My mother's eyes

It is all about perception or personal construct. Some of my friends love what I have done.  Others find it a little strange.  It would be nice if they could see it through my eyes. Then they would understand instead of biting their lip, afraid to laugh. This is essential in therapy.  If we cannot begin to understand how another person 'sees' his world then we are of little use.  We cannot help them and we feel a sense of failure.  Who wants a doctor who does not have empathy?  The deepest healing comes from knowing that the other person understands and cares.

My perception of reality changed overnight from feeling satisfied to stunned disbelief.  I could not live with what the morning light revealed.  It had to be obliterated immediately as it was offensive.  I needed to create a thing of beauty which was unique to me.  This has been an ongoing feeling since I came into this house.  I have demolished walls to reveal beautiful stonework, painted a sky on my ceiling, scumble glazed walls and stood back each time delighted with my creativity and inventiveness.

That is why I could not understand the tears of sadness that started to run silently down my cheeks.  I am a woman not a wimp.  Another coat of paint was nothing to me.  Something much deeper was happening.  It started whilst writing another article and I had shut it down.  Before lifting the paintbrush again, I had gone to the bookcase and, by mistake, pulled out The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide, which I had bought after the original book.  It fell open at a page which dealt with qualities, both negative and positive, that you had inherited from your mother.  I had skipped that chapter and wanted to skip it again.  I pushed it back on the shelf but, as I started to block out the offending paintwork, I felt such a deep pity,  almost an anguish for her.  Although I had forgiven her a long time ago, I had not understood her.  I had never seen it through her eyes.  She had wanted to obliterate me as I was about to do with my fresco.  I had to understand her thoughts and feelings so, down went the paintbrushes yet again and the pen, my means of therapy, was picked up.

This, I think, is a type of grief but it is different.  The grief when my children died was like a river of blood, that deep agony that sweeps you screaming through rapids and torrents finally throwing you up on some deserted beach to crawl back to some kind of normality.  This is different.  It is like being swept slowly downstream in a deep silent river whose far banks are out of reach.  There is no sound, no sobs with these tears - just tears that will not stop spilling down my cheeks and they are all for her.  I have only ever looked at my life from one perspective - my own!  I have included my father with her.  I am not forgiving them. That has been done. I am pitying them.

My father was in the same boat.  I met him again when I was 18, just after the twins died.  Strangely enough, he worked for the newspaper that my mother sold the story to.  That was how he found out that he had become a grandfather and knew my address.  The relationship lasted for a few years and should never have happened.  He had married again and had another four children and I was a ghost from his past, awakening painful memories for him.  I last saw him when I was 29.  He never forgave me for leaving my first husband and said that I was just like my mother.  In truth, I was disappointed when I met him, imagining him to be tall, elegant and accepting.  He was small, rigid and aloof.

The first meeting was very restrained.  He talked constantly about what my mother had done to him. Remarriages for both of them had done nothing to heal the suppurating wounds.  I realized, even at that age, that they were still very much bonded. But it was hate and resentment, not love.  That is why, for me, forgiveness is so important.  Like love, it is the best thing that I can do for myself.  Who wants to carry the rotten corpses of dead relationships so close to your heart, blocking the chances of fresh clean love from entering your life?  I was the product of that union apparently having his looks which my mother despised and her personality which my father loathed.  How deep his pain must have been.  Hers too.

How much better a therapist I would have been had I known and felt this earlier!  My mind goes back to several cases of parental rejection but one in particular.  It was a mother and daughter and I still feel the pain of not being able to help very much. I felt better when I had read Brian Weiss's book, Only Love is Real, where he explores his own feelings of failure. "How devastating it is to be a healer who cannot heal his patient... The failure to heal strikes at the very soul of every healer."  It really does, but he goes on: "To reach out with love, to do your best and not be so concerned with outcomes or results.  That is the answer."  He is right but it is not always easy.  There is nothing nicer than to watch the pain dissolve from someone's eyes.  That is the real perk of the job, not the salary or the status.

