| SWIMMING IN THE REALM OF ETERNITY: (a book about mothers and daughters and the search for a separate self) |
by Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D. Preface Introduction 1. Being Irredeemably Separate and Unrelentingly Close 2. Symbiosis, Separation and the Pas de Deux of Anxiety 3. The Journey of the Soul between Life and Death 4. Dreams of Flight (and other desires of the soul) 5. In Search of History 6. The Diaries 7. Growing Down 8. A Zombie Without a Mother 9. A Screamless Death 10. The Loss of the Omnipotent Mother 11. Sex as an Act of Betrayal 12. Wandering Around in Psychic Space 13. Murder as Metaphor 14. Mommy Nearest; Mommy Farthest 15. Giving Into Complete Abandon 16. The End of Longing Chapter 1: Being Irredeemably Separate and Unrelentingly Close For such a long time, home meant for me the house I grew up in, my mother’s house – even after I had long left that home and moved to another state. Perhaps in some sense, even now, home always will mean the lush environs of New Orleans, and, indeed, the home of my mother, but, too, the home of her mother and her mother’s mother before her. Home, and its ineluctable entanglement with my relationship with my mother, was where I returned to in states of pride and the desire for closeness; but it’s also where I retreated for comfort in states of fear and pain; and it was the landscape of my struggle to find my independence, the establishment of my true self. On this one particular sultry evening in June, I was visiting my mother, sitting by the pool, letting my thoughts wander, letting my senses gradually coalesce into full-fledged feelings. As I was lost in my reverie, not even the familiar fragrance of night-blooming jasmine -- that sweet scent that had always filled our back yard at dusk -- could shake me out of my deepest fear. This was a fear that had been chasing me off and on throughout my life. Most of the time this fear never quite emerged in full-force; rather, my anxiety foretold, as a mere hint, of its potential ferocity. It was a fear that even the absolute love and acceptance that I had always felt from my mother could not assuage. The fear was that of inhabiting a place of aloneness, living in a dimension of oneness -- without accompaniment, without love, without solace from another. . On this evening, as my fear threatened to emerge, I knew that it was, ostensibly, the fear of losing my mother to her illness, the cancer that had gripped her. But, on a more primitive level, perhaps it was, as well, the fear of losing myself -- because in so many ways, I felt that losing my mother was tantamount to not having a self of my own. Losing my mother was going to mean losing the greatest love of my life. There was never a moment, throughout our life together, that I was not certain of her love and devotion to me. She gave me the feeling that there was always a “yes” emanating from her, stretching over to me. I don’t mean that she agreed with me about everything, nor gave me whatever I wanted. Rather, it was that she was warm, and open, and receptive, and loving. She liked talking with me, and she liked snuggling with me, expanding her individual body boundary to incorporate me. Throughout my childhood, I was utterly responsive to her affections. It was a passionate love affair between us. Sitting there by the pool by myself, I remembered our best days together – the days of swimming: at first, the days when I was young and she would take me with her to Audubon Park to teach her swimming lessons, and how I was her “little helper.” I remembered the Sunday outings on our boat, our jumping off the boat, all of us together -- me, my mother, my sister and brother -- splashing into the water with glee, waving at my water-resistant dad who remained at the helm of the boat (because, as the story was told, he had gotten water up his nose one day when he was a child, and never went back into the water again) - and then we children chasing each other in the water, so sure were we, so confident about our aquatic abilities because, after all, the mermaid we called our mother had been our teacher. And I remembered the days that she and I would swim together in the pool that I was sitting next to – she wearing my bathing suit sometimes, I wearing hers sometimes, as though the two of us were, like our clothes, interchangeable. I was remembering -- and thinking and feeling -- the enormity of my mother’s love for me because I had just arrived from New York to be with her and take care of her, as best I could, in this, her dying time, a period that would spread out over the next 12 months. In that agonizing year, my mother, overly thin and frighteningly delicate, was confined to her bed as I made my monthly trip between cities. These trips were made out of a need to snatch every last minute still left to us; they were made out of guilt, and love, and a sense of responsibility as well as a gift of generosity; they were made in order to be close, and they were made out of fear of the aloneness that I envisioned as my future without her. As I faced this separation of death, the thought came to me that perhaps all the previous separations that we had endured throughout our lives – the normal and inevitable separations that befall all mothers and daughters – were mere dress rehearsals for mastering this, our final separation. In the process of letting go of her that year, I became like a squirrel readying for winter— obsessed with possessing my mother’s belongings, closing that yawning gap of separateness between us. Each trip home I found something else of hers that I wanted with me up in New York: an inexpensive knick-knack, an antique bowl, a dress. I took her white winter wool – something so lavish I never would have allowed myself to actually purchase. I justified my raids on her closet: She wouldn’t miss the clothes, couldn’t even see whether they were there or not; the knick-knack was too cheap for her to care about; the bowl would look too perfect on my bookshelves, set next to the cherished Matisse print she gave me after I moved to New York; I would wear the white winter wool and she wouldn’t -- couldn’t. On one visit, I took back -- Indian-giver that I was -- the pretty little jar with the jeweled top that I had given her for Mother’s Day the year I was thirteen. It was the first present I had ever bought for her, the first time I eschewed merely drawing a picture for her, or making a Popsicle- stick box. She kept all my childish creations; she displayed them and I know she treasured them. But the jar was special to her because I gave it to her when I was old enough to have developed a taste for fine -- often old -- and beautiful things; it was special to me because I had really wanted it for myself, but I lovingly made that sacrifice. Through all those years after I gave her that jar, I would walk into her bathroom, spy it sitting in the place of honor she had accorded it, on the black marble countertop that was the design definition of her bathroom, and I would covet it. I would wonder if I had made the wrong decision to give it to her at all – whether I should have kept it for myself as I had wanted to do. That conflict was so much what we two were about: wanting to share, giving to each other even when we didn’t want to, even at the point of sacrifice, even, on occasion, at the detriment of our own well-being. I felt like a thief as I roamed the house, furtively planning my next steal. Piece by piece I was trying to move my mother’s home into mine. I was trying to ward off her death by acquiring her, by becoming her. And yet, even with the convergence between my mother and myself, I was never quite so intent on defining the differences between us. My mother lay unmoving in her bed, her leg twisted at an unnatural right angle because simply turning on her side had already resulted in breakage of her fragile, cancer-eaten bones, and there was no treatment to be had for these weak bones that had ceased to have any form of living integrity. In the face of my mother’s stillness, I made sure that I kept moving—as though to convince myself that it was not both of us who were dying, and if only because, unlike her, I could. I trained for a triathlon, running six miles a day, followed by a one-mile swim and the obligatory bike ride. The more my mother’s body waned, the more mine waxed. As her body lay immobilized, I rejoiced in the strength of mine. And the buckets of sweat that poured from me; those were my tears. And I defined our differences in how we each dealt with her mother. Dutifully, my