My Mom, Miracles, and Our Amazing Journey

At the airport before leaving Michigan for our homes in Washington state.

Ron, my mother, and I are joined for a celebratory lunch in Michigan this past Friday by attorneys and friends, including Debby Werthmann, my friend from childhood who had not seen my mom in 50 years. A lovely gathering!

It was a whirlwind trip! Ron and I took the red eye flight Thursday night from Portland to Michigan, landing at 9:30am. By 3pm the next day my mother, Ron, and I were on a plane headed home, for good. There is so much to continue to integrate, share, embrace, let go of, grieve, heal, celebrate, and experience profound gratitude for -- all of which has occurred over the past year and leading to this moment where finally, finally!, we are able to bring my mom home to her family to stay. Several of us have also noted that the very day of Mom's return has fallen on the Solstice, this time of both going inward and embracing the darkness and a time of a the gradual return of the light...

As a human being, and professionally as a social worker with DHS Child Welfare, I fully recognize the profound need my mother has had for permanency, for beginning baby - and yet solid - steps to intervene on my mother's patterns of Saṃsāra, of endless wandering and continuous movement away from herself and what it is that she carries in her heart, mind, spirit and soul. My mom has spent so much of this lifetime stuck in dukkha, stuck in suffering, anxiety, dissatisfaction. Over the past year, this pattern of running has been exasperated by the struggle for guardianship between myself and a stepson from one of my mother's former marriages. As long as permanent guardianship was unable to be established, my mom continued to have this back door open, this distortion of her belief system that all she has to do is move to Michigan, move to Washington, move back with her former husband, move, move, move and she will be happy at last. What Mom has not been able to comprehend is that wherever she goes, there she is. She cannot move away from herself, her depression, her "loneliness",... the loneliness that she has carried within herself of a lifetime.

When first hospitalized last May after her initial move to live here near her family, my mother's psychiatrist spoke honestly with me about what I already knew. He said, "There is no fix for this." The doctor was referring to my mother's mental illness, her anxiety and major depression, her inability to experience peace within herself. I understood, I heard what he was saying. There have been so many countless times in which my mother shared her great pain with me that she had no friends, that she was "alone." Mom has struggled her whole life with dropping the image management, the pretenses, the attempts to control and instead open to true intimacy, vulnerability, authenticity, love. Knowing what my mom has been through, I had long been witness to the consequences of a lifetime of running from herself, of turning away from the darkness of her wounds and simply not having the support or wisdom or encouragement to embrace healing and transformation of what was so deeply hurting and neglected within her heart. 

At some deep level, my mother has believed herself to be unlovable, gravely flawed, and only worthy of caring through literally attempting to buy love, to be in control, to be better than those "others". From the time of her birth, my mom did not have experiences of trust, mirroring, connection, equality, mutuality, and connecting heart to heart. She did not know that authentic relationships are not business transactions. Instead of love, my mom has had a lifetime of empathic impairment within herself and with others. And without the experience of empathy for oneself and others, a depth of relationship with anyone is simply not possible. Thus her deep, pervasive "loneliness" that has followed my mother wherever she has gone. Mom never learned to love herself or to open to the Divine beauty and loving energy that is what I believe to be the true nature of us all.

One of my earliest therapists who actually met and spent some time with my mother in 1985 shared with me that my mom is "compelled to push away love." This is the tragedy of all who suffer from "cluster B" diagnoses, which certainly my mom has throughout her adulthood. This therapist's words illuminated greater understanding for me that as I healed and opened my heart more deeply myself, and began to gain the tools to disengage from the harmful interchanges and the dysfunctional dance we had done together for a lifetime, my mother had more and more difficulty with consistently keeping any doorway open to me. The more I stopped playing my roles of "good" or "bad" daughter, the more healthy, authentic, and loving I became and the less attached I was to playing out roles, the more my mother pushed me away. Opening to authenticity and to giving and receiving any depth of love was such an incredibly foreign, raw, terrifying, and painful experience for my mom. Over the years of my healing and awakening, seeing and understanding my mother and her pain has broken my heart wide open again and again and again. It is like seeing someone you love so deeply starving to death of thirst while she stands next to a pool of clear, pure, life-sustaining water. I have been offering my mom the loving waters of my heart for so long, which she has been largely compelled to push away. Until now.

This is what has made the evolution of our relationship over this past year so extraordinary. Of course, it has not just all been a walk in the park. At some deep psychic level, my mother has known that more than anyone else, she can trust me. Consequently I have often been the brunt of acting out her most excruciating pain, rage, fear, and trauma. And, paradoxically, it is through the love that flows through my open heart that my mother's heart has also had these moments of a gradual and tender awakening. Because my mom does not have a connection with solid Self and is largely fragmented and split off, these moments are not stable or consistent. They ebb and flow. The miracle is that they happen at all. 

