Tending the Garden of Our Hearts

My mom and me, May 21st, 2020

Today I arrived during my mother's lunch hour rather than our usual time later in the day. Like yesterday, my mom was having a very sleepy day. During these past two visits, it's been very difficult for her to wake up enough to eat beyond just a few bites at best. So I end up spending much of our visits sitting by her chair or her bed while Mom sleeps just simply soaking my deep gratitude and the gift of being together.

Our visits today and yesterday were very different from just two days ago. On May 19th my mother and I had the longest most awake and engaged time that we'd had in weeks. After eating 80% of her dinner + ice cream + all of her ensure and iced tea, I shared numerous videos and pictures off my phone of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When asked if she was tired and wanted to get ready for bed, Mom kept saying that she loved looking at the pictures. So we went on to look through four of the many photo books that I've made for my mother over the years, sharing pictures dating from her childhood all the way to the present. It was such a lovely time together. 

That was Tuesday. Today is Thursday. I'm reminded again of how I never know what tomorrow will bring or even if there will be a tomorrow. Every moment is precious. And these times also bring up a lot...

* * * * * 

My mother, Ron, and I are joined here with our attorney and his wife, Roman and Karol Grucz, outside the Michigan courthouse, May 21st, 2013.

As I sit by my mother's chair or bed day by day now as she sleeps and moves in and out of consciousness, many experiences over the course of our lifetimes continue to come to me. 
 
Included is the great struggle in 2013 to bring my mother home to her family given the enormity of the combined obstacles of both my mother's mental illness and of the former family members who were determined to keep my mom from living out the rest of her life with what my mother referred to as "my flesh and blood." The deeper truths and multiple reasons why my mother and I hadn't seen each other for 14 years prior to her first suicide attempt were also often denied, not understood, fueled and fed, or distracted from.

My thoughts take me back now to seven years ago today when we prevailed in a court hearing in Michigan. This was when I was granted temporary guardianship over my mother and permission to bring her home to our family here in the Pacific Northwest. Mom was to come back with us and to have four months of time to adjust to her new home here with her family. If successful, I would be awarded permanent guardianship at the next court hearing set for September.

At this time, it had been four months since my mother had attempted suicide in January 2013 in her condominium in Michigan. This came on the heals of her impending divorce from Don, Mom's fourth husband, and after a stepson from her third marriage had convinced her to move from Florida back to Michigan to live near he and his wife. Instead of things going smoothly, my mother slit her wrists and was then forced into her first psychiatric hospitalization.

One day later, Ron and I were on a plane to Michigan. Seeing my frail mother for the first time in all these years on the psychiatric ward, and seeing how far gone she was, absolutely broke my heart. I promised my mom that Ron and I would be bringing her home with us. But this was not able to happen right away. After months of a legal struggle with Larry Larson (not his real name), who fought to then keep my mother in Michigan, the court finally ruled in our favor.

What came next, on hind sight, was more predictable than shocking. My mom, my husband, and I went from the airport on May 25th to her new assisted living. And my mother almost immediately began to demonstrate the emerging signs of another serious breakdown. Within a couple of days, she said she hated me and couldn't believe that she ever wanted to come live by me. She took a plastic knife to her wrist and made a less serious suicide attempt than the first one when living four months earlier near Larry and Laura Larson in Michigan. This resulted in my mother's hospitalization and then being moved for a second time to another psychiatric ward. Instead of being settled into her new assisted living, my mother was on a locked floor in a hospital just blocks from our home. She had again become obsessed with wanting to move or wanting to die.

And I remembered then, and now, the words of a counselor I'd had decades earlier who understood the severity of my mother's mental illness. She told me that when people with severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder run out of the mirrors that they require to feed their narcissistic supplies, that "they go quickly. They get sick and die, they commit suicide, or they have to be institutionalized." 

After decades of threatening suicide, my mom had now twice attempted suicide and was at risk of needing to be institutionalized. Her psychiatrist sat down with my husband and me and informed us of where things were at — my mother would need to be put on strong doses of antipsychotic medication and other medications, which could shorten her life, but without it the trajectory would most likely mean institutionalization.

