under microscope. As National Geographic summed up, such photos are: ... not meant to tell a story of this year's most important moments, but to show what the world, in all its variety and richness, looked like to our contributors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you'll still find in these photographs many of the themes that are on all our minds: the shadow of war, the impact of climate change, the push-pull of modernity and tradition, the promise of science.
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| Our Mother Earth from 3.7 billion miles away, Enhanced image: NASA |
*All of those noted words came from Liquid Rules (mentioned in the last post); the ball point pen was especially notable since for centuries, writing with ink was limited to dipping something in a dye and then "writing" with a reed (Egyptians), brush (Asians) or the quill of a feather (early Europeans), none of which allowed for extensive travel (one needed to carry a separate container for the ink). The search was on for a better dye formulation, one which could be more viscous and yet dry quickly on the paper without smearing. László Bíró first noticed that such an ink was used by newspapers and was vastly different since it had to dry as quickly as the rollers ran; but still, how to package it? So his thoughts shifted away from the ink itself and more to changing the delivery system; by putting a small "ball" in a cylinder and letting the viscous ink flow down, one needed only to "cap" the tip when finished (later, he realized that simply retracting the ink holder back into the cylinder eliminated the need for a cap and accomplished the same result, thus the retractable pen). He did all of this in 1938 (when he got a patent) but it was WWII which saw the demand for his new "ball" point pen skyrocket, literally, as British pilots needed a way to write log entries at high altitude. From there the ballpoint pen entered our lexicon, although in the UK such pens are still commonly known as a "biro."
**In yet another piece from The New Yorker, there came the now-taboo subject of doctors and other medical personnel facing the difficult task of whether to save their jobs or to save the life of a mother. The topic is of course, states which have restrictive anti-abortion laws that prohibit an abortion even if the life of the mother is threatened (the article notes that Texas, Idaho & Missouri have such laws). In the piece, paramedics called to rush a pregnant woman to a hospital five minutes away sat parked for two hours. When the ambulance finally did reach the hospital: ...the paramedics didn't get out. The hospital workers looked at one another. Finally one of them flung open the vehicle's doors. The patient had no pulse. The article continued: ...a doctor trained in emergency medicine was making one of the most difficult calculations in the field of obstetrics: when to turn from working on a mother to working on her baby. The concensus among specialists is that initiating a C-section within roughly four minutes of the mother's death improves the infant's chances of survival; delivering the baby also improves chances of resuscitating the mother. The four-minute mark passed, then a C-section was done. Both the mother and baby were dead. Since that double death, noted the article: ... some of the medical professionals involved in and briefed about her care have been haunted by the question of whether sins of omission were committed. They have asked themselves if responsibility for her death raised in part with the new laws that suppress free discussion --both among doctors and with patients-- about therapeutic abortions. Had fear of legal repercussions trumped compassionate care?... In Idaho, Texas, and Missouri, for instance, performing an abortion in almost all circumstances became classified as a felony for which a doctor could face years in prison and the loss of a medical license. The mother who died, when earlier asked by relatives about what to do if she had complications with delivering her baby and her own survival might be threatened simply replied, save the baby.
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