Dead Mom Walking

by Rachel Matlow

  And so, eventually, I found myself ready to finally dig in to the question that still vexed me. I had my half-baked theory about the nose job, but I still didn’t really have a deeper understanding of what had guided Mom’s decisions. I’d continued to use my rational mind to figure out the irrational.

  “Why did she do it?”

  I was sitting on Pat’s couch. “I don’t understand,” I kept saying, over and over.

  Pat was concerned about colluding with the part of me that intellectualized everything—“You tend to think instead of feel,” she’d pointed out on more than one occasion. But she knew that’s how I processed, so she indulged me.

  “I didn’t know your mother, so I have to be careful,” she made clear. “I’m talking about her through proxy—through you.” She went on to explain how it’s common for children of narcissistic parents to become self-reliant. They fear dependency because their emotional needs were never met. Their parents’ needs were prioritized over their own.

  This made sense to me. Mom had told me how her father hadn’t acknowledged her feelings growing up, and how her mother called her a “cold potato” if she didn’t attend to her needs.

  In my search for answers, I finally read Silver Fox (making sure to skim over the part where she dresses up in a sexy maid outfit). In it, Mom described herself as “a psychological parent” to her “needy parents.” Huh. She was affirming our theory in her own words. “Unremittingly sweet to the rest of the world, my mother used me as a repository for her unowned depression and anger,” she wrote. “When I was a child I felt like an orphan, I thought I had to take care of myself.”

  Check.

  Check.

  Check.

  It was safe to say that Pat and I were on to something.

  For the next few months I saw her every week. With the benefit of time, and Pat’s psychological insight, I could make sense of what had happened with greater perspective. I’d had no idea just how deep Mom’s fear of dependency went—before the nose job, before the bad hospital experiences. Like all roads, it led back to her parents, particularly her mother. Mom experienced dependency as a horrible thing that brought only disappointment. She couldn’t drop her defences for fear she’d be obliterated by her mother’s overbearing needs. She learned to depend on herself—and to defend herself—at all costs.

  I’d known that Mom felt she’d had to mother her own mother—it was why she’d been so adamant about never leaning on her children—but it dawned on me that she never actually leaned on anyone. I’d always thought she questioned authority simply because of the problems with, well, authority. But now I could also see that she needed to be the authority. She was comfortable only when she was being the leader, the teacher, the mentor, the advice giver. She didn’t follow anyone (not even Thich Nhat Hanh).

  Having been assigned the role of helper early on, Mom had learned to deny her feelings and cater to others. “I had decided at the age of five to be independent, charming, outgoing, and funny,” she wrote. “I had decided never to cry.” I was starting to see that she felt like she wasn’t valued for being herself, but rather for how she could satisfy others’ needs.

  “To be vulnerable would be a crisis of self-worth,” Pat commented. “There was no way she was going to let the doctors take control of her treatment.”

  I thought about how hard it was to maintain autonomy within the medical system. Surgery is one of the most powerless and vulnerable situations we can put ourselves in. We’re forced to place absolute trust in the person at the other end of the scalpel.

  “Perhaps to lose control would be to lose herself, to be subjected to things she didn’t want. It was just too scary for her,” Pat said.

  Ding ding ding! Mom had worried that the doctors would “get” her and “keep doing things” to her. “They’ll give me chemo when I don’t want it,” she’d said.

  “What exactly was she so afraid of?” I asked.

  Pat thought about it for a few seconds. “I think your mother was afraid of being devoured.”

  Devoured. I’d heard Mom use that word before. I flashed back to Mom reading me her play: “You want to devour me—just like my mother, just like my lovers, adore me and devour me.” I hadn’t understood what she’d meant at the time, but now it made more sense. Mom was afraid that she’d be subsumed by the medical system—just as she’d been subsumed by her mother. Mom had told me several times, “I don’t want to fall into the clutches of the system.”