grandmother trudged out to our suburban home from uptown New Orleans to make her visits. It was during this final year that my mother was able to inflict upon her own mother her final revenge for the bad mothering that she felt she had experienced. My mother made my grandmother sit in the front part of the house, trip after trip, never permitting her into the back bedroom for a proper in-person visit, not even for a final goodbye. I think my mother was recreating for her mother the feeling that she had when she was a baby: “Hello, is there anyone out there to care for me? Hello, I hear someone, but where is she? Why is she not here with me?” This was the story of my mother’s childhood that I had grown up hearing – a mother not there, a mother who couldn’t/wouldn’t love; a child with no secure sense of self, no confidence, a child filled with self- loathing. I sat with my grandmother during these times of banishment, sharing her shame and humiliation, both of us wanting my mother to be able to rise above her hatred, above her anger, and above the fierce disappointment in her mother that had defined so much of my mother’s life. The day my mother died, regardless of my protests about our differences, it was as though in her final, irreversible act of separation, our minds became fused; we came back to a togetherness that we had not felt perhaps since the thirty-four years earlier when I slid out from her womb. That last day of my mother’s life, her imminent death seemed to call out to me in some mysterious way, pulling me out of my bedroom where I had been hiding away, taking a reprieve from having to listen helplessly to her labored, sparse breaths. I believe that she needed me to be with her those last few minutes of her life and that she, somehow, in and despite her comatose state, communicated with me to come be with her to share our final separation and her entry into the realm of eternity. And now, over a decade since my mother’s death, I can’t remember what I called her. I know I didn’t call her Mommy; I'm not sure about Mama, it could have been Mama; I'm inclined to think it was Mother, but if it were, I would wonder about myself. I know she and I did better than my calling her Mother, with the hint of stoic reserve that Mother suggests. Could I really have separated myself this much from the woman who raised me, this woman who adored me and whom I adored in return, that I can’t even remember my name for her? Maybe I can’t remember what I called my mother because I am still insisting, even in her death, on declaring our distance from each other, just as I did for long stretches of time when she was alive. Maybe I don’t want to know that she is really dead; I can’t allow myself to know that she and I are irredeemably separate - and perhaps the only way to wipe out the fact of her death and the fact of our eternal separateness is to attempt to obliterate memory, to forget her life – our life together. Maybe all the separations that I insisted on while she was alive -- my acts of rebellion, even deceit, my leaving home -- moving to a city 1000 miles away in order to get away from her -- were all preparations for her death -- dress rehearsals -- attempts to prove to myself that she and I were not the same, that I could have life independent of her, proving that we were not fused, as I think she thought of us as being. And there is, too, the fact that I am, truly, no longer my mother’s daughter. I have read that the human body changes all of its cells every seven years. We are all, in effect, reconstituted soup. I see, from observing the various permutations of my life and of the concomitant fluctuating changes of my emotional construction, that the psyche, too, is continuously reborn. Since my mother’s death, my body cells have had two full revolutions. I can’t even guess how many rebirths my psyche has undergone. Would my mother even recognize the person I am today, the self I have become were she to come down from her otherworldly perch? Sometimes I remember best who I was when she was still alive, what I was like back then, in my dreams. I will wake up and be filled with long-lost feelings. For years, through my teens, my twenties and thirties, I lived almost entirely from my feelings. I loved voraciously and blissfully, as well as despairingly and dejectedly. No one was filled with more adoring love of their mother more than I; no one was closer to their girl-friends than I; no one was more involved with the passion of romantic love. I still dream about the protagonists of my past life – each of them. They walk through my dream-world as though in a procession. And in these nostalgic dreams about love and love-lost, I reconnect to the immensely feeling-Jane I was. I was carefree back then. I broke rules; I challenged authority. I smoked a little dope and railed against the government for a war in Vietnam that I thought we shouldn’t be fighting. I insisted on not accumulating worldly goods, harboring the notion that I wanted to be able to pack up everything I owned and hit the road with no more than a twenty-minute warning. Now, I live much more from my mind. I live from decisions, schedules and accomplishments. My life is utterly structured. Even my daily jog is by the clock, a half- hour – no matter (like the postman) rain, sun, snow or sleet. The other day, I accidentally left my watch home when I went running. At first, I felt disoriented, not knowing how long I was running. The next day I ventured out, decisively, without the watch; this was a great adventure for me in my now, fully organized life. How freeing that was, that small act of defiance against myself, against whom I had become, returning back to who I had been. My mother knew a different girl than the woman I have become. My mother knew a sweet, southern-bred girl who never dared to disagree. She never knew the hard-edged New Yorker I have become who can stand up, fearlessly, to large amounts of aggression, irony and sarcasm. She knew that boy-crazy girl who was willing to forego high-school homework, favoring instead make-out sessions in the back seat of a car. (And, as the mother of that boy- loving, sex-craving girl that I was then -- when I told her for the umpteenth time, in my late twenties, that I was madly in love, wanting her to be as excited as I was by this new, fabulous man -- one in a self-admitted long series -- she responded by saying, not so much with irritation, but rather resignation: “Oh Jane, I can’t get excited every time you tell me you’re in love.”) She never knew the woman I became, finally pledging and honoring a promise of eternal, true love to one man. Most of all, she knew a daughter; she never knew her daughter as a mother. I am a mother now, and I live by the precepts of being a mother: I make rules now instead of breaking them. In spite of our differences, with all the separations we endured and all the unknowingnesses between us, I cannot, will not forget my mother. Although my memory doesn’t stream seamlessly together like a film, nevertheless it seeps through in pieces; it’s more like snapshots placed on a gigantic-sized album page with large spaces between all the pictures -- static memories frozen in time -- of sensations, feelings, events and places. I remember her sitting on the edge of the tub, playing with my brother and me when he and I took baths together as young children. I remember the endless patience, the sense that she had no where else in the world to go, that she was exactly where she wanted to be at that moment – with us, watching us play, even playing with us. I remember the song we sang, the three of us laughingly pulling down on our ears, making them hang low, and saluting each other like a Continental soldier. I remember, when I was older, from the age of seven through my teenage years, her listening to my playing the piano every day after school. I played for hours; and although my mother couldn’t tell Mozart from Beethoven, she never stopped encouraging me, calling out to me from the kitchen where she might have been preparing dinner, praising me for my musicality, or my “expressiveness” as she called it. I remember one time when she went to the beauty salon and came home as a blonde; we three children insisted that she march right back to the beauty salon and make them restore her back to “herself.” She complied, as though understanding that her transformation seemed to us as though a foreigner had invaded her body, and that this blonde mother was a mother we did not know. That very afternoon, we had our mother back. And, even when I was