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| My second mom |
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| My first mother |
The work of the mature person is to carry
It has now been four months since the death of my mother on June 20th. My heart continues to be filled with both grief and gratitude. Through these days and weeks and months have come many memories, triggers, tears, sweetness, compassion, gratitude and love. My heart remains very tender.
I am consciously aware each day of this ebb and flow of waves that wash over and through me. Today, and as best as I can, I get to allow my heart to stay open. And I am incredibly grateful. I am grateful that I can feel, that I can increasingly experience life as it is rather than dissociate and deny it.
What a long journey it has been, and continues to be, to open more and more to being a fully embodied human being. For many years now I haven't needed to drink or smoke away what is happening. Much more often than not, I also don't need to experience shame or fear or denial or disassociation. Instead I get to feel, to be vulnerable, and to need and receive the support of my beloved family and friends. This grief, this gratitude, this tenderness and love is complex, nuanced, and holds many layers.
I sit here and weep as I write... I really miss my mom....
And I recognize that sometimes it's just something as simple as reaching for lipstick and then realizing, oh, this was Mom's lipstick. So much reminds me of her and touches into this sadness, this need to still forgive, this depth of love, this appreciation and marveling at miracles, and this deep gratitude and compassion for our journey — this amazing, tragic, miraculous journey of my mama and me. And, always, I’m conscious of the fact that it wasn't until my mother's last seven years of life that she was able to open her heart.
* * * * *
My First Mother and Donald Trump
Flashback...
It is September 29th and I am watching the presidential debate. Mr. Trump is constantly and relentlessly interrupting and talking over Mr. Biden. DJT wants to dominate, control, and not allow one criticism that is out of alignment with his reality and his perception of personal greatness, entitlement, and superiority over Biden, over the moderator, and over everyone else.
And I am suddenly teleported back to early April 1985. This was the last week of my 28 day stay at the in-patient alcohol and drug treatment center at Laurelhurst Manor in Portland. I hadn't even considered asking my mother to fly out from Michigan and participate in the family program for spouses, parents, and other close friends or relatives. After all, it was my emerging childhood trauma that I could no longer keep down that was threatening my 9 months of sobriety and which drove me to take four weeks away from my 2 and 5 year old sons and to enter treatment. I was desperate to stay sober and to not repeat the horrors that had happened to me as a child. I was desperate to be the mother my sons needed and that I had never had.
Even though they'd come to know some of our story, my friends in treatment convinced me to just try calling my mother and see if she'd come. My dad had died suddenly in 1975 and my twin ended his life two years later. So there was only my mother to contact and find out if she would possibly come for the family program over the final days before my graduation; she would be joining my first husband and his mother, who'd flown out from North Carolina to care for our sons while Jim worked and I was in treatment. I didn't think my mother would come. After all, she had been the roots of so much trauma for me and all of us around her throughout my young lifetime.
And, at first, she did indeed say no. She had too much else going on. Then, minutes later, my mother called me back and said she'd come. I was really surprised, hopeful, and scared. And I thought... Well, Mother might be equating me being in addictions treatment with my twin being psychiatrically hospitalized. Maybe she thinks that if she doesn't come I'll commit suicide like my brother did. But I was wrong. That is not why she came.
The first night of the family program was hard, but manageable. Although obviously not happy, Mother only gave me The Look a few times. The second night was different. She arrived on time with Jim and Kitty, who'd picked her up from her motel. And she arrived drunk. I mean speech slurring, wobbling walking, alcohol stinking drunk. And there we were — my sons' father Jim, his mother Kitty, me, and my drunken mother — all plopped down in a room filled with my treatment friends who were set to graduate with me and their loved ones.
It's a blur how we made it through that night's program. What I do remember was when we were walking down the big hallway afterwards to leave and we were stopped by one of the facilitators from that evening. This was when my mother was asked to not drink before she came the next night, or to not come at all. My mother was outraged! How dare she! My mother furiously stated that she had a sore throat, had one drink to soothe her throat before coming, and that no one had the right to tell her not to have a drink! And she stormed off.
I didn't know if Mother would return the next night. But, along with Jim and Kitty, she did. And she came without any obvious sign of drinking. One of the facilitators escorted our family out of the room where all the other families were seated and took us to a little room on the third floor of Laurelhurst Manor. She knew that more trouble was inevitably brewing and didn't want any outbursts from Nancy to interrupt anyone else.
We were supposed to take turns saying whatever it was that we each needed to say, especially in support of the person in treatment — me. Jim and Kitty were obviously in support of me and my ongoing sobriety. Then my mother spoke. And she dove deep into everything single thing that she could possibly think of that I'd done wrong in my 34 years of life. She was relentless and brutal. This was my first mother speaking. The facilitator did her best to try to control the uncontrollable.