As my mother and I shared with greater and greater depth over the 2-1/2 months that she lived near us from May to August of this year, we both found ourselves blessed with the painful, but incredible gift of giving voice to what had been some of my mother's childhood experiences with her own parents. While I have already done so many years of grieving for my mother's tortured life, I now found my heart breaking again as I felt within my mom this little girl more deeply than ever before who had both loved and feared her father and who had been abandoned by her mother, who spent long periods laying depressed on the couch with a washrag over her forehead. To sit on our patio and speak for the first time of these heartfelt experiences flooded me with such compassion and love. And my heart filled with gratitude for the extraordinary preciousness of the sharing that was occurring. These were intimate moments that I had not thought were possible. It is amazing to me, the extraordinary power of love. 

And now this new chapter begins. Mom is here with her family. Last night when we arrived exhausted after an incredibly long day, my mother's initial reaction to her new apartment was to do what she had done each time she has moved over the past many months. She hates it, she wants to die, she wants to move back to what she had been so desperate to move from. Yet, with skillful, tender, empathic responses from all who surrounded my mom, before we left her my mother sat contentedly eating a chocolate candy bar given to her by the staff at her new assisted living, watching her favorite Fox News channel, and was saying how much she loves us and is grateful for all we have done. Who knows what we will find today. I fully recognize that the old terror and loneliness can trigger hair flash rage and/or talk of wanting to die at a moment's notice. And that is okay. Mom is home. She will be loved, deeply loved no matter what. We are all in this together.

There are many who have helped me to heal and transform my life, empowering me to be rooted in the solid, grounded place I am today, an internal place where I am fully ready to embrace my life with my mother and how it is that our journey is coming full circle. Judith Duerk - author, psychotherapist, Thai Chi teacher, and leader of women - first came into my life in 1990. I had read Judith's Circle of Stones early in that year, and then synchronistically found myself in my first women's intensive retreat with Judith and 22 other women in a lodge on Mt. Hood in May of 1990. It was a profound experience for me. My heart also wept with surprise and gratitude the following Christmas Eve when my phone rang and there was Judith calling me from her home in Maryland. She had seen me during that initial retreat. And what I found in Judith was the opposite of the empathic failures I had experienced throughout so much of my childhood and into my adult life. She knew that I was a young mother of three sons and that none of us would be hearing from Mom/Grandma Nan that Christmas. So Judith shared that it had just come to her to call me on December 24th, 1990; she had found my number from information, and she called. What followed was a relationship that continues to this day with my beloved Judith.

In Circle of Stones, Judith writes: 
      How might your life have been different, if, when you were a young woman, the first time you felt feelings of depression, an older woman had come to sit with you? If she had come to sit with you, as someone had come to sit with her the first time she had feeling of depression? To simply sit, quietly, perhaps wordlessly - to sit with you, during your dark time?
      And how might your life have been different if the woman had accepted your feelings of depression? Had accepted them so completely and fully that you began to feel safe with them. If there had been no judgment and no questioning... no attempt to make you smile, to betray your feelings, to deny your darkness. If the woman had simply sat in silence with you, with your pain, and in the darkest moments had been able to reflect it to you... to reflect to you your pain... to witness... attend... and by her quiet respect for it to help you learn to respect it... your own pain and depression... to witness, attend and respect your depression... and to see that just as the woman had faith in it, you also might have a glimmer of faith that there was meaning and truth in your darkness.
      How might your life be different?

Judith has been - among others - a teacher and loving and wise soul who has helped me to claim the wounds of my heart. She has helped me to embrace the gifts of the alchemist, tranforming the darkest experiences of my life into blessings. And, today, these are  the gifts I am able to bring to myself, my mother, and others... and increasingly with each passing year. It is certainly a lifelong process, this journey of awakening. Blessed be.

I do not know just what will unfold for my mother. I just know that I am ready, we are ready... to love and accept and cherish my mom with all our hearts. There has been so much suffering in our family. Today the bigness of our family's heart only grows and grows. Again, the power of love is beyond what I once - so many years ago when I first began on my path of healing - could have ever imagined. Life is amazing. My heart overflows with gratitude. Including to each and every one of you who have supported my mom and me and our family on this incredible journey. Heartfelt thanks.

Namaste ~ Molly

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

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Finally going home for good to the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the heart of our family.