adult, she understood my concerns that I am sure most people would have thought were senseless, even idiotic. We were in California on a trip, and I had brought my dog, Oscar, with me. I was a bit nutty about this dog. He went everywhere with me. We had left him in the hotel room, and 45 minutes into our car trip, I couldn’t let go of the idea that the maid at the hotel was going to open the door and Oscar would run out, never to be seen again. I voiced my concern, and I didn’t have to ask. She just said, matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to suggest, “Well, let’s just go back and get Oscar.” Never mind that the turn-around cost us an extra two hours of travel time. To my mother, my feelings, my comfort and my well- being were all-important. These memory snapshots are sparse though. What I remember most of all, and most viscerally, is the feeling tone of our relationship. She loved me, she made me feel loved by her, and this is the gift, above all, that my mother gave to me. This is my memory of her that is most important. My memories of my mother -- capturing those that come easily, searching for those that are elusive -- have become particularly important to me now that I myself am a mother: they fill in the empty space that now exists between my mother and myself; they bring us back together. Though my conscious memory may fail me, at times, I feel that my mother is solidly in me. No matter what effort I, or anyone, make to get away, there is no escape from that which is within. The things that happen in closets I was sitting on the floor of my mother’s closet. A milky light filtered through the eyelet drapes of her bedroom. The play of the shadows from the huge live oak trees out back soothed me, painting a soft carpet of dappled light on the floor beside me. I was probably five or six here, not yet tall enough to reach the string attached to the overhead light. But it didn’t matter. I was surrounded by a treasure trove of her shoes that I could touch and smell and dimly see in the cavernous safety of her inner sanctum. I had an assurance about our relationship. I knew that should she find me hiding out in her closet, as she did often, she would smile and say lovingly, acceptingly, “So there you are.” I accepted, at this age still without resentment, that she would always want to know where I was; and she accepted, still without worry or fear, that, as much as I wanted to be just like her, there were times, too, when I wanted to hide from her, to be altogether separate and away from her. I pulled a high-heeled shoe over my foot. It was heavy and unwieldy. I marveled at how much room was left – how much bigger I needed to grow to fit into her shoes. Yet, as much as I yearned to be like her, I felt a chick-like contentment that I was still her little girl, an adjunct to her towering presence. And now: three decades later-- my childhood has passed, and with it, the pleasure and excitement I had from hiding in closets. I am in my mother’s closet again. We – my sister, brother and I, the heirs to my mother’s estate – have sold the house, and we need to take everything from it, remove all vestiges of the particular constellation of energy that constituted our five lives together, the family we were. I am looking at what’s in her closet – trying to decide what I want to keep for myself. The shoes of course -- those finely crafted shoes -- the soft, Italian leathers, blue, tan and red; the brown and gray scaly crocodile and alligator skins -- those shoes that even now are still slightly bigger than my own feet. Never mind that. I take the shoes (and I commit to wearing them for years to come, heels flopping, anticipating the inevitable blisters from the ill-fit – but I will wear them nevertheless). I take all the glitzy sequined, the rich brocades, the pastel chiffons and the deep-hued velvet gowns, all the plush dresses she wore to multiple weddings and bar-mitzvahs over the years. She wore them well; she looked elegant -- really luminous -- in them. I take them all, even knowing that my sneakers/no lipstick/down-home style will never accommodate her gowns. Yet, I cannot bear to part with them. And, I decide to take the umbrellas too. It’s been a year since I saw her umbrellas -- those umbrellas that had meant so many different things to me over the years, even up to right before her death. My mother’s collection of umbrellas was large and varied. She had, it seemed, one for every occasion and for every outfit. She had the elegant, dressy ones, the ordinary, everyday ones, and the well-worn, over- used ones. I don't think the dressy umbrellas ever actually left the closet. They were perpetually too good to be used. They hung together in the closet, each of them beautifully and richly patterned. Each had its own cover, matching patterns that fit sleekly over their forms. Their handles were carved woods, both dark and light. The two umbrellas that were used all the time were black and white twins; they stayed in the car mostly, ready for use. They both folded into little square packages with plastic covers around them, black plastic for the black umbrella and white plastic for the white umbrella. These folded umbrellas were the perfect size to get trapped in the space between either of the front seats of the car and the armrest dividing the seats – the horsey crack, as I called it. The car was either a Lincoln or Cadillac -- my father always had one or the other -- and the horsey seemed to divide the front seat into two sections, thus making my mother and father seem, to my child's eye, very far apart. I would ride the horsey, and I would stretch out my arms, aspiring to touch my mother on my right and my father on my left, as though the mere act of touching each of them simultaneously was what held them, held all three of us, together. These two umbrellas were perennially getting lost. This was due to the basic disorganization that my mother struggled against all her life. She wanted order, yet could never seem to accomplish it. She wanted a neat house, but somehow it was never neat enough. I didn’t help her with this; in fact, I only aggravated the situation. When company would come over, my room was such a messy embarrassment that she insisted I close the door and we declared it off- limits for any house-tours. Similarly, she wanted to be on time, but she was perpetually rushing around. She wanted her newspapers read in a timely fashion, but she was always behind – reading today’s news three weeks later. Once, when she and my father went to Russia on vacation, she was so behind in reading her papers that she filled an entire suitcase with newspapers, took them to Russia with her, and brought back the ones she had not finished on the trip. The umbrellas, of course, were never really lost. I got wise to the real thief at a young age: the horsey was the culprit. I became a sort of minor hero in those days because my favorite (and only) place to look for lost umbrellas was the horsey crack. Usually they were stuffed down in there, wedged at the bottom, almost to the floor of the car, forgotten victims of my mother’s own use. I was always the one who looked; my older brother was too busy with his cars and motorcycles; my older sister simply didn’t care about pleasing my mother the way I did; my father was either at work or sitting in his easy-chair, not to be disturbed from his newspapers. I would find the lost umbrellas, and my mother would praise me. I would swell with pride at my cleverness, and I would absorb her love and admiration, pulling it into myself, feeling the certainty of our closeness and love. Sneaking around, filled with trepidation The last time I had seen the umbrellas was when my mother was just a month away from her death. She hadn’t left her bed for almost a year. I had flown into New Orleans to be greeted with one of the city’s notorious, torrential rainstorms. As usual, all the low streets were flooded. A usual 20 minute trip in the car could take as long as an hour, as one wielded one’s way around the patchwork of back streets that were higher ground and not likely to be submerged. Such are the travails of living in a city six feet below sea level. When I arrived, Blique, our maid, wanted to go home. I was happy to take her for my mother, but, I needed an umbrella. I looked first in the car trunk (a newer version now of the old Lincoln or Cadillac) for the old white and black ones; I looked in the horsey crack of the car (through all our cars, my father stayed with bucket front seats), though the car hadn’t been driven in