Then it was my turn. I began to speak of my deep, deep pain with my mother and things that had so hurt and traumatized and wounded me. I should clarify that this is what I tried to do.
And this is where the Trump trigger comes in. My mother would not let me speak. She continuously interrupted me and yelled over me and tried to stop me again and again. The facilitator was not being successful in intervening on my mother. "Nancy, this is Molly's turn to speak." "Nancy, Molly needs to not be interrupted." Nothing was working.
Then Jim yelled, "Shut the fuck up, Nancy!!!"
Jim's mother was horrified. "Jimmy, I didn't raise you to talk that way!," she said in her southern accent. Kitty was also rather conflict avoidant and not comfortable with stronger emotions.
My mother was shocked into silence. I tried once again to speak. And my mother again interrupted me. The facilitator said in her most authoritative voice possible that it was my turn to speak.
As the words and tears poured out of me to my mother, there was simply no way that she was going to listen. Nancy stood up, put her fingers in both of her ears, paced the room, and then walked into the darkness of an adjoining bathroom. My mother was simply incapable of hearing me.
In so many ways, Mr. Trump reminds me of my mother — my first mother.
* * * * *
Don't Believe Everything You Think
Nancy did not attend my graduation from treatment. I wasn't to see my mother again after that last night in the small room on the third floor of Laurelhurst Manor for eight years. This was her choice. I had not been the mirror for her narcissistic delusions that she required. I had my voice. This was not to be tolerated. I was not allowed to be.
And I realized that my mother had not come in April of 1985 to support or help me in any way. This was made especially clear the first time I saw my counselor on the outside after I got out of treatment. Through our many sessions together, John Derrickson knew a lot about my mother, had clearly named her severe narcissism, but didn't really get my mother until he met her face to face. And this happened when my mother made an appointment to see John during that last week of my inpatient treatment. When I saw John afterwards and he told me what happened in his session with Nancy, that's when I first got it why my mother had traveled the 2,500 hundred miles from Michigan to Oregon.
John was gentle when he spoke to me. He wrapped his arms around me and said, "I never want you to have to go back there again." He then recounted the truth. My mother had traveled all this way to be sure that she wasn't exposed. Rather, she was on a mission to ensure that everyone — my husband, his mother, the people I was in treatment with, my counselor on the outside — all knew that it was me, not her, who was the Bad One.
During their session, and when my counselor wasn't buying into my badness or being complicit with her abuse, Nancy pulled out the big guns. She told him that when I was around 13 months old, and no matter what she did, I would not stop crying. I simply would not stop! And so I made her put a pillow over my face and nearly suffocate me to death. That's how bad I was. That was my mother's evidence that I was born a "bad seed." She wasn't the one who'd been in the wrong. It had always been me who betrayed her.... or my brother, my father, and anyone who Nancy had ever been close with. My mother's early abandonment by her own parents was recreated by her again and again through projecting those buried but deepest losses onto innocent others in her adult life.
My counselor was obviously shaken from his encounter with Nancy. And he told me that my brother and I were lucky to have physically survived your childhoods. That's how dangerous my first mother was.
And I went on to read everything I could about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Two different early therapists recommended that I read Scott Peck's People of the Lie: Hope For Healing Human Evil. One of them told me that on a scale of 1 to 10 of "people of the lie," my mother was a 10. And, it's true, I totally related with the incredibly traumatic and dark stories of Dr. Peck's clients that he wrote of in this book. And I realized with relief — I was not alone! So many others had experienced the insanity and trauma of living with a severely and dangerously mentally ill parent.
After reading People of the Lie, and while also being flooded during the course of my early therapy with so many buried memories of the horrors of my childhood, I came to think of my mother as evil. Although I didn't agree with Peck's treatment for narcissism, which included exorcism of this “evil,” the naming of evil resonated with me. And I came to believe that Nancy, the human being who was my mother, was evil.
Over time, and as I gradually came to see larger and larger pictures, my perspective shifted. What emerged was a growing understanding of how generational family dynamics and trauma, coupled with normalized but deeply unhealthy and harmful cultural belief systems, could produce someone who indeed engaged in acts that could be called evil. As more veils were lifted, it became increasingly clear that while her actions may be seen as evil, it wasn't my mother herself that was evil.
Monsters don't fall from the sky. But hurt people do hurt people. Especially if there was no doorway available to intervene on the need to wall up one's heart in order to survive. Some have the resilience and support to overcome overwhelming obstacles and trauma. And some do not.