  “I never understood the extent to which Mom felt suffocated by her mother,” I said.

  “There was no way she was going back,” Pat replied. “Even at the expense of her own life.”

  I came to understand that Mom was afraid of self-annihilation, of her autonomy being taken away. She’d been obsessed with self-preservation from a young age and was intent on creating a separate person from her mother. “Be True To Self,” she’d underlined in her diary. Mom’s whole life had been devoted to honouring, building up, and reclaiming her authentic self. After decades of working on personal growth, she’d finally come into her own as a confident, “ageless” woman. And then, suddenly, that self was being threatened.

  “I know I’ll get well as long as I don’t abandon myself,” she’d told me. At the time, I didn’t get what she meant by that either. I hadn’t understood what was at stake for her emotionally. I realized now that Mom hadn’t chosen death over me—she had fought for herself. I think we just had different definitions of what that meant: I’d meant a fight for her physical self, whereas she was fixated on preserving her sense of self—the fully realized woman she’d worked so hard to become.

  Reading Silver Fox, I got a fuller picture of who Mom was—notably, how difficult reciprocity was for her. For her, “we” was a trap. When it came to relationships, there wasn’t much middle ground. Everything was extreme. She felt either free or trapped, independent or contained, in control or devoured. Yet despite this, Mom was always on a search for love: love that wouldn’t devour her, love that made room for her needs, love that didn’t take, take, take. “Perhaps love will trump my extreme need for freedom, my deep fear of being trapped,” she’d mused in her book. As a wife, mother, girlfriend, friend, she was afraid of losing herself. “I’m scared to be diminished into a wife, scared to be loved for my use, not for me.”

  With Mom, it was always a Battle of Needs: hers versus others’. “For years, I put others’ needs first. I didn’t want anyone to be angry at me. I believed I had to see all the people in my life at regular intervals. I would put aside my writing schedule, or my wish for alone time.” Mom was done with reducing herself in order to, as she put it, “fit into someone else’s agenda.”

  Mom had clung to this story since she was a child, but the story never seemed to change, even when the conditions of her life did. “Your mom couldn’t write her way past her core belief that there was no room for her needs—and that others’ needs would engulf her,” Pat said. “No matter how much she put herself first, the child in her could never be sated.” Mom believed everyone was a threat. And the medical system was the biggest threat of all.

  At my coming-out winter solstice party, Mom had chanted, “Freedom comes from not hanging on, you gotta let go, let go-oh-oh.” But she struggled to follow her own mantra. “The choice to trust is like choosing to let go of a trapeze in order to grab the next rung,” she wrote in her book; “you need to tolerate the uncomfortable gap.”

  “But there were times when she did jump,” I said to Pat. “Mom did tolerate the uncomfortable gap when she travelled overseas in her twenties, when she left her marriage, when she took that job in Switzerland.”

  “But she only ever let go when it meant relying on herself,” Pat noted. “She couldn’t jump when it meant relying on others to catch her. She had no tolerance for the uncertainty of the situation—it caused her too much anxiety.”

  “Take
the faraway parking spot she could control rather than a chance at the spot right in front!” I joked.

  “Every time something that looked like a tiger came near her, she took off,” Pat explained. When faced with the terror of cancer—the thought of her life being limited, of losing control—flight was a familiar defence mechanism. “If someone has a flight defence, you’re going to see it recurring over time. It comes in early,” Pat said. I thought back to how Mom was always trying to escape her mother’s clutches. “I was a runaway before I was five,” she wrote in Silver Fox. “In the late forties in Toronto, I followed the iceman and their horses, followed parades, chased a cute little white dog. When I got the tricycle I longed for, the one I slept with my arms around in my fourth year, I knew I could go farther. Wheels!”