months. Finding none of the everyday umbrellas, I realized that I would have to take one of her better ones – one of the ones that were hanging in the closet. The thought -- knowing it would displease my mother -- filled me with trepidation. I snuck, stealthily, into my mother’s closet, in an alcove adjacent to her bedroom. I made my selection – it was a pretty, frilly one – bold red, with a kind of skirt that edged it – but, in spite of its femininity, it looked sturdy enough. I walked into her bedroom to tell her that I was leaving to take Blique home. Furtively, secretly, I held that umbrella against the side of my body away from her so that she couldn’t see it, letting it parallel down the side of my leg, swinging it with the movement of my body as I walked. With my mother’s body almost utterly useless, with her having become mostly deaf, with her partially paralyzed mouth that made her speech slurred, and with her belly swollen as though she were eight months pregnant, this frail, terminally ill woman still held such immense power over me that I preferred sneaking and hiding -- actually manipulating her field of vision -- to letting her see that I was engaged in an act that represented a deviance from the order she had fought so valiantly (more or less successfully) to create. Or, had it nothing to do with the hierarchy of power in our relationship? Was it simply my way of loving her to not disturb the small sense of order that she was able to feebly hold onto in those last days of her utter powerlessness? Sometimes I can’t distinguish between the two: fear or love. The days of my mother’s dying time Those days – the days of my mother’s dying time – are my most intense as well as my freshest memories of my mother. My sense of my parent’s bedroom is that it was perpetually darkened. After my parents had built their dream-house when I was nine, they tinted their bedroom’s sliding glass doors to ward off the intense southern afternoon sun. The room acquired a softened, hushed hue. But, during the time of my mother’s illness, that softness seemed to turn dark and morbid. During those dying days, I craved sunlight, as though it represented life itself – the antidote to her dying, the anti-death. I would flee from that darkness into my own sun- filled bedroom. That last year of my mother’s life, as she lay in her bed unmoving, I would walk into her room. I would sit on her bed and she would tell me her dreams. In one recurring dream, she dreamt that she was walking to the front of the house. We would hold onto that dream as our hope for her future, imagining the day would come when she would --not miraculously, but normally and naturally -- get out of her bed and walk. Although my mother remained imprisoned in her dying body, her psyche/her spirit was still free to roam and her dream reminded us that this was so. In her dream life, she could do the impossible. And then, after day-dreaming together about the vision of health that her dream had given us, I would get up and walk out of her room – and through all of my motions, my comings and goings in and out of her bedroom, I was intensely aware that I was moving; I was able to move, and she was not. During this time, I witnessed my mother’s small acts of separating from me, preparing me for her eventual death. She withdrew into herself, no longer as interested in my life, no longer asking me questions about every trivial aspect of my life. She accepted our times together (gratefully), but never insisted (hungrily), as she had been used to doing, on more. The smallest fraction of time into which time can be divided I was in the room with my mother the moment she died. I was watching her labored breathing, and then, the next instant, it stopped. I thought for a moment that I might be wrong, that my mother was still breathing. I suppose I had not quite given up hope for eking out one more moment of life with my mother. That’s all death takes: an instant, the smallest fraction of time into which time can be divided. One moment my mother was breathing, and then there was no more. Everything that had defined my mother as the human being that she had been, as my mother, as a mother to two other children, as a wife, as a woman of courage and compassion, humor and cunning as well as cruelty and vindictiveness – all of it, all of her life left her in that single instant. Being with her for that moment, that breathless moment in which she inhaled and then exhaled her last, not too regretful, breath was then and remains still the most profound moment of my life. As life left her, there was a sense in which I gave chase to her vaporous spirit as it was floating away from her body. Part of me kept right on going with her air-borne/space-borne, perhaps even heaven- borne, journey, and I think I lost a little bit of myself in the travel that day of death. But another part of me grabbed onto her spirit before it had gone too far, and I pulled this “her” tightly into myself. At that moment, I stopped our life long battle about who was who, who she was and who I was. From that moment on, all conflicts about our separateness vanished, and my mother remains alive inside me, surely as much a part of me now in her death as I insisted, at times, that she was not a part of me during her life. Chapter 2: Symbiosis, Separation and the Pas de Deux of Anxiety Now, more than a decade after my mother’s death, life, brimming life is defining my time as much as death did in those earlier years. I am standing at the gate of the airport waiting for my daughter with Gregg, the man with whom I live, the man who will be Molly’s father. Despite my having been assured that my one-week old daughter is on this plane I await, it all seems unreal. I don’t quite believe that I will be, momentarily, holding her in my arms. It has taken me all these long years since my mother’s death to become a mother. Perhaps I had to wait until she died. Perhaps the closeness we had was sufficient for me all those years that she was alive. Perhaps it would have felt like an act of betrayal to our relationship for me to bring someone else into my life, someone who would compete so completely with her in significance. (The boy/man thing was never a real threat, because when the relationships would end – and they all always did – I would run back to her for comfort.) By the time my mother had become terminally ill, we had reversed roles; I was giving her the same devotion and care that she had given to me all those prior years. It was I who made the sacrifices for her, as she had previously made for me. I took all my vacation time to spend with her; I called her frequently, often daily, asking how she was, rather than waiting for her to call me. I made sure I accompanied her to all her doctor’s appointments – even when they were on the other side of the country – even when they were in other countries. Perhaps while she was alive those last years, she was all the child I needed. The closeness we had didn’t want to be disturbed by the intrusion of another. How close we came to not succeeding This hypothetical daughter -- that I now await -- and I have had a shaky start. It took a search for us to find each other, and I shudder when I think of how close we came to not succeeding. I began my decision to have a baby by trying to get pregnant with Gregg. We tried au natural, and then we tried artificial insemination. When those failed (after our sex life had gone to pot from the prescribed schedules, the waiting for “blue” in the ovulation kit, the head-stands after sex), I put ads in newspapers all over the country. I was never sure of exactly what to write in the ads. What words, which sympathies should I use to appeal to a woman wanting to give up her baby? Then I looked into getting Cambodian, Russian, Chinese and Rumanian babies. Finally, I signed up with an adoption agency. The agency was in Louisiana, my home state, and the women who worked there were southern-sweet. They didn’t criticize me: they didn’t tell me that I had waited entirely too long to begin this process of becoming a mother -- that when my daughter would be a vigorous 20, I would be a dotty 67. They just told me they would get me a baby – even a girl if I wanted. They told me the wait would be longer for the girl-wanted list – girl babies are more desired than boys apparently – but, for me, there was never a question: it had to be a girl. It had to be a girl because my femaleness was my sense of identification with the human race. All I knew about boys was that they grow up to be men and then break my heart. It