I reached out with love but, at the time, I did not know or understand what I do now.  A, the mother, had totally rejected her eldest daughter.  B, her daughter, was a sad, lonely child.  She also had learning difficulties.  Her siblings were bright.  B was the result of incest.  All the girls in her mother's family had been raped by the father but only A became pregnant.  The sisters had bonded closely, sharing their shameful secret.  B had no idea that her real father was, in fact, her grandfather.  These cases always seemed to come in my direction as I had been trained in psycho-sexual counselling.  That is a very different ball game.  Unfortunately, I was therapist to both mother and daughter which really complicated things.  No one else would touch it.  To make matters worse, they were of a different race, culture and religion.

I had little experience in this so went to the psychiatrist who had trained me.  Although extremely knowledgeable about most things, this one was outside her experience.  I think that she was glad that it was me and not her that had it!  Her advice was to proceed very carefully and do my best but the child had not to be told who her father was.  It was a case of, "If not you, who?  If not now, when?"  That message was given forcefully to me by another source much later on.  Sometimes, without very much knowledge or understanding, we have to proceed with love remembering that we are not alone. We are never alone.

The situation was deteriorating rapidly.  Both mother and daughter were depressed and, with the onset of puberty, B was becoming difficult for mother to handle.  B could not have coped with knowing that her real father was her grandfather or that her mother was also her half sister or that her aunts were also her half sisters and her uncles were, indeed, her brothers.  My dilemma was that I loved both of them.  A was a wonderful woman, bright and beautiful and a hard worker.  But there was so much pain.  It was difficult to be in the same room as mother and daughter.  A could not hide the rejection in her eyes for B.  Nothing she did was right.  I loved B.  She was also beautiful with gorgeous almond shaped eyes -  the eyes her mother loathed because they were her father's eyes.  It was a matter of perception.  What I loved, A hated.  Why did I have so much pity for A yet not understand my own mother?

I wish that I could say that the case was concluded successfully.  It was not.  On our last session A gave me a lovely crystal vase and flowers.  When I hugged her for the last time I had given her all I could.  I had given her the love and acceptance that she needed - the love of one woman for another but I could not help her to love her daughter.  B's last words still echo in my head.  "What I want from my mother is love and respect."  She got neither.  I knew that she felt that I had failed her but I could really identify with her feelings.

Many more cases of parental rejection came my way.  Thankfully, few incest ones, but the pain was just the same and just as deep.  I ached for them, both parents and children, men and women.  Paternal rejection and criticism is just as painful as that coming from a mother.  I could never understand how a child could be rejected outright, probably because I could not understand why it had happened to me.

For a long time I had felt ashamed at having unresolved grief - a wounded healer who could not heal herself.  It was only recently that I changed my mind.  Two great therapists, Robin Norwood (who wrote the best sellers Women Who Love Too Much and Why Me, Why This, Why Now?) and Dr. Susan Forward (who wrote Toxic Parents and Men Who Hate Women and The Women Who Love Them) admitted openly to having problems that required therapy.  They stopped seeing patients until they had sorted themselves out.  How courageous to make that public.  That is why I trust them.  They are honest and they have clean hands.  The dangerous ones are the ones who recognize their own dysfunction and keep it secret, fearing for their reputations.  That is as bad as a surgeon with hepatitis B or Aids continuing to work with open wounds.  I should have had the courage earlier.  Maybe then I would have been more help to A and B and all the others.  I could do a better job now.

At last, the first glimmerings of understanding are coming through.  It is not about forgiveness.  It is about compassion and understanding for them - seeing it through my mother's eyes.  These tears which have flowed so freely this morning mean that I have nearly found the way through and out of the other side.  It will come as I think and write.  I have tried to suppress it but a poem on my wall is a further reminder.  I have kept it from my own days of therapy.

I thought of it
As a stone
Or a piece of glass
And wrapped layers and
Layers
Of imaginary cotton wool
Around and around
So I wouldn't feel it
But today I saw
Barbed wire tangling itself
Around through my emotions
So nothing was safe
And I knew that I would never heal
Till I removed it
Bit by painful bit.