Through incredible Grace, and beginning in my early 30s, the trajectory of my human journey has been very different from that of my mother, my father, and my brother. And one part of this has been through not getting stuck by falling into the trap of dehumanizing my mother through the label of Evil. Instead I was able to nurture the compassion and wisdom of my heart.
Gratefully, and for many years, I had a bumper sticker up on my kitchen cupboard with an important reminder. It read DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK. And this has enabled my thinking, my perspectives, the experiences of my heart and soul to continuously shift and evolve. So many deaths and rebirths along the way as I let go of that which no longer resonated so that greater understanding, consciousness, compassion, and love could be born.
* * * * *
To Be Or Not To Be
The essence of one significant part of my journey that I have been integrating, grieving, coming to terms with, and transforming for a long time now are what my current therapist has illuminated: For most of my life, and in relation to my own mother, I was not to be. I was not allowed to be. I was only allowed to exist as an extension of Nancy. I was there for her to show off, to make her look good, to ensure proper and successful image management, and to feed her narcissistic supplies. What this meant was that I was not to have my own needs, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, thoughts, or any part of who I actually was that in any way contradicted or threatened my mother's reality. And because of the love-starved child within Nancy and her own extraordinary neediness, there was no space for me to exist outside of my mother's needs.
At some point over many years of healing and awakening, and through experiencing many layers of enormous rage and grief, I gradually emerged with the insight that my mother had not been allowed to be either.
As an only child, she was the one receptacle for all the generational and cultural pathology that her parents did not know how to cope with or heal. The tragic result was that my grandparents unknowingly and blindly passed this pain and trauma, shame and fear, pervasive empathic impairment, and unaddressed grief and loss onto their only child. And there was no place for my mother, as a tiny vulnerable child, to be safe, to be held, to be seen, to be loved. There was no place where little Nancy could safely be who she truly was.
So my mama went underground. She fortified her heart and survived. She cultivated an image of superiority to compensate for the overwhelming shame and unworthiness that she could not bear to feel. And today I understand this. I understand that as a very young child that there was no reliable foundation of support for my mother to feel, to need, to be vulnerable, to be loved and seen. And when there is no place to go, all the self-loathing and deep shame, rage, and terror of experiencing being unloved gets buried. Deeply.
Of course, this strategy is doomed to not work. What we deny within ourselves doesn't simply go away. Instead, our split off rejected fragments still have to go somewhere.
And the result is that my brother and I also grew to feel unlovable and profoundly flawed. Like our mother, we tried to compensate, to earn love, to be good or be bad to get attention. Any attention was better than no attention. Until adolescence, I took on the role of the "good child." My twin, John, was the "bad" one. And all narcissists require this — other persons on whom to project both idealized "love" and to project self-hatred.
Mr.
Trump projects this good/bad, perfect/evil, black/white thinking onto
all those around him and onto the world. My first mother projected
her self-loathing onto those closest to her — especially my father,
my brother, and myself. Whoever the narcissistic perpetrator, or
their victim, the one commonality shared by everyone is the dictate
that no one is allowed to be their authentic selves. That gets buried
in a sea of the tragic and traumatic belief of not being worthy of
love and needing instead to compensate by erecting an image of
someone else. Managing this image of a false self is exhausting,
crippling, and deadly — because a projected image can never know
love. Only a vulnerable, open heart can experience love, not one that
is fortified with dense layers of protective walls.
Before
his suicide, my brother wrote this poem about not being loved by our
mother —
If Only
I love to be loved.
— John Strong
The cost of not being loved, of not being allowed to be, or not having the resilience or the support to engage wholeheartedly in the healing and opening of his heart cost my brother his life.
The roots of the generational and cultural patterns within our family which caused so much harm, suffering, and trauma could have gone on unaddressed and unhealed within myself, my three sons, and now our grandchildren. But these are no longer the unconscious tragic patterns that are being perpetuated and blindly passed on to new generations of vulnerable precious children. Beginning with me, the trajectory for our family has radically changed.
I just never dreamed it possible that my mother would someday be part of our family's journey of healing and awakening. My many years of heart-work, coupled with extraordinary Grace and fierce Love, worked its miracles — even coming to penetrate and open the heart of my mom after decades of her relentless compulsion to push away the love that she so desperately hungered for.
* * * * *
Complex Trauma, Complex Grief
Every day I am missing my mother. And I understand deeply that I am needing to grieve and to honor both of my two mothers.