took the agency a year to call. Over the course of my search, I had lowered my expectations from wanting a musical, athletic, med school student as the biological mother of my child to being able to tolerate a Twinkies-eating, soap-opera addict. But then they told me that this mother smoked. This I could not bring myself to tolerate. I could not accept the child of a smoker. I knew too well the health risks of infants born to smokers. The agency asked me to reconsider. They told me the mother was decent and kind and pretty, and that she liked my profile. They told me that they were going to send me a picture of her. The picture arrived, and it was a revelation. One glance and I knew that this was the baby I had been waiting for. My search for my baby was over. I knew that this baby was my baby, and I would slay dragons, fight lions and go to the far ends of the earth to get this baby. Staring out at me in this picture was an all-too familiar face. She had the same thin, very adult-like nose, the same dark hair, coiffed to perfection, the same refined chin that met the world at a challenging angle. She looked like a contemporary version of the woman who I had never known at the same age as the woman in the picture -- about 18 -- but whose pictures I had seen at that age. This woman, whose picture I was staring at, was the symbolic reincarnation of the more mature version of my mother, and it was this young woman’s baby girl who was to become my mother’s namesake, Molly Malvina Goldberg. A misbegotten fantasy? My daughter was to be delivered to me by the foster mother, the woman who had cared for Molly during her first week in which the adoption was finalized. They were all set to board the plane, and then the foster mother’s husband suffered angina. They spent the day in a hospital instead of on a plane to New York. They were scheduled to come up the next day. Then the foster mother’s niece was notified that she had been awarded her wish, a piano, from the Make A Wish Foundation, and the piano was being delivered that day. One more day my daughter was not in her new home with her new mother. Now, at last, the plane carrying Molly and her foster mother has landed and I am ready to claim my Molly as my own. The passengers have disembarked, all of them. The flight attendants have disembarked; the pilot has disembarked. I ask the pilot if there is another passenger still on the plane. He thinks not. I get more specific: “A passenger perhaps with a baby?” “A baby?” he asks incredulously, as though he has never heard the word or the concept. I am poised to be crestfallen, an inch away from the certain knowledge that I was never meant to be a mother, that this is all some misbegotten fantasy of mine that has brought me to the airport, and at just that approximation of despair, one lone passenger begins her slow exit from the plane to the gate. She is holding a baby. She comes to me, wordlessly, and stretches her arms out to me to give me the infant she is holding. Yet, my arms remain paralyzed at my side. I can generate no movement anywhere in my body. And then I force myself to do the right thing, to do the thing that everyone there -- I have the concentrated attention now of the flight attendants, the pilot, even the clean-up men -- is expecting me to do. I raise my arms to take the child. If you were to ask me at that moment what I was feeling, I would have answered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” I am an empty vessel – no mind, no thoughts, no feelings. And that is why it is so strange that my tears have started flowing uncontrollably down my face, forming a moist mist that falls on the small body of this, my new baby. The baby-soul time This state of nothingness that I have fallen into upon receiving my infant daughter for the first time -- tears streaming down my face with no connection to conscious feeling -- this state is only the purview of adults. From observing baby Molly, and from getting to know her in the first few weeks of our togetherness, I see that she is incapable of this kind of disconnect. Molly Malvina Goldberg gasps in through every lively breath as much life as my mother let go of in her death. They say that the soul has entered the body by the time of birth. I think that this must be correct. From being with Molly, I come to understand that a healthy newborn is born into a state of complete integration with soul, mind and body. I think of this state of harmony as being the baby-soul time. For baby Molly, as for all infants, the world is all now and now is eternity because it is all there is. The world of feelings Psychoanalytic researcher Daniel Stern calls this time -- what I call the baby-soul time -- the World of Feelings. He explains that there is no sense of before or after because there is no notion of temporal order, no understanding of causality. There is no sense of an Other because Baby can’t yet differentiate between itself and Mother. There is only actual, raw experience, and it is, as Stern describes, “the baby’s inner tone of an experience that anchors his impressions.” Molly is a living example of Stern’s theory. Only the present counts for Molly because it fills the entirety of her consciousness of, minute to minute. A minute ago was the past and no longer relevant to the minute now. Baby Molly’s feelings fly out of her, released into the air to rise away from her, soaring freely like a butterfly in flight. Baby Molly, living from her soul, is like a living Buddha, truly living only now -- no thoughts of before or since. I watch in awe as Molly’s expressions of her baby-being demonstrate her perfect integration and her connection to her soul. For instance, Molly cries like there is no tomorrow. Her crying is a primary expression of her being and in expressing her soul, she becomes connected to her soul. Molly’s cries are so different from that of an adult’s that are ejected out merely from the throat. Molly’s cries fill her whole self, her body serving as a container for her cries that find their route all the way to the outer perimeter of her body/self being. Only her skin, serving as a barrier between who she is and that which surrounds her, prevents her expression from exploding outward, bound air-ward. This is how infants live and this is how we should all aspire to live – from our center outward to the farthest boundaries of our bodies, filling our selves with ourselves. Molly, like most infants who are born healthy and are well cared for, lives entirely from her soul in these first few exquisite months of her life. This baby-soul time, this oneness with herself, reflects a perfect integration between what she feels and her expressions of her feelings. Although without words, and in spite of the limited number of ways she can express herself, Molly is able to use both her voice and her body in an entirely integrated way. Molly is a singer as well as a crier. Molly has what I call her sleep song -- a little baby hum that actually goes up and down the scale a few notes. She puts herself to sleep every night with her sleep song, and then she wakes up the next morning with a hardy, full-bodied laugh, as though no time has intervened in her joyful connection between the two. Molly, as well as being a crier, a singer and a laugher, is a screamer. It is most of all in her screams that Molly remains connected to her essential self, her “actual me” as Walt Whitman has called it. Her screams are not from pain, or frustration or anger. They are from the sheer joy of having a voice that wants to be used – a voice that doesn’t yet form words. It is through all these myriad uses of her voice – her crying, singing, laughing and screaming -- that Molly is able to express her soul-being. The immediate social world I think Molly’s soul-living is where she and I meet in these early months as her awareness of me as separate from her deepens. Daniel Stern refers to this next period as the Immediate Social World, beginning at two months and lasting in its full emergence until six months. This is the time when Baby begins to become aware of the interaction between himself and Mother. Baby becomes aware of the rich choreography between himself and Mother, and this growth spurt is so rapid that it seems as though it has happened overnight: suddenly Baby is social. And this early social interaction is what lays the foundation for the ability to interact and read others’ behavior, lasting the whole of the individual’s life. I know that my interaction with Molly is on the level of our souls from our eye contact. It is the same