In truth, sadness rarely affects my life.  This is only a small piece of barbed wire in comparison to the other chunks that had to be ripped out.  Whereas pain used to be there for weeks and years, it now only lasts for hours.  I know how to look for the gift in adversity.  In fact, I am quite irreverent.  I just say to whoever is listening "OK, big, smart and clever, whoever you are.  I feel like shit.  Help me. Now!"  I get a quicker answer than religious people who mouth standard prayers on a Sunday or whenever.

Criticism is easy, particularly of those that reject children.  We only need to watch the Romanian or Bosnian situation.  It is only a distraught or trapped animal that will destroy or reject its young.  I am capable of rejection.  We all are.  It just depends on the situation.  In The Sacred Path, by the incredible medicine woman, Jamie Sams, she explains the purpose of The Great Smoking Mirror.  When we point a finger at another, three fingers point back at ourselves.  It is about the reflections of our own shadow side. "If you have an issue that has not been resolved, look to the Self and see if you can stand in another person's moccasins for a moment... Having compassion for the situations of others, without destroying the Sacred Space of Self, is the lesson of The Great Smoking Mirror."

When I need to cry like this, another thing that I would never have admitted to for fear of seeming vulnerable, I go into the Moon Lodge or, in Western terms, the silence. I no longer fear touching these emotions.  I do not fear 'feeling' because, for me, once I have experienced the feelings as distinct from the thought process of rationalizing, fear and pain melt away like the last of the winter snows. They do not return.  I use my Sacred Space which means that I will not allow the needs of others to disturb me till I have completed what I have to do.  Music also heals me.  The adagio by Tomaso Albinoni is already playing, wrapping itself round my soul like a cashmere shawl.  I am now ready to look through my mother's eyes, through the Great Smoking Mirror and into my own soul.  Help me.

She did not want to be pregnant.  She resented the foetus within her body.  It has just dawned on me.  I am not trying to understand her.  It's me, not her.  That is what I felt when I was pregnant at 17. That is where much of my guilt came from when they died.  What a shock to find that we have similarities.  That must be why I avoided the chapter in Redfield's book.  Dear God, am I more like her than I care to admit?

My mother and father grew to loathe each other, even before my birth.  I loathed my first husband.  How many times have I said to my children "You are just like your father!" and I wasn't complimenting them!  I can hear the echo of my own parents' voices.  This is harder than I thought it would be.  Maybe this is why I feel so much compassion for them.  I have so much more compassion for myself.  As I find it easier and easier to accept myself - both the light and the shadow -I find it easier to feel compassion for others.  Is this the lesson?  It certainly isn't where I started out or where I thought I was going.  I can't think of anyone that I don't forgive and that is quite selfish.  Clinging on to hatred is such a futile waste of energy and it blocks the warmth of the sunlight of love.  I prefer to live with love.  It makes life easier.

I still do not understand the depths of parental rejection that some mothers and fathers feel. That does not make me better than them. Just luckier.  I suppose it depends on intent. A did not intend to hurt her daughter B so much.  Her pain was just too deep.  Some parents do hurt intentionally.  I'm pretty certain that my mother did.  I am trying to feel that level of revulsion.  The only thing that I feel that revulsion for is slugs.  Imagine feeling like that for another human being?  How awful to live in a head like that.  That is the pity I feel for my parents.

I now know that the tears that I have cried today are not about pain.  The tears of compassion are healing like gentle rain at the end of a long, hot summer's day.  Unlike the Santorini fresco, my parents cannot be painted out and redrawn.  They are my parents.  They helped make me into the woman I am today - strong, loving and compassionate towards  myself and others. I can now go back and read the chapter in James Redfield's book that I have avoided for so long.  Perhaps they had good qualities that I have overlooked.  There might just be another diamond in the dross heap.  If nothing else, I am an optimist.

Love,