Earlier, sitting around a table in a meeting room in the hospital, and with my mom, multiple hospital staff, and an attorney appointed to represent my mother, the case was being presented to justify holding her on the psychiatric ward for another two weeks. Repeatedly it was discussed how my mother fits the diagnosis of the full cluster B personality disorders — narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial — along with major depression, anxiety, and dementia. Later, my mother's primary care physician would add schizoaffective disorder.

Is it any wonder that my mother's lifetime had been mired by alcoholism, chaos, violence, trauma, and ruptured relationships? As another therapist told me in the mid-80s, "Your mother is compelled to push away love." And there was also the therapist who told me just before my twin brother's suicide, and two years after my father's sudden death, that I was going "to need to grieve your mother like a death."

I had come to believe that love was always going to be a one-way street with my mom and me. All the evidence pointed to that my mother would live out her life tragically unable to give or receive love.

* * * * *

Mom and me, July 2013

My mom spent her 87th birthday on the psychiatric ward of the hospital five blocks from our home. I took leave from my work as a caseworker for Child Welfare in Oregon and went on FMLA so that I could easily visit my mom every day while working to secure a safe plan for her transition to a different assisted living, this one fully equipped to handle the risks associated with my mother's mental illness. There was a comprehensive collaborated plan put in place that included a social worker, a therapist, a new primary care physician, daily medication, daily visits with me and other family, and multiple staff at what was to be my mother's new home at The Quarry Senior Living — all of whom knew my mother's story and were prepared to ensure her safety and ongoing intensive support and treatment.

At the same time, I knew that my mom wasn't just going to shake out of the torment of the mental illness overnight, an illness which had plagued and tormented her for her entire adult life. The talk of wanting to die continued, as did the back and forth about wanting to leave and move back to Michigan. Of course, none of this was surprising. 

After a lifetime of running away from herself, and the use of multiple distractions — drinking, building new houses, gaining new husbands, planning trips to Europe and the Caribbean, compulsively projecting her self-loathing onto others, being pulled obsessively into right-wing narratives of dehumanization, latching onto the few who would enable her, and more — I was well aware that my mother was not going to surrender quietly into embracing what she'd been running from her whole life. I got it in my bones how terrifying it was to stop the endless wandering and begin the process of withstanding the gradual conscious awareness of what had been rejected and hated within herself for so very long.

I'm weeping now as I again absorb how much my mother suffered. People who commit monstrous acts do not fall from the sky. First, monstrous things happened to them which seemed to give no escape other than cutting the strings which tie one to reality. We see this daily with our reality TV president. I understand the tortured soul that is under all the grandiosity, grandstanding, hatred, and projections because I understand my mom. And it makes me cry. There is nothing more tragic than those whose trauma is so great that they cannot love.

This was the reality of my mother throughout our lifetimes together. Until now...

* * * * *

When I first knew that I would fight to bring Mom home to us, I didn't ask family and friends for prayers related to making my mother's mental illness go away or prayers related to my inheritance and that of my sons. Through decades of work, I had come to this place of loving my mom, of understanding her illness, of forgiveness and compassion, and of wanting to do everything I possibly could to care for her in these last years of her life. The only prayers I asked for where prayers to bring her home to her family.

And I know that people all over the country and beyond were praying for just that. I will always be eternally grateful...

What I hadn't known when all this started was that there would be a huge nearly year long fight over my mother between myself and Larry Larson, the former stepson. That is a trauma that I am still healing from. But what surprised me more than all else — more than any words can ever adequately convey — is that when my mom was released from the psychiatric ward in early June 2013, she began a process of gradual awakening. This was not supposed to be possible. Everything over the course of her lifetime and mine said that this was impossible.

But there were these openings, these miracles, this Grace that happened — made possible by a combination of medication, multiple resources of comprehensive support, just enough memory loss to forget the things that my mother could not have bared to remember, and the daily immersion in love. 