eye contact that I experience in my work with my dying cancer patients. There are no defenses, no holding back; there is just pure meeting, seeing each other and looking into the deepest selves of each other. With my patients, the closer the person comes to death while remaining conscious, the more profound the contact becomes. And, similarly, Molly’s closeness to her birth gives her an innocent, trusting openness. I have heard about this soul-connection with eye contact, too, from other mothers, both biological and adoptive. It’s why adoption agencies advise their birth mothers to not see their child. They know that when the child gazes up into his mother’s eyes, the mother will recognize their bond, and it will be more difficult for her to let go of her child. During the time of my search for Molly, I met a woman who had traveled to Romania to find her child. She had seen him on a 60 Minutes television segment about the plight of orphaned children in Rumania. She felt this one child calling out to her. It took her nine months of living in a foreign country, traveling all over the country from orphanage to orphanage, learning the language, to find this child who she had seen for only an instant on her television set. I asked her what about him had inspired her to undertake such a monumental task. She said, without a moment’s hesitation, “It was his eyes.” Infants’ souls are intimately tied to the souls of their mothers. This is, I believe, the real meaning of symbiosis. This, then, is at the root of the unshakeability of the bond between mother and child. I give my daughter the closeness she needs because her whole future depends on it. I give it to her because in agreeing to be her mother, I have assumed the responsibility of tending to her needs. But I give it to her, also, because I need it. I need this closeness with her as intensely as she needs it with me. She is my completion. It is only through this initial symbiosis between mother and infant, through their shared togetherness, that the infant can come to develop a separate self. British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott describes the process of the mother gazing at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazing back at the mother’s face and “finding himself therein”. The mother mirrors for the baby who he is, and thus, aids the baby in the long procession of psychological events that occur, culminating in the formation of a stable self-identity. I know, then, that my job as mother to baby Molly is to mirror for her a self that is connected to soul-living. I need to be for her a model for soul-living, to give her an emotional experience of my mothering that will help her to stay close to her soul and to find herself in the reflection of my soul. I need to give her an emotional experience that will enable her to be able to access her soul once the inevitable process of separation from me begins. I know that in Molly’s baby- soul time I need to sing, to laugh and to scream with her, as she does with me. During our baby- soul time together, Molly never hears my voice without a sing-song in it. I laugh with her when I am feeding her, when I am bathing her and when we play our little games together. But it is our screaming together that is our greatest pleasure. It is in Molly’s screams that she manifests her own self most emphatically, but it is, as well, in the screams we do together that we have the richest choreography of our twosome. The Eskimos have a variety of names for snow because snow is so important in their daily lives. Similarly, I’m interested in all the different kinds of screams there are that are expressions of feeling – yet all have the same name. There is the first birth wail of discomfort. Immanuel Kant observed that this first cry of the newborn has the tone not of lamentation, but of wrath. Later, there is the screech of playful pleasure – the scream that baby Molly and I are currently engaged in. There is, too, a scream of fear as well as a scream of orgasmic ecstasy (and perhaps these are not as far apart as one might initially think). I have a patient who is a graphic artist, and her calling card is a photograph of her head, her mouth mobilized into a scream. When you look at the picture closely, you indeed see the mouth stretched wide, but you see, as well, unadulterated joy around her eyes, the joy of release. And, finally, there is the scream of the horrified – a scream that is almost more intense than we can tolerate. This is the scream in Edward Munch’s painting “The Scream.” I know that most people find the vision of that woman, whose mouth seems clamped open into perpetuity, horrifying. I find it exhilarating: the throat release of that long, unending scream, the expression of feeling that would be too much to bear without that scream. Or, the uplifting scream of blues and gospel singers who squeal it out from their souls. I aspire to such a feelingfully-felt throat release; I aspire to Molly’s scream. Our screams have no reason to be other than our mutual engagement with each other. There is no topic of discussion, no subject matter, no past to explain, no intention for the future: there is just pure togetherness. In this togetherness, we scream in high screeches and in low schooches; we scream together in unison and then our voices follow each other’s in a sequence; we scream imitatively and responsively, one as chorus to the other's melody. We, together, try every kind of scream known to mankind. We find ecstasy together in our screams. Needing to separate in spite of the terror I know that my ability to joyfully fuse with my own child arose from the completeness of my symbiosis with my mother. I think I must have cooed lovingly into my mother’s face when I slid out from her womb and she became immediately enchanted with me. In spite of her deep sense of being unloved by her mother, my mother’s own loving ability, and then later her psychoanalysis, gave her the tools to share a time of symbiosis with me that must have been heavenly for us both. It is the foundation of this early love from my mother that has given me a solidarity of self that has infused my whole life. I know that every strength I have -- my energy, enthusiasm and essential contentment in life -- each has its origins in the contentment that I felt with my mother in my early years. My relationship with my mother has not been segmented off from the rest of my life. It has influenced just about every aspect of who I am (strong and weak, good and bad): my choice of profession, my relationships (and anxieties) with men, my passion for athletics, my love of music and reading, the particular brand of my spirituality and, of course, the ways in which I mother my own child. My strongest memory of my childhood is of the affectionate hugging between my mother and me. This went all through my childhood, big bear hugs, ending with her asking me, “Will you ever grow too old for ‘lovin’?” (as she called it). So sure was I in my absolute and eternal devotion to her that I, without hesitation, without reservation declared that I would never, ever grow too old for lovin’ and that she was the best, most beautiful mom in all the world. In the beginning, when I was young, her question to me and my answer to her were just fun ways of our confirming our closeness. In spite of the blissful symbiosis that my mother and I shared, that all mothers and children share, in spite of the terrors of separation, closeness is never enough. The call toward separation, toward discovering one’s own individuality away from mother and the desire to be different from her is just as compelling a pull as the need for closeness and sameness. They’re both biological edicts, built into our very cell structure. There were times when I fought my mother fiercely for my separateness – fought sometimes against her and her wishes that, at times, were markedly different from my own. As separation became my overriding desire, as I began pushing my mother away as all children must do in order to individuate, she never stopped asking me the question about my getting too old for lovin’. I never told her the truth about that. Even as I was already too old to unambivalently enjoy our endless hugs and kisses, even when I began to enjoy hugs and kisses from boyfriends, replacements for hers, I kept reassuring her, kept going through the motions of affection. I think, though, she sensed the difference. I think her sensing that I was moving beyond her is why she couldn’t let go of the question. As my world broadened, our dreaded separations