Nurtition1 recently posted a beautiful testimony entitled Perceiving Perception. One notion (among many in that piece) jumped out to me and called up memories of my own. That notion is:
An object sitting in the middle of the room can look entirely different to each person standing in each of the four corners of the room. I believe it to be the same in life.
This week was the ninth anniversary of my mother's death. So much has happened in lives of her three children in these past nine years. It seems to me her death served as sort of a cold bucket of water splashed onto her children, waking us up from trances we had been in since childhood. Bless people like Nutrition1 who can "wake up" before their parents leave the scene, and have "adult" conversations with them like the one described toward the end of that testimony.
Anyway, the story that came to my mind upon reading "Perceiving Perception" was my mother's suicide atempt in the summer of 1972. A few years ago, I came to realize that this event occurred just before our family headed to Greece that summer. That summer was the first time my mother had seen her own mother since she left the old country in 1952. And although I don't know much about this stuff, I gather there was a great deal of family trouble in the old country -- you know, shame, guilt, etc.. Bless my mom for getting out. But, obviously, in the summer of 1972, some dark thoughts from those days caught up to her.
Anyway, in the summer of 1972, I was 9 years old. My sisters were 11 and 12. On that eventful day, our dad took the three of us kids to the local fair in the town park. Mom stayed home. I don't remember why. (Actually, I remember very little from my childhood. Mostly just sunny days, and my mother's cooking and love.)
What I remember about us coming home from the fair was dad with mom in the bathroom, forcing her to throw up. Apparently she had swallowed some pills.
Anyway, it all turned well, and we lived happily ever after. Sort of.
Fast foward to 2002. I am in a hotel room in Disneyland with my girlfriend, soon to be my second wife and mother of my child. I am in a state of rage with her. She is depressed. In the middle of the senseless argument, she says to me: "Peter, look at your face."
I turned to look in the mirror and saw a face comically contorted with rage. That sight shocked me, and popped me out of my mood. And then I started thinking.
From the hotel room, I called my oldest sister and asked her: "What year was it that mom tried to kill herself?"
She said it was the sumer of 1972. Unlike me, my sister remembers everything.
And suddenly, it all became clear to me. The summer of 1972 was the moment when I became an asshole. I mean, I'm Canadian and was raised by gentle loving parents. So most would say that I'm a pretty nice guy. But if you ask my wives, sisters, and mother-in-law, you might get a different answer.
These women are and have been the mother-proxies in my life. And from time to time, I have been belligerent with these people. Like I was in that hotel room in 2002 in Disneyland.
I realize now that the lesson the 9 year boy drew from his mom's suicide attempt in 1972 was the following: "When your loved ones are derepssed, beat some sense into them -- that will shake them out of it." Nobody told me that back in 1972. Actually, I don't remember the family discussing the matter at all. I'm just saying that all of us see things, and each of us draws out lessons from those things based on the biases of our own individual perception.
I don't know what lessons my sisters learned from that 1972 event. But I am pretty sure their lessons were very different from mine. For example, I suspect that one sister learned: "When you have trouble like that, keep it to yourself, don't tell anyone." I suspect the other one learned: "Hey, when everybody is being an asshole to you, attempting suicide is a pretty quick way to turn that dynamic around."
I'm noy saying these "lessons" if "learned" by my sisters were conscious lessons. No more conscious than was my "berate your depressed loved ones" lesson. Intsead, I believe these were unconcscious understandings.
Nor am I saying that anyone explicitly taught us these things. Dad certainly didn't teach them to us. Instead, we children implicitly deduced these lessons.
Let's write them out again to see how "silly" they are in the light of our adulthood:
Silly notions. Who thinks like that? Children do!
But until my mom died in 1999, the three of us kids were still following these childhood misguided lessons, even if the lessons never rose to consciousness. But with my mom's death, all of these lessons made their way to the surface. The lessons saw the light of day, and couldn't survive it. All three of us are now adults.
So tying up what Nutrition1 said, in the summer of 1972, there was a seminal terrifying event in our family involving our mother. The three of us children, witnesses all, drew three very different lessons from the same event. These various lessons stayed with us through adulthood. Only in our 40s, after our mother's death, did these lessons finally make their way to our adult consciousness, and thereby leave us.
Life seems confusing. And then it becomes awfully simple.
Flag
Send to a Friend