* * * * * 

"My desire is always the same; wherever life deposits me:

I want to stick my toe and soon my whole body into the water.

I want to shake out a fat broom and sweep dried leaves,

bruised blossoms, dead insects, and dust. I want to grow

something. It seems impossible that desire can sometimes

transform into devotion; but this is what happened.

And that is how I survived: how the hole I carefully

tended in the garden of my heart 

grew a heart to fill it."

— Alice Walker 

Several months ago one of the women in my women's circle spoke of the two rings of her mother's that she was wearing. Her mother had died six years earlier. And my dear circle sister spoke of how the rings were more flashy than anything she would choose for herself. But she treasured them because they helped her to feel close to her mom. I was grateful for my dear friend. And I wept for myself. There are no rings of my mother's that I will be able to wear after she dies.

I wish that I could say that Larry Larson told my mother when he called her on the psychiatric ward in early June of 2013 and she began pleading for him to come get her and take her back to Michigan, that he understood her illness and that more than anything she needed to be supported in not running and in staying here in the Pacific Northwest with her flesh and blood. 

Don, my mom's fourth husband, had loved my mother but knew that her mental illness was too much for him. For years, he had said things like that he didn't care what Molly had done 20 or 30 years ago. Don told my mother that she needed to "make peace with Molly" and that "you can't call yourself a Christian if you can't forgive." Don knew that trying to make peace with me was essential if my mother was to ever know peace herself.

But for the Larson's there was too much money at stake. To make a very long story short, Mr. Larson had his attorney tell the Michigan court that I was failing to adequately care for my mother and that staying in my care kept her at risk. The judge in Michigan then ordered my mother back to Michigan. No amount of attempted appeals by my Michigan attorney made any difference, and there were times when Mr. Larson's attorney and the judge met without my attorney being present, despite his requests.

Meanwhile, my mom was similar to an adult with reactive attachment disorder, vacillating back and forth about what she wanted. Finally, in July my mom had come to a place where she knew that she did not want to return to Michigan, court order or no court order. Our Vancouver attorney informed us that my mother had the right to refuse to go. My mom called the Larsons and attempted to tell them that she would not return to Michigan with them. But their daughter answered the phone, said that her parents were already on their way, and yelled that "somebody's going to jail!" My mother then proceeded to make a statement to a police officer that she was going to refuse to return to Michigan. And, indeed, when Larry and Laura Larson arrived to take her back with them, she steadfastly refused to go.

So the Larsons called their attorney in Michigan, who then flew here to pressure my mom into leaving. Mom believed that she "would be in really big trouble" if she didn't return to Michigan with the attorney and the Larsons. Again condensing a much longer story, on August 9th, 2013 — two days before my mother's oldest grandson's wedding  and one month before my wedding to Ron — my mother was flown back to Michigan. This occurred even though letters had been written to the Michigan court by my mother's therapist, primary care doctor, and guardian ad litem all advising against moving her because she had been making such steady progress here, was bonding with me and her family, and also remained fragile due to her mental illness. But they took her anyway.

Four months passed before we were able to finally bring my mother home for good. Between August and December of 2013, there were court hearings, the original Michigan judge agreed to recuse herself when my Michigan attorney presented an overwhelming case for her repeated unethical behavior (something he'd never had to do before in his over 30 years of practice), and we had a new judge. The problem was that a trial kept being pushed back again and again. And we came to realize that if we pursued a trial, rather than settling, that another six months could pass — and that wouldn't just be incredibly more costly, but it would also cause more harm to my mother. And the harming of my mom simply had to end, and no matter the financial losses to our family that would be incurred through agreeing to a settlement. She had to come home with us and the continuous torment of her waiting to "be with my flesh and blood" had to be ended.