  There was also her intellectual flight—always in a book—and her imagination sprees as a child, disappearing into her rich fantasy world. Mom had a pattern of turning away from reality. Reading Silver Fox, it was all right there in front of me. At the top of page 25: “Always fearful of being trapped, I’ve looked for alternative worlds.” YEP. As Mom got older, tricycle wheels turned into cars and planes, Buddhist retreats, Paris. And her fantasy life continued in her writing, her lucid dreaming, her visualizations. Even talking to her cancer cells.

  When faced with the fear of cancer, she retreated into magical thinking—an old favourite. I think fantasy allowed Mom to control the unknowableness of cancer, to write the outcome. It was easier to create a narrative she could direct, even if it was just a fantasy. She chose to believe that the doctors were giving her minimal hope; it was a way to justify taking control. She convinced herself that she was the holder of the knowledge.

  “She had an aggrandized belief in her own autonomy,” Pat said. “The tragic irony is that autonomy is an illusion. We live in a web of relationships. No one gets by on their own.”

  After staring at the Magic Eye puzzle for so long, I could finally see the 3D image hidden within. It had been there the whole time. Now there was no unseeing it: Mom was a minefield of defence mechanisms and contradictions. She’d used the genuine benefits of natural medicine, legitimate critiques of conventional medicine, liberal feminism, and anti-authoritarianism as a screen so that no one would detect what was really going on. She was in camouflage, masquerading as her true self—her intellectual knowledge was a cover for her emotional avoidance.

  Mom played a very clever shell game. She distorted reality and constantly confused the situation. She was able to get her audience to focus on one thing in order to distract their attention from another, successfully reframing their perception of the situation. (As any magician will tell you, misdirection is key.)

  Mom had a way of turning everything on its head. I thought back to how she could even co-opt something as innocent as the Buddhist practice of “staying in the present” to justify her avoidance. (If she stayed in the literal present, she wouldn’t have to look to the future and consider the deadly prognosis awaiting her.) Mom had an answer for everything. There was no way she could lose. I’m sure it wasn’t conscious, but it was pretty freakin’ genius.

  “Why didn’t I understand that back then?” I asked Pat, thinking about how I’d been constantly arguing with her, desperately trying to appeal to her with logic and facts.

  “You didn’t understand how much of a false self you were constantly in contact with,” Pat said. “You were caught in a power struggle with her defences. You thought you were speaking to the mistress of the house when really you were talking to her armoured guard, who was doing a brilliant job of not allowing any new information past the gate.”

  “I guess I didn’t understand how afraid she was.”

  “You didn’t understand how much your mom was afraid of being afraid,” Pat clarified. “She shut the door. Her story was locked tight. No one needs that much control unless what they’re feeling would overwhelm them. Her system would not budge. Her control was absolute.” Pat’s gaze turned to the floor. “But not really…because she died.”

  A long pause followed.

  “There was really nothing I could have done?” I asked.

  “No,” Pat replied, without hesitation. “You were outmanoeuvred.”

  I sat back. My shoulders lowered a centimetre. I finally got it.

  Mom had been operating from an emotional place where reason was suspended in the face of fear. I had underestimated her truth, her emotional reality. My logical arguments were no match for her slippery sleight of hand. There was no way I could’ve won. Mom was a better illusionist than I was a chess player. Surrender came over me, and I tipped my king.

  * * *

  —

  I LEFT PAT’S office that day feeling lighter than I had in a long time (maybe not since the opiates). For once I actually agreed with what everyone had been telling me. I could finally accept that Mom was the only one who could have saved herself.

  And yet a part of me still didn’t get it. Mom had been aware of her issues. She’d written about how “chronic worrying leads to unnecessary control” and how “the less free-floating anxiety we have, the less we try to impose control.”

  And so, at our next session, I put it to Pat: “Why couldn’t she follow her own advice?”

  “She had the intellectual knowledge, but healing oneself is an emotional accomplishment,” Pat explained. “Was she really ever pulling up the memory and sitting with it? Did she feel it in her body? Did she ever process the emotion?”

