Some Thoughts on Gratitude, Grace, Life, Loss, and Love

My mother and me, Christmas Day 2019

Sharing Stories of Meaning, Heart, 

 Healing, Hope, and Love 

As we approach the end of 2019, I reflect on what an amazing year this has been. There has been exquisite joy, beauty, and love and countless heartfelt blessings. And there has also been much to grieve, from the personal to the collective suffering of humans and other beings worldwide.

*****

Every day with my 93 year old mother is a teaching in being open and present with what is. What a gift it is to be present in our lives with whatever emerges — and as best as we each can — with clear mind and open heart.

Arriving on Christmas Day, my husband and I found my mom in her wheelchair more asleep than awake. Her eyes remained mostly closed, but a hint of a smile crossed her face when she realized that Ron and I had come. As we wheeled her down the hallway to the dining room, I didn't know if my mother would awaken enough to eat her dinner or be able to engage at all with us. While she continued to sit at the table with eyes closed, I instinctively massaged her arm that was closed to me, up and down, up into her shoulder, back down again. She responded after a bit saying, "This feels so good." And I kept massaging and intermittently whispering in her ear, "I love you, Mom... Would you like a bite of your dinner?... I'm so happy to be with you, Mom..."

And ultimately her eyes opened and my mom was able to eat most of her meal, even feeding herself some of it, and then proceed to enjoy her Christmas gifts afterwards. And between gifts, there was this gazing, this amazing interchange of moments of gazing deeply into one another's eyes, soul to soul. "You're my sweet darling." "You're my beautiful mama."

I never know what each day will bring with my mother, whose Alzheimer's has dramatically progressed over the 6-1/2 years since she first came to the Pacific Northwest to live close to her family. Sometimes she eats little. Then there was the evening a few days ago when my mom spent 1-1/2 hours eating 95% of her dinner, an amount that would have taken me 10 minutes. I witness how eating is slow and laborious, with it usually taking an hour to eat 50-95% of any given meal that I share with her. Many times, my mother will look up during meals with concern and say, "You must be so bored." And what a special moment to seize where I am able to remind my mama again and again that I am never bored, never. "I just love you, Mom. I just love being with you, whatever we are doing." And every time a smile sweeps across her face as my mother remembers what she had forgotten — that she is loved.

And there are times when she's not present. Her eyes are glazed over or closed and she's largely unresponsive. But then, so far and again and again, my mom has rebounded and come back for cherished lucid moments here and there. During my last lunchtime with her, my mother — who is usually very quiet during meals — looked up and began staring deeply into my eyes. I sat in silence and returned her gazing. Then Mom broke her silence, "I love you so much."

*****

I hold in my heart with the deepest love and compassion both mothers I have had. There was the first mother whose self-loathing compelled her to project hatred and dehumanization outward, especially to those closest to her. Severe narcissism is like that. And when the inner terror and rage was triggered and rose to the surface, the violence that followed was brutal, devastating, and heart-crushing. My mother lived in that tormented hell for nearly her whole life, pushing away love, trying desperately to manage her image and keep her fear and shame and grief at bay, and starving to death and utterly unable to give or receive love.

Then, seven years ago, with the breakup of her fourth and last marriage and the suicide attempt that followed, my mother was forcibly hospitalized and treatment for her mental illness begun. That was the very beginning of what would change everything.

And a window into my mother's heart opened for the first time, one which I believe had first closed off as a tiny vulnerable infant who was born into a family and a world where she did not feel safe, valued, or loved. Don't trust, don't feel, don't need, don't be were the messages which my mother deeply absorbed. It feels like the generational and cultural patterns had continued unabated for hundreds of years. And now there was this miraculous shift, this profound Grace occurring. And my mom began to allow herself to experience the acute vulnerability and intimacy of Love. And her starving heart began to be fed.

My second mother was in process of being born.

*****

We don't talk about these things much in our culture. Trauma. Mental illness. Addiction. Suicide. Greed. Betrayal. Loss. Love. The obstacles that block our hearts — the shame, grief, fear, family secrets. Not really. The Don't Talk, Don't Trust, Don't Feel, Don't Be rules were not just part of the generational legacy of my family. They are also epidemic in our culture and too many other places around the world. We would not have so much loss, so much devastation, cruelty, violence, and suffering in our families, our communities, our nation, and the world if this were not true.

For many years now, I have been utterly devoted to breaking those life-suffocating rules which severely limit our capacity to live honestly, open-heartedly, and with kindness, compassion, and love. As I freely speak of how our family has been impacted by mental illness, addiction, suicide, greed, betrayal, and loss, I also know that I am not alone. What our family has experienced is not an aberration, but is tragically incredibly common. Over time, I've come to see that we are a culture and a world starved for connection, for truth, for the sharing of  stories of meaning, heart, healing, hope, and love. The cost of our silence is profound. As long as we, individually and collectively, hold so much inside, a depth of intimacy and vulnerability and love remain out of reach — and even though love is what and who we are.

When I speak about being asleep, this is what I am reflecting — being a stranger to ourselves and the Great Heart of Love that connects us all and is our essence.