So my three sons and I signed on the dotted line agreeing that the will my mother wrote in November 2012 was valid, which highly favored Mr. Larson, but that the one she signed in May 2013 disinheriting Mr. Larson was invalid because in that five month span my mom had become "incompetent." The settlement agreement, to our family, had always been a ransom agreement. But we got my mom. We got my mom. And just before Christmas 2013 Mom got on her last flight with Ron and me, finally coming home for good to her family.

* * * * *  

 

As I sit by my mom and look around her apartment, I'm reminded of the furniture, the wedding gifts to my parents, the jewelry — each piece of which Mr. Larson had appraised in April 2013 while my mother was in an assisted living in Michigan — that is my mom's and also connected to my dad and my grandmother. And I know that I will be letting it all go. After all these things are sold off, and coupled with what they'll receive from my mother's trust and the sale of her Michigan condominium, Larry Larson and his wife will come out of it with around $800,000. Add all the related expenses from the nearly year long legal battle of 2013 that my mother's trust paid for, and the total financial and ancestral losses to our family total $1,000,000 or more.

So I'm continuing to come to terms with these losses and the impact on me and my sons and their children. And I weep. I will never be able to wear my mother's rings or pass on wedding gifts to my parents to my own children....

There is more than one thing that helps me now as I do the work of letting go, forgiveness, and acceptance. A memory comes to me of after my mother had been here for a couple of months, maybe February 2014, when I was visiting her in her apartment. And suddenly I noticed this look of distress on my mom's face. "What are you thinking, Mama?" And with a look of horror, Mom asked, "Do you have a good attorney?" I answered no, that I had but that we don't need attorneys anymore. "Why do you ask, Mama?" And my mom, with a distressed look that I will never forget, said, "My will." In that lucid moment my mother was fully conscious of how she, as Don, her fourth husband put it, had thrown her own family under the bus. I still weep with how tortured my mother looked in that moment. And I remember how I immediately began to reassure her that we got her here with us and that she's worth more than all the money in the world. Gratefully, the tragic lucid remembrance of what she's done soon passed and she was soaking in being loved again.

I know that in her heart of hearts, my mama wanted to change things. She cared. She felt deep remorse. She no longer wanted to throw her family under the bus. That meant the world to me... and along with all the other amazing moments of healing between us. These moments are all holy.

All of this brings me to the conscious awareness that I treasure today and how it is that I am called again and again to attend to the garden of my heart. I remember what truly and deeply matters. And I feel a greater wealth than any material objects or amount of money could even begin to equal. I am soothed knowing that if everything were reversed and I'd had the opportunity to lay claim to another family's material wealth, I don't care if it was worth a billion dollars, I am simply incapable of doing what was done to me and our family. I am incapable of masquerading as love while acting out of greed. Incapable. And I am so eternally grateful for that.

And I sit by my mom and I carry my mom in my heart and I weigh everything out, holding in one hand all the material and financial losses that will go to this other family. And in the other hand — in my heart and my soul — I hold my mom. I hold my mom. And I hold love.

I hold seven years of treasures — of miracles, grace, and love. I hold a depth of gratitude for the antidote to greed and spiritual impoverishment that my life and the lives of my family embody today. And as I hold money in one hand and love in the other, there is just no comparison. None.

And I tend to my heart as I feel through the losses that I will never be able to wear my mama's rings. But I will always have my mom in my heart. Always. Always all the memories and gifts and beauty and joy and amazing grace of the past seven years — all of this and more will live on in my heart and in the heart of our family. There is no greater wealth than this. 

So I'm grieving. And I'm grateful. So very, very grateful to have the capacity and the resilience to tend the garden of my heart and that of my beloved mama and to know in my soul what really matters. What really matters always, always, comes back to love. 

My story and my mom's is so much greater than that of our family. Again and again we're all invited to remember what really matters, to tend the garden of our hearts, to heal and transform the obstacles to compassion and love, and to remember the holiness of our lives. All is holy. Blessed be.

❤ Molly

In this photo I'm gifting the turquoise blouse that my mama wore today. Now the back is cut down the middle to make it easier to dress and undress my mom. So many memories...