There was the first mother who could be charming and, at the flip of a switch, brutal and terrifying. We never knew which side of her would show up. The trauma bond that we had with our mother meant that my brother and I were unconsciously and chronically fighting to secure enough love and attention to survive. Under all the appearances and pretense and momentarily happy times was this constant struggle to both be loved and to cope with the underlying heart-crushing messages that it wasn't safe for us to be. And this, of course, had also been true for our mother as a tiny child. The unseen and unaddressed family legacy meant that none of the deepest needs of our hearts were able to be seen, supported, or lovingly responded to.
There are sometimes the extraordinary workings of Mystery, Grace, and Love that bring about a profound shift...
Beginning when she was turning 87, my second mother was born. The ending of her 4th marriage, followed by a suicide attempt and forced hospitalization, and ultimately bringing her home to live near her family here in the Pacific Northwest changed everything. Treatment for her mental illness with antipsychotic and antidepressant medications, just enough memory loss to not remember what would have been unbearable, and the immersion in deep, deep love all served to shake something awake in my mother that had up until then been inaccessible throughout her lifetime.
It's hard to have the words for the journey that unfolded for us. While Nancy gave physical birth to me in 1951, beginning in 2013 I was able to act as midwife to the birth of the opening of my mama's heart. Despite all appearances over the decades and overwhelming evidence that my mother was incapable of ever giving or receiving love, there was something inside of Nancy that never died, that was buried so deeply but always there, that was watching and waiting for a time when it would be safe enough to risk to open her heart and experience love.
My mama and I were ultimately able to spend the last seven years of her life loving each other. The one way street was no more. At the same time that I mothered my mother day after day, week after week, year after year — the mother I had never had also emerged for me. And there came to be this flow, this mutual flow of love. The transferring of emotional energy between us took a radical different direction, one where the power of love and grace overtook all else. Love prevailed....
So there is this complex trauma, this complex grief of having had two mothers —one incredibly cruel and unable to love, and the other with a heart that courageously and miraculously began to open at the age of 87. And it was this second mom who was able to make up for a lifetimes worth of loss in the last seven years of her life. There is no greater treasure than love. None.
And this is why I weep and why my heart aches. I weep for my mother who couldn't love and for my mom who could. I weep for all the lost years, and for the last seven years where we squeezed in so much love that we'd hungered for and that finally, finally!, we were graced with being able to share together.
* * * * *
Our Human Story
The essence of our story is not one that is confined to our family. It is much more common than not in American culture and in many places around the world.
All around us we see the faces of violence, unconsciousness, dehumanization, disconnection, trauma, fear, and loss. These may appear separate, unique, individual, isolated. What I see, however, is their interrelationship. In our families, our communities and our culture, our government and politics, our policies and economic systems, our belief systems and societal norms is often the undercurrent of longstanding patterns of unaddressed suffering that gives rise to narcissistic mothers and siblings who commit suicide and to presidents and their enablers who blindly wield horrific and heartbreaking harm onto those around them and countless others and the Earth herself.
It is the roots of our suffering that need to be looked at, and deeply. It is not possible to alleviate the suffering within ourselves much less anyone else if we are oblivious to the core of that which causes so much pain, trauma, and loss. We humans can only act to serve as midwives to the healing and awakening so urgently needed in our own communities and across the planet as we simultaneously attend to our own suffering and pain. It is what we deny ourselves, what we abandon in our own hearts, that ends up not just hurting ourselves and even those we most love, but also sends ripples out into the world that add to suffering rather than alleviate it.
It is this human story of trauma and transformation which has much greater implications and meaning beyond what has happened within me and my family. And this is why I continue to tell our story. There is something here and in the journeys of countless others that holds the potential to shake something awake in ourselves that has been slumbering for a very long time.
The unhealthy aspects of our culture tell us to stay busy, to point dehumanizing fingers at the Other, to pick up the drink or the affair or shop till we drop, to not see what we see or need what we need or feel what we feel, to not be. And the cost of this disconnection within ourselves and the great Sacred Heart that connects us all has long had devastating consequences.
So I am not alone in having complex trauma and grief. Not at all. Yet, it is exactly through the doorway of our tears that more is revealed — the tenderness and strength of our hearts, our latent courage and underdeveloped compassion, our unclaimed wisdom and deeper purpose, and our capacity to serve as powerfully loving human beings in our hurting and too often love-starved and unjust world.
And so today I share this story of honoring and grieving my two mothers with the understanding that the heart of what I speak to here is actually about far more than me and my mama. It's my belief that we all may hold this capacity to serve as midwife in some form to our awakening world. And this is especially true as we courageously attend more and more deeply to the needs of our own hearts and souls. If we are alive and breathing, there is always more work to embrace and greater wholeness to embody. To know this is a great and precious gift.
The more we love, the more real we become.
Heartfelt blessings to all,
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| Little Nancy, 1930 |
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| Molly and Johnny, 1955 |
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