loomed ever larger in her mind. Later, her question became more of a fear. Ultimately, I think, it became a terror. I came to know that about her – her fears of my leaving her. Not because she ever told me, not because she tried to hold tight to me. She sent me to sleep-away camp for two months when I was eight years old. There was never any question that I would go away to college. Once I left home, she never insisted that I come back for vacations. Often, I preferred going with my college roommate to her home in Chicago, or sunbathing with friends in Ft. Lauderdale. Her fear of the looming distance between us wasn’t about the physical separations, which she didn’ t mind at all. (She even claimed to enjoy her summers without her children when we were at camp, though I never believed her. Even now, I still think she was lying. Perhaps it would have been, would be now, too painful for me to imagine that my mother enjoyed her existence without me.) Her fear was deeper than the mere physical distance between us. It had more to do with a fear of losing me, not being able to find me -- ever -- not merely missing me. It was more like a fear of utter abandonment. And, too, I came to know my own terror of her leaving me. I came to know this terror even as I was pushing her away, declaring my independence from her. I’m not entirely sure how I inherited this terror of aloneness that my mother suffered from. Perhaps it was passed on to me through our shared genes, or through our common lineage, through the process of identification in all its manifestations, through gazing into her face and “finding (my)self therein” and feeling that who she was, in her incompleteness, was complete enough for me. Complete enough for me to love and to, apparently, imitate. Or perhaps it is the shared lineage of all children. Perhaps it is simply as psychoanalysts say: a stage that we all proceed through toward emotional maturity. Psychoanalysts call this stage separation anxiety, but, of course, as my mother and I both came to know, as I think many of us come to know, it’s really more of a terror than a mere anxiety. From the child’s point of view, life can be proceeding along harmoniously, and then suddenly and incomprehensibly this period of smooth sailing ends. It can be when the child realizes that mother is out of the room. Mother, protector and provider, is nowhere to be found. Or it can be when Mother is distracted and can’t respond instantly to the child. Mother protector and provider may lash out irritably at baby, and she will have become transformed into some unrecognizable witch who bears no resemblance to the loving mother of the moment before. In that instant, the world changes and danger and discomfort are everywhere. Mother may make demands that are unreasonable (she may ask Baby to stop crying); she may make threats that are terrifying (she may say she will put Baby back in crib if Baby doesn’t stop crying). And these transformations happen for no discernible reason. There is no reasonable cause from the child’s point of view; these events just happen. It feels like a life or death danger for the child. The child does not have the prescience to know that Mother protector, Mother provider has only stepped away for a moment, is only irritable for a moment and her nightmare of aloneness will end as abruptly as it began. Such is the emotional experience of separation for the small child. The pas de deux of anxiety As my mother did with me, I revel in the symbiotic togetherness that I share with Molly in our first few months together. This love is like a duet. It needs both of us to exist, and I exhilarate in our togetherness, that out of all the babies in the world and all the mothers in the world, we two have found each other. And yet, in the midst of all this togetherness, this love pas de deux that Molly and I perform, there is a deep anxiety. My fear comes to me only in the dark of the night. It is only in my dreams that my anxiety is allowed to seep out, to sneak out. My dreams tell me the origin of my fear: it is separation. My dreams reflect my terror of my daughter’s leaving me. I am a busy mother at night with my dreams while everyone else in my household -- Gregg, Molly, the nanny, Oscar -- is sleeping peacefully. For the first six months of Molly's life, I have dreams almost every night of her near-death. She is lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, and her body is lifeless. I pull her up, and I breathe into her mouth, but she remains immobile. I know that she is dying. This thought is intolerable -- not just painful -- intolerable. It cannot be and it will not be. I scream at her; it is the intensity, the depth of my not accepting that she is leaving me and the concomitant scream that brings her back. "Molly, come back. Come back" I cry out at the loudest decibel that a human being has ever screamed. And she hears, and comes back. Or she is falling down the banister, and at the very very last moment, after it seems that all is lost, I am able to perform a miraculous twist of my body, like a trapeze artist, and catch her. Every night a different miracle, a different death-defying feat occurs. I wake up to check on her breathing to make sure that night is night and day is day. When morning thankfully comes, I am able to be clear-headed enough to understand that my dreams of Molly’s death are symbolic communications from my unconscious. I know that my dreams reflect my anxiety about separation: after all, what is death, but separation – the most final of all separations? In my dreams, our separation always comes about through some unfortunate circumstance, some event beyond our control. During this time of our symbiosis, the thought that Molly would actually want to separate from me is too awful, too disconcerting for me to even make its way into my unconscious. I know that this anxiety is deep and old. I know that it has to do with my issues about closeness and separation. I know that it started with my relationship with my own mother. An affliction of muteness I come to understand why I am screaming in terror at night in my dreams. It is because by day, in my waking life, I suffer from a terrible affliction. I must give release to my voice at night because by day, I am mute when it comes to giving voice, in words, to my feelings for my child. I am an exemplary mother in a thousand ways; I behave with this child of mine as though she is the light of my life. I can coo and goo with Molly; I can hold her affectionately and lovingly. And yet, with all this love, with our joyful togetherness, I still suffer this terrible paralysis of expression. This muteness is an old story for me. It’s one of the reasons why I entered analysis. Until my analysis, it was hard for me to find justification to talk. One of my family’s favorite stories is of the time I went to meet our new next-door neighbors. I was about five then, and my brother walked over to their house with me to welcome them. We stood at the screen door, and the lady of the house came out. She said sweetly, “And what’s your name?” I stood there mutely, not answering, not offering even a glimmer of recognition that she had spoken to me. Then she said (again, apparently sweetly, but perhaps, too, a little condescendingly), “Oh, you must be bashful.” And then, at that challenge, I found the urgency to talk. I said defiantly, offended at this misidentification of my identity, “No, I am not Bashful, I am Jane.” And I remember sitting in the student lounge in graduate school, watching people around me, and they would all be talking a blue streak – the important talk of young intellectuals. It all seemed so idiotic to me, all that talk. It seemed to me that my time would be better spent reading, or seeing a movie, or playing the piano (all solitary activities, I notice now). And so, I would depart – go home and sit at my beloved piano. Even as a beginning analyst, I was afflicted. I never noticed it about myself until one of my patients complained to me. Judy would ring the doorbell, and I would say into the intercom "Who is it?" and then she would answer, and it was always a friendly answer, not just announcing her name, but with a “Hi” first or “Hi Jane, how are you”. Then I would buzz her in. I never said, "Oh, hi, Judy" or, "Come on up." I never said anything. Just the harsh, electronic BUZZZZZ. Perhaps I was even drawn to being an analyst because it is a “listening” profession. You actually have theoretical justification to not talk. (Although I learned early enough in my career that not talking