Truth hurts and heals

44

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

I am forty years old and live with my mom. Take that, pride. Take that, overachieving perfectionist.

But I don’t care. The din of dizziness doesn’t leave room for me to care. I am in survival mode and in mom’s hearth, I wait out the storm.

When desperation grows, she listens without judgement. When failed treatments crush hope, she keeps believing. With my head in her lap, her hands cradling the commotion, she summons healing. Our relationship waxes bright as my identity and relevance wane into nothingness.

I am an ouroboros, eating my existence within the renewing embrace of the feminine.

But am I healing or hiding? Dave is back home, but home is now haunted—our individual and shared pain re-traumatizing each other. Lost at sea, I need mom’s confidence, grace and unwavering optimism. I need her to make decisions for me. I need her to dream for me. With identity now blasted open, I do what is safe and familiar—I look to mom to build my narrative.

Mom’s intelligence, love and marked magnetism are a dwelling for many. For as long as I can remember, she’s presented with polished, but sincere, optimism; uncertainty and negativity digested in her sleep by a dependable shadow gobbler. By morning, the chaos is sorted, the meaning clear. In my youth, while tentative frames of my own forming identity would montage into meaninglessness, it felt a lot more safe to buy her narrative than to discover and write my own—Disney over film-student flop, an easy choice.

Her truth was a snow globe that never stopped snowing—divine beauty and perfection blurred the plastic, paint-chipped faces of children on skates. I didn’t want my life to settle into a meaningless made-in-China export. Standing inside the globe, mom’s narrative swirled around my head, obscuring my own truth, and it was glorious.

But now the snow is settling, and I’m unmoored by the broken bits, the hard faces, the scenes ordinary and void of meaning.

in the radiant hearth of mom

Occasionally mom encourages an outing, to say little yes’s within my life’s rapacious mouth of no. Most evenings I retreat to bed after dinner or sit at the dining room table poking needles into wool until eyes grow heavy. On a rare night, I’ll “watch” a movie—mask over eyes and volume so low I can barely decipher dialog. But I’m feeling brave tonight so I venture out—an experiment!—with mom to see the indie film Unbranded, a documentary that follows four men and sixteen mustangs on an epic 3,000-mile journey from Mexico to Canada.

Mom is running her usual fifteen minutes late so only a few front row seats remain open in the theater. We walk through the dark, the equine stampede deafening. I breathe into my diaphragm, I am safe, I am safe, but already know it’s too much. My hands clench the arm rests, a knee-jerk attempt to stabilize haphazard signaling. The screen, a suspended tsunami just seconds away from my demise, hovers over my cowering existence. And even though the edits are thankfully paced, the blow-out-your-eardrums Cinemax experience is enough assault for all my senses combined.

I am desperate to have a successful outing, to feel normal again, to not ruin the evening. So I sit through the one hour and forty-six minute terrordome. I am a pool of sweat when the credits roll. The floor drops out under each step as we make our way back to the car. Mom notes my distress, but not its magnitude.

When we return to the safety of her townhouse, I immediately drop to the floor, pressing myself into solid, hardwood feedback, something to settle the eight-hundred pinballs all firing at once in my brain. The floor jolts up and down, side to side, a zigzag herky-jerky patternless motion all the more pronounced by indisputable stillness. I so badly want out of my experience. I must, but can’t, escape my body. Our experiment was a failure; I’m a failure. While mom reviews the movie, “Incredible scenery…” “The masculine test of endurance…” “In wildness is the preservation of…” somewhere from the periphery of embodiment, fury collapses in, and then explodes out of me. I stand up, two feet from her face and scream,

“SHUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTT UPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!”

Stunned, not one more than the other, we stand in silence.

And then, an unfamiliar sight—a jaw trembles, tears well, snow settles. But instead of reaching out to her, I march out of the room. I am full of indignation I can’t comprehend. Rage eviscerates rationality.

I lay on the guest room bed, staring at a ceiling I’ve memorized. How dare I? Mom’s exuding patience with me, but because of my stupid reaction to a stupid movie, I lash out at her. I’m the one I should be angry at for not leaving the theater. It’s not her job to protect me…so why do I feel like it’s her fault? Her beautiful face draining in color, her tears, her trembling jaw—I clench my own as the images loop through me. I don’t want to stay angry; I crave peace, even more so with its biological absence. I hurt her and I need to make it right.

I get up. Walk back to the kitchen. Her back is to me, poised on a red stool; she munches on leftovers and watches MSNBC. Mom has a dial imbedded in her brain, I’m sure of it, allowing her to flip in and out of emotional states with ease. I envy this in her. She welcomes the biting edge of relationship, the moments of truth that shatter boundaries and invite intimacy. She has an almost super-human, infinite trust in the unfolding of events and knows we will find each other again. I apologize.

It doesn’t need to be spelled out—I’m pissed about my situation. Unscrewing the valve and letting off steam sometimes is necessary; but rage is scary and threatens abandonment.

Months pass and the outbursts arrive more frequently. She doesn’t abandon.

I never plan for them to happen, erupting without warning. My adult self can’t rationalize away the child’s fury. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT ME, she screams—not back in the movie theater, but forty years ago when I first shaped the word DAD. I ask her to tell “the Charlie story” over and over again, trying to understand her choice to stay in the dark.

I explode again. We hug. I explode again. We cry. I explode again. We talk through it. This thawing business is a slushy mess. Mom’s shadow gobbler is fat and her brain’s emotional dial is getting a workout.

And then, I hear it. Soft, but differentiating consonants free our tangled branches; tiny shoots push down, down, down from my feet.

With her beautiful glassy eyes only inches from my face, vulnerable but certain, “I’m so sorry Kim, I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you and pursue the truth.”

I hear “sorry,” I hear “pursue truth,” but it’s the everyday “you”—incarnate and valid—that fortifies and repairs. The snow globe shatters; I no longer identify as an accessory to her story, I am an individual with my own needs, desires, failures—someone who was protected from the truth, not protected with the truth. Someone who didn’t get to decide her own story because it was edited and tidied up before she was even born.

Can I trust myself enough to now write my own narrative?

We hold each other. I feel no blame, only deep, undying love for the woman now and also the woman then who did her very best to protect me from hurt, only to discover forty years later that the truth does hurt, but it also heals.

NEXT CHAPTER

still radiant