  I’d always thought the reason Mom bounced from one self-help fix to another was that she was curious, always seeking, always discerning. But now I could see how jumping from one remedy to the next was also a distraction from feeling her fears. Mom went for breadth, not depth. She pursued one shiny crystal after another, never sticking with anything long enough for doubt to arise.

  With cancer, Mom looked for a quick fix. A shortcut through the acute discomfort of fear. “You can’t process your emotional life without being uncomfortable,” Pat pointed out. “You need to be able to tolerate pain.”

  But Mom didn’t like to do anything too uncomfortable. She didn’t really ever follow strict alternative protocols. She didn’t like to be cold. She didn’t even like to sit cross-legged while meditating. “Sounds like sitting with herself was going to be difficult,” Pat said.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WERE A lot of lessons here for me, too. “To do emotional work is to surrender,” Pat told me. To surrender to the fact that I couldn’t have controlled the situation. To surrender to my own childhood feelings—or the fact that I even had any.

  Mom believed that by loving me less intensely and less intrusively she was breaking a pattern of what she called “overinvolved mothers and their weakened children.” There are ways in which her laissez-faire mothering style had served me well in life. She’d helped me become strong, confident, independent. Yet in overcompensating for her mother’s neediness, Mom reproduced some of the same consequences. The pendulum swung too far. It was awesome getting to eat all the ice cream I could stomach and not having anyone tell me what to do, but it was also lonely at times. Mom taught me to have a self, but she also taught me to be self-reliant—too self-reliant. Like her, I’d learned to be wary of dependence. I dismissed my emotions. (I, too, had decided never to cry.) Like Teddy, I processed everything through logic.

  “You lived in a household where feelings were intellectualized rather than felt,” Pat said. I imagined that if we had a family boat, its name would be Avoidance.

  “It’s ironic that your mom wanted to see you as a separate person—because she actually gave you what her inner child needed, not what you needed,” Pat noted. “You needed her to be more involved when you were young.”

  I realized that when I was a kid there’d been an unspoken deal: Mom didn’t have expectations of me, and I shouldn’t have expectations of her. She needed a lot of
alone time, and in turn she never made me feel guilty for doing my own thing. We all acted like islands. But we weren’t.

  Beyond our shared interest in art galleries and raw French cheese, I never understood just how similar Mom and I were. We were both fiercely independent. We both wrote our own life scripts. We were both storytellers. Not to mention that we both minimized our pain and had difficulty depending on others. And like Mom, I was capable of my own denial. What stories did I tell myself to cover the pain? (Pat didn’t think my childhood anecdotes were all that funny.)

  For most of my life I’d been unable to see Mom as anything other than an amazing mother. I needed that story. Her story. To admit otherwise would have been to admit the sadness that came along with the part of her, albeit small, that hadn’t always met my needs. Sitting in Pat’s office and revisiting these stories and memories forced me to sit with my emotions—for more than a complete sentence, if not a whole book. I had to open up to my anger, my confusion, and my own guilt. I had to go to much more uncomfortable places than I’d ever expected and experience deeply uncomfortable emotions. Coming to understand Mom’s issues meant I had to look at my own. Not so fun.

  “We often pick partners who embody our disowned self or unlived life,” Pat remarked during one of our sessions, steering the conversation back to me. There was no mystery with Molly. She would mirror my pain and multiply it by a hundred. Molly had embodied my unfelt emotions, so I’d held her at bay. All those times when I’d literally told her not to react, or to just be happy, I’d been terrified of my own feelings. Molly wanted me to cry with her. She wanted to be my person, to support me, but she didn’t know how. And, well, I never really gave her a chance.

  * * *

  —

  “I THINK YOUR mother had a form of psychic cancer,” Pat hypothesized one day. “The defences that were supposed to protect her turned against her and kept her from getting the help she needed.” The same was true for me. My defences—logical thinking, self-reliance, emotional avoidance—failed me too. They kept me safe, but they stopped me from growing.