Mom & Me Journals Histories: 1999 - 2001

    So I was minding my own business on Wednesday (well, struggling to get a better handle on my mother's business) and an acquaintance (a woman who occasionally does my mother's hair and who I got to know superficially when my mother's regular hairdresser was in Chicago visiting her dying father) handed me a piece of paper with the name of a book on it: The Woman's Comfort Book. The reason she handed me the book? The week before we walked into the shop on the wake of yet another frustrating delay caused by a few manipulated "mishaps", one of which involved Mr. Insurance Adjuster leaving a message with my mother that I never got. You know, with every letter and every phone call to everyone, whether business or personal, if they are people who call me regularly or I'm expecting them to call me I always, always, always tell people, "Don't leave a message with my mother and if you do, even if you think my mother took a message, CALL ME BACK AS THOUGH YOU'VE NEVER CALLED, assume I never got the message!" But he left a message with my mother anyway, to which I did not respond, and he took my nonresponse as an "answer". What a fucker, and I do mean fucker, that man is. That day, the hairdresser asked me innocently how things were going and I burst into tears for about a minute. Although I've been spontaneously flushing for more than a few months, enough so that I now consider the social sphere an appropriate place to release a flash flood, I hadn't done that in the beauty shop. Being a mother of somewhere near a million kids, I guess this woman thought she could help me (it didn't occur to her that my habit of bursting into tears in public might be helpful to me).
    Although I rarely read self-help books I thought, well, who knows, maybe this one might have a suggestion or two of the caliber of your suggestion to head in the opposite direction of my intention and let the centrifugal force on the turn push both my mother and me in the direction I need us to go.
    I suppose the book is valuable. It teaches the reader to self-nurture. The author makes three assumptions, though, that rendered the book useless for me:

1. Anyone who picks up the book is suffering from a lack of self-esteem;
2. The reader has absolutely no idea how to self-nurture and doesn't even do the most basic things like:
   • Telling people when one needs them, whether or not those people appear to be available;
   • Allowing oneself to get angry;
   • Being honest when someone says "How are you?";
   • Accepting oneself in the moment as is;
   really simple stuff; there is even a chapter on how to masturbate and why one "should" masturbate. I mean, how basic can you get?
3. She implies the well-worn assumption that men are better at self-nurturing because they learn how to do it as a matter of course and women learn how to other-nurture as a matter of course. [Actually, I think you guys are "better" only at allowing yourselves to masturbate, and that's probably because it's more difficult for you to ignore the need. I mean, you can see the need so you're less likely to believe that masturbating is going to cause you to grow hair on your palms, and probably less likely to care, since most of you become familiar with the utility of razors.]

    First of all, I think men and women (at least in this and similar cultures) are equally bad at self-nurturing across the board; sometimes in the same areas, sometimes in different ones. I think both men and women tend to go overboard from different ships but they travel the same ocean.
    Secondly, I think our disabilities in the area of self-nurturing are hard-wired circumstances to insure that we don't all become, well, probably like me. Some of us, I think, can get away with and be "valuable" (but, I don't think we ever really know if we're, as individuals, from an "objective" perspective, one of the valuable ones; I certainly don't, which is why, I think, the bottom line is that nature doesn't do its thing with "value" in mind) being like me or more "acute" (quoted because I consider that word a quote now; I'm still very pleased you used that word once a while back instead of "worse" because it reminds me to be careful with "worse") but not the majority of us. I know better than to think that "hard-wired" is synonymous with "eternal" or "unchangeable". I also know that right now the hard-wiring is not likely to change toward isolationism in the human species. Not with this many of us around. Unless it's utilized as a mechanism to thin us out.
    Lastly, there are more than a few of us who self-nurture to the point of it getting in the way of others nurturing us. This happens, in my experience, when others perceive me as so self-competent (an erroneous perception but an understandable one; sometimes, also, a perception on other's parts that is actually a boon to me; there are so many people who think they know how to help but don't check to see what kind of help is needed and don't listen when they are told) that they can't imagine how they can help me, thus are reluctant to take my word on what I need from them or are so bound up in their own other-nurturing or self-nurturing that they don't have the nurturing energy to spare.
    A good example of the second circumstance happened this week when I visited MPS one-on-one (which we haven't had a chance to do for a long time) and she said to me, "You know, I'm concerned that you need a respite but I don't know how we're [the extended family] going to be able to swing that." I agree with her. I mean, who's available to help me out? MCS, who is recovering from breast cancer and is still wiped out from chemotherapy, radiation and emotional/soulful trauma? MFS (you already know where she's at)? MPS, who has helped fashion a family full of people whose lives are so busy that they are barely ever home or available to each other let alone someone outside their immediate family? It did, however, raise my spirits considerably when she spontaneously acknowledged this. It let me know that her thoughts are with me. She's aware that I'm in deep water (primarily because I report my depths, assiduously, to everyone) and never learned to swim because, usually, water calms me so much that I can't see any reason to go anywhere when I'm in it (I did learn to float, sort of; that seemed to me like a valuable skill). Now that its on her mind, as it has been for awhile on MFS's and probably will be, one of these days, on MCS's, there's a good chance that when I sink below the surface (which I don't believe has happened and don't believe is imminent) and can no longer be seen or heard, some one of them will look for me. Being reminded of that occasionally, for me, anyway, often does the trick (whatever trick I happen to need at the time).
    The hairdresser's effort wasn't wasted. I'm surprised and pleased that someone I barely know took the time to think about me enough to believe she might be able to help, even though the book she recommended didn't help in the way she thought. Since it caused me to think about nurturing though, it was an inspiration.
    So, LTF, my consolidated response to this book is, someone needs to write a book entitled You'd Better Nurture Your Nurturers and it should be directed to both genders. I don't think I'll write it, at least not now. If I did, the first sentence would be, "Listen, asshole." Not an appropriate intro for sales purposes.