My own journey of awakening has taught me that there is no way around this messy middle of embracing, healing, and opening our hearts if we want to truly become who we are. I have learned that wholeness requires that we befriend our split off, and often long denied and rejected, parts of ourselves.

Rumi speaks with eloquent wisdom to what is asked of us...

The Guest House

 

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi

*****

My mama and I have both fought and resisted welcoming these "new arrivals." My mother just did so longer. The cost of this resistance still breaks my heart.

I flashback in time to experiences from this other lifetime with my first mother... Slugging my head into a wall. Spitting in my face. Putting a pillow over my head as a 13 month old because I would not stop crying and nearly "made" her suffocate me to death. Falling prey to a former family member who took our family for a million dollars. Justifying going 14 years without seeing me or her grandchildren. Yelling that she hates me and is going to forget that she ever had children. And the list goes on. It is hard to imagine how tortured her soul was to have once been capable of so much heartlessness and brutality. 

I still grieve my mama's lost years. The miracle, the profound miracle, is that my mother was ever able to make it back from being so far gone. So far gone. For those who wonder why I have been seeing my mom every 1-3 days, and originally every day when she first moved here, it is because of those lost years. It is because my mama was starving to death for loving connection for nearly her whole life. And, no matter how I tried, the primal need within myself for love from my own mother never left me. Knowing that I was not loved, and that it wasn't my fault or anything I deserved, was a place of great loss and of great compassion that I lived with. Until the miracle...

I continue to grieve for the losses for us all. Intertwined with my grief is this gratitude that is hard to adequately find words for. Because I was the first one in our family for who knows how many generations to emerge from this legacy of loss, of so much loss, and to open my heart to love.

Weeping now, again... I'm so grateful that I can allow my grief when it comes...

And I am so clear — it was my mother's cruelty that pushed me through the doorway of getting sober, embracing my broken heart, and waking up. I had become fierce, utterly fierce in my commitment that I would not do to my own children what was done to me and to my twin. The trajectory would be transformed. 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés wisely writes that the most important decision that we will ever make is whether or not to be bitter. So true.

*****

When we finally won the legal battle — with the former family members from a third marriage who sought to keep her in Michigan — and were able to bring my mother home to our family, it was very rocky. Initially there was another, but not as serious, suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization. Mom talked of wanting to die. And she wanted to move, to continue that ceaseless wandering. Of course, she was not able to understand that wherever she went, there she was. Running away from herself, something that she'd been doing for a lifetime, simply wasn't going to work any longer. My mother didn't realize that there was a death that needed to happen, but not of her whole self. Instead, the parts of her that had long served as obstacles to Life and to Love were what needed to die away.

Gratefully, by 2013 I had tremendous support and had done three decades worth of healing work. And so when my mother came to live minutes away and the self-loathing — which, with treatment for her mental illness, she was now directing at herself rather than others — arose to the surface again and again for healing, I was able to understand what was happening and meet the cruel voices in my mother's head with tenderness, compassion, and love. Over and over again, I was able to communicate what she had not known for her lifetime — that she is worthy of kindness, compassion, caring, and love.

And I don't know exactly when the gazing first began, but it was early on after my mother's move here. As I witnessed my mom now courageously breaking the Don't Talk, Don't Trust, Don't Feel, Don't Be rules again and again — giving voice to and sharing with me "the new arrivals, the depression and crowd of sorrows, the shame and dark thought" — I knew how to meet and welcome them. It was more than mothering my mother in ways that she'd never experienced. In the larger picture, I knew how to be midwife to my mother's soul.

This was only possible because of my own journey, of  I had first allowing others to midwife the birthing of my soul, my wholeness, my capacity for tenderness, compassion, wisdom, and love.

*****

My heart is very tender. My mom is now on hospice and I know that this was my last Christmas with my mother. While I could write a book — which I will someday — about all that I have to be grateful for and all the teachers and Grace and Love that has transformed my life and helped shake me awake, what comes to my heart first right now is my mom. And the Grace that has enabled me to turn so much loss into my greatest strengths. While I wish on no one the trauma that my mama and I have experienced, I also find today in our story a transformative experience that is so much greater than just the two of us and our family. So much greater.

I often reflect and write about Revolutionary Love, and especially since meeting Michael Lerner and reading his book (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304505/revolutionary-love). Today I see this story of my mama and me as being an example of Revolutionary Love and what is possible for us individually and collectively. Through my own evolution, and witnessing the impossible become possible with my own mother, I have come to believe in the potential for us as human beings to heal, awaken, grow into our greater wholeness. I believe that we are capable of evolving and claiming the loving essence of who we most truly are. Among my deep prayers is that we not underestimate the transformative power of Grace and Love.

As we are now hours away from a New Year and a New Decade, I reflect back on 2019 and this past decade with deep gratitude, awe and wonder. And I hold all of life with reverence. On the other side of loss, so much becomes clear. And so much becomes possible.

Thank you, Mom.

With deep blessings to us all

in the New Year.

❤

Molly 

My mother in her apartment with pictures of my dad, who died in 1975, and my twin brother, who committed suicide two years later, looking on.

 ❤❤❤