New Project: Chapter 16
Sixteen
Most life forms just survive. They eat, defend, and nurture the next generation. Then they end. Conscious beings have a hard time accepting they are part of this pattern. Mere survival is untenable. We are born to thrive. Even below the subsistence level this is true. We can laugh or cry, accept or deny, but, as Dylan said, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
We thrive or we die. Sometimes, this is purely physical. More often, for those of us privileged enough to live without serious lack, it is mental and emotional. In every situation, every relationship, we are making a choice. Are we growing – birthing ourselves again and again as something new, fresh, and delighted to be alive – or are we shrinking, shriveling, and dying inside?
Shakespeare had it right. To be or not to be is the ultimate human question and one we must ask all the time. Should I be in this relationship? This job? This house? This community? Is being here how I thrive or is it killing me one tedious day at a time?
Because we ask, because we demand answers, because just drifting through life is unacceptable for most, all human stories are love stories. This is an inescapable fact. Who and what do I love and why? Do I express love or has it died? Can an ember once cooled be reignited or do I move on and light a new fire?
Our capacity to love enables us to thrive. It makes us resilient, gives us strength, and keeps us excited to be alive. It also kills us sometimes.
Relationships are hard. They go against our aspiration to easy, our desire for safety, our need of status quo. Every time we think we understand our role, something explodes.
In my twenties, I flew home for my brother’s wedding. I’d been living in Massachusetts with a family of my own and hadn’t seen my siblings in a long time. Eager to catch up with each other, we lounged on the deck at my mother’s house and shared a bottle of wine.
Sun-swept needles made brilliant patterns in the evergreen trees. Our laughter startled butterflies. To be adults together in our childhood home was to heal old wounds and write new stories about our lives.
It didn’t occur to us that mom was in the kitchen by herself. That’s where she had always been at this time of day. The space-time continuum had not been disrupted. The sun would set and rise, the seasons would change, and if we were home, mom would feed us at dinnertime. So, when we heard a loud bang and a pitiful cry, we were surprised.
As one, we rose and entered the house. My sister called out, “Mom? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
In reply we heard a sob. We rushed into the kitchen, filling the tiny space with our grown-up bodies. My mother slouched over the sink, holding a dishtowel to her eyes.
She dropped it and turned to face us. “Did you ever think that I might want to be out there talking with you all? Did it ever occur to you that I shouldn’t be cooking alone? You guys come home and it’s all fun and good times while I’m relegated to the kitchen like I’ve been my whole life.”
Our mouths dropped open. She was, of course, right. All our lives we’d been her children and we’d never seen her in a different light. Coming home as adults, gathering in her house, we’d treated her the way we always had and that was no longer enough. If we wanted mom to be okay, we had to learn a new way to be us.
That’s hard sometimes. The more intimate a relationship, the more difficult it is to respond well when emotions run high. Consequently, we tend to compromise and that erodes our ability to thrive.
Empathy is the antidote for toxic love and compromise. Unlike sympathy – when we share another’s feelings based on our own experience and consequently render some form of judgment – empathy requires us to set our experience aside, step into another’s shoes, and walk a mile in their life. It means asking questions instead of comparing notes, listening instead of talking, understanding instead of comprehending. It means to accept as truth something we may never experience and allow ourselves the feelings that experience might evoke. Then, when we hug our loved one(s), our sincerity offers hope.
Men will never experience gender-based oppression in the same way women do. Whites will never experience race-based oppression the way blacks do. The Hispanic experience is not the same as the Asian experience. People raised in Texas are fundamentally different from people raised in Massachusetts. Our differences make us rich. They also make us crazy because effective communication is based in commonality. Green means green. Blue means blue. Sad is universally understood. Love is more action than emotion because the emotions that drive the actions are so complex they don’t fit into a single word.
When I encountered my mother crying in her kitchen, empathy came easy. As a mother myself, I could all too well imagine the pain of her experience and changing my behavior was easy. Though my siblings didn’t have children yet, they too could understand my mother’s upset. None of us wanted to cook by ourselves in the kitchen while the others talked and laughed outside.
Empathy is harder when another’s experience is difficult to imagine. Then, the fights are brutal and do real damage over time. After I left my first husband, I stayed with my mother for a few months. My three children were seven and five. They were the joy of my life, my reason for being, the why I’d survived. They were also loud, curious, rambunctious, and hungry. They fiddled, climbed furniture, and ran inside. Their hands attracted dirt like honey attracts flies.
The boys made my mother nervous. It had been decades since she had young children in her house and breakage was a constant concern. So was noise. The sheer energy of their exuberance exhausted her. When my siblings came for dinner, I was forced to compromise. The boys had to watch a movie in a bedroom when the adults wanted their own time.
I did not understand how they could be so cruel. My children were reeling from the divorce. They needed family, a sense of belonging, unconditional love. They shouldn’t have been ostracized. They should have been adored.
On the other hand, my siblings had no idea what parenting entailed or what it was to love a child that much. Neither had experienced a difficult divorce. They both took time from their busy lives to visit my mother and my children were first cute and then a distraction.
My mother wanted to enjoy her grown children in peace and she wanted unmolested belongings. It had taken years to build what she had after her children were grown. In the span of minutes it could be undone by sticky, impatient, boisterous grandsons.
The holiday fight we had that year was worse than we’d ever had and, in some ways, I’m not sure we’ve completely healed. Time passed. My niece and nephews were born. Having kids romp around the living room after dinner became the norm, but the hurt we caused each other cracked trust and eroded bonds.
What if we’d taken the time to understand each other? What if we’d really listened? What if we’d accepted each other’s truths without defense or judgment? Instead, we kept quiet until the fight, unwilling to share hurt feelings and fear. We’d gone along to get along, given a little to get a little, and done the dance of compromise. To this day, when I open my heart and look inside, I see the piece of me that shriveled and died that night and wish I could walk back time.