...to, well, I'm not sure what, maybe only my mother's continued existence, but I noticed something last night, throughout the entire evening that reminded me of something you wrote about her that I appreciate more and more the longer I live with her.
    Normally in the evening while my mother is watching television and doing crosswords and usually something else like filing and polishing her nails or keeping up on the tabloids she buys (or putting Mild Taco Bell Sauce on cigarettes or lighting matches in her mouth) I'm usually at one of the computers or walking around the house doing chores (and putting off others). Last night I was feeling thrown off track and scattered so I avoided the computers and settled on the living room floor to sort through paperwork. I spent a lot of time looking at everything but the papers. I noticed that my mother's mouth has a very slight upward curve at the corners all the time and the skin around her eyes sits in such a way that it looks as though she is always just about ready to smile. My mother is magnificently wrinkled so, if anyone's mouth was going to pull down at the corners strictly as a result of age, it would be hers. At first I thought, "She's really enjoying herself tonight." As I continued glancing at her (actually, spying on her to the point of her finally asking me if there was something wrong with her hair) I noticed, regardless of what she was doing at any particular time her mouth and her eyes didn't change even when she stopped to read something to me, commented on something, reached down to pet the cats or pick up something she dropped, went into the kitchen to refill her water glass or slice more cheese. I realized, she always looks like that. It occurred to me that this is the secret to her life, including her open arteries, her relaxed heart, her entire body, which accepts and adjusts to anything she does to it (a lot of which causes health care providers to shudder). Her body seems to react to her life the same way she reacts to Life. She's always ready to be amused or warmed by whatever is going on or whatever she's thinking. I suspect she's always been that way. Right now I'm looking at her staring out the window at something, probably thinking about something and, sure enough, the woman appears ready to burst into a smile. Although I have no desire to make her angry I can't wait until the next time she gets mad (who knows how long that will be; she hardly ever gets mad and, obviously, she doesn't carry around any internal anger either). I wonder if the corners of her mouth will still tilt up.
    I'm not sure it's the secret to anyone else's life or longevity or anything, despite the fact that there appears to be, in this culture at least, a tendency to browbeat people into "positive" attitudes by: citing "research" that people with "positive" attitudes are healthier, live longer, etc., or pointing to famous spiritual leaders and noting that they have ready smiles (it doesn't occur to people that being in the public eye because one appears to have something intangible that others want would tend to put a smile on one's face anyway, for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with generosity of spirit). But I think my mother's readiness to smile may be the secret to her health and longevity. It might also be one of the reasons that she is aging so easily, which is a tremendous gift to me.
    I know there is that old argument (which is true) that women are trained to smile, but no one trains their at-rest mouth "up" instead of "down" unless they're an actor or consciously acting their way through life. I don't think either applies to my mother. If it did the rest of her wouldn't be "up", as well. I wonder if she "smiles" in her sleep. I'll have to check.

    So we went to Pier 1 and it took over an hour for us to get something. Mom forgot halfway through our sojourn that the gift certificate was only for Pier 1 and sat down in a chair in the store. When I finally found her she told me she couldn't find anything she liked and decided she was going to spend it someplace else some other day. I had to tell her there is no someplace else and there isn't another day. We finally found something that took almost the whole gift certificate except for a few cents. We got new reed mats for outside the front doors of both houses. Thank you! They are perfect!
    Something very curious happened. There was an item I found that cost exactly the amount of the gift certificate: A metal wind chime with a 12 tone c-scale followed by the octave of c. I ran my finger over it and it was a luscious listening experience. I beckoned Mom over, angled her right in front and practically on top of the wind chime, drew her attention to it, ran my finger over it, and Mom smiled delightedly and said, "What an idea! A wind chime without sound!" She was so entranced with the idea that someone would actually create such a bizarre thing that I didn't have the heart to break her reverie. Needless to say, I didn't suggest we buy the wind chime.