is the best way to lose patients.) But of course, that superior sardonic stance (even, I guess, my defiance in not being Bashful) was all an elaborate defense, a ruse to make myself feel OK about my inadequacy. I just really didn’t have that much to say. Either I didn’t have many thoughts (or the associated words), or I didn’t think my thoughts were worth seeing the light of day, or I didn’t think anyone (except my mother) would be interested in my thoughts. Most importantly, I wouldn’t -- couldn’t -- talk in the most important way there is to talk. I couldn’t talk about my feelings. Except with my mother, I just was never very good at expressing my feelings in words. I hid the ones that were embarrassing (the hurts and angers), and the love ones seemed too obvious to have to say. Making feelings heard We humans invented language -- from our grunts and screams (as well as from our coos of pleasure and our whimpers of pain) -- because we decided that there was no thought or feeling that was too obvious to not say. We attach sounds to our inner processes precisely so that we might render our internal experience accessible to others. This is what I must do with my daughter: I must make this feeling that I have toward her and that I want to say to her, accessible – heard, as well as seen and felt. The feeling has a name, a word that defines its meaning. I know the word; I want to say the word; I want to own the word as mine, as the feeling that I am embracing toward this child of mine. Yet, I am unable; I am unable to tell my beloved daughter that I love her. I open my mouth to say the simple, time-honored words, “I love you.” And there it is: the old/ now new story: my lifelong throat constriction: the way in which I am the repression from which Munch’s screamer is released. The words do not come out. I can almost get out the words. I accomplish a facsimile. I get so far as to say, "Mommy loves goosey," or "I love goosey," or "Mommy loves Molly." But I have not yet been able to say, absolutely straightforwardly, no- holds-barred, "I love you." I want to utter these words – desperately, I want to. I try to will myself to say the words; I promise myself I’m going to. I rehearse it when I am not with Molly. And then when the opportunity presents itself, when we are lovingly together, the words stay inside, stuck deep in my throat. My lips won’t part to let the words escape. It’s as though there is a song that wants to come out from my unconscious and I can remember the lyrics and the words but I’ve lost my ability to sing. No matter my effort, I cannot eject those words, the verbal representation of my feelings, from my body and from my soul out into the air for those words to travel to Molly’s ears. I am not alone with my affliction I have sojourned in this throat constriction all my life, through boyfriends as well as girlfriends, with Gregg, and now with Molly. Having this affliction of a strangulated throat -- this constriction that prevents the free-flowing of words -- means that I can recognize it anywhere. Like Jews finding their fellow Jews anywhere in the world; shy people recognizing their fellow loners at a singles dance; or sadists/masochists finding each other across a crowded room. I suspect that one of my patients, Melanie, suffers from the same affliction as I. I can tell from the way she describes her relationship with her mother that they don’t talk about feelings; they don’t verbalize feelings. I ask. She breaks down into a bawl, saying that she was too embarrassed to mention it to me. Her inability to tell her mother she loves her has been plaguing her because she is pregnant with her first child, and her mother is aged, soon to die. She wants to accomplish this task for the sake of the young (about to be born) and the old (about to die). We discuss her paralysis endlessly. She wants, more than anything, to be able to finish her relationship with her mother, their lives together, and to be able to begin her relationship with her daughter, with these words of love having been said. I ask her what the impediment is; I ask, even already knowing what her answer will be, because she is no different than I in this. “There is no impediment,” she says. “There is nothing to say about it. The words just don’t/can’t come out. It is an unfixable problem.” I want to cure this woman of her affliction as badly as I want to cure myself. I think that if I can cure her of it, then I too will reap the benefit. We discuss all the permutations of her relationship with her mother. Here, we part company. Her mother was demonstrably angry a lot (mine wasn’t). The frequent outbursts of rage frightened Melanie. She attributes many aspects of her life to her mother’s rage. Melanie married an angry man and she is fearful, too, of him. She retreats into fear whenever her boss criticizes her performance. But, she still insists that her aged mother’s rage is a thing of the past; her mother’s half-blind and deaf now, capable of no damage, and Melanie has forgiven her. Yet, with these insistences of letting bygones be bygones, Melanie still cannot bring herself to utter the unspeakable words of love. I am so identified with Melanie that I wonder even if I can help her. I start to feel impatient with my own affliction, and my impatience with myself begins to show in my relationship with her. I point out to her that she has to do this. I am hoping that my internal attitude toward her is not showing because I really want to say it to her as an accusation, like, “How can you be so uncouth, so unloving? Get it together already before the poor woman expires.” But even if a glimmer of my impatience with her seeps through in my instruction to her to just “do it”, I am careful to not let on my secret - that I am the pot calling the kettle black. I only feel a little badly that I am telling her to do what I cannot (sports coaches do it all the time). Melanie rebels against me (as she should; orders for behavioral change rarely work in therapy – or even in mothering for that matter). Now, every time her mother comes up for discussion in the sessions, Melanie falls asleep. We decide to put her mother to sleep for the time being in her analysis in order to keep the patient awake. This patient is going to be of no help to me. Like her, there is no cure for me in this. Perhaps with Molly I am afraid that, as my mother did with me, if I let myself grab onto this child, my new child, I won’t be able to let go. I think it is the anticipation of the dreaded separation that is so daunting to me. Perhaps it is the words of love that are the last needed bastion of separation between me and my daughter, my last defense against falling hopelessly in symbiotic love with her (as my mother did with me). Still gazing at my mother and finding myself therein This muteness of loving words is not a new affliction in my family. It can, of course, be traced back to my mother. In this way, too, I am unable to separate from my mother. Even as old as I am (47), as cognitively (a Ph.D.) and emotionally (20 plus years of analysis) developed as I am, I am still gazing at my mother and “finding (my)self therein.” Even with all the progressions I have made -- personally, professionally, emotionally, spiritually -- in this one way, this way of muteness of the word “love,” I am still imitating my mother, still being limited in the same ways that the ways of our togetherness were limited. Though I know my mother loved me madly, wildly, perhaps even as she loved no one else, the fact is: she never told me. Those words were simply not in her vocabulary, as they were not, I am sure, in her own mother's, and her mother's mother, and so on back to G-d knows when. Those Madeleine Malvinas for all those generations back were handicapped, I suppose, by that first, long-ago Madeleine Malvina who never learned to say "I love you." and so, neither can I. I suspect neither can my sister. She was my big sister who I followed around as I was growing up. She comforted me when I was homesick my first year at camp. We do love each other, but you’d be hard-pressed to know it from watching us. There has never been, in a whole lifetime of togetherness, a word exchange of love between us. Just the feelings. No words. She can’t initiate it, and neither can I. I think she suffers from the same Madeleine Malvina complex that I suffer from. Two pronouns and one verb in the sentence “I love you” And so, with Molly, here I am in the same paralyzed-throat place I have been in all these years. Molly doesn’t know that I’m not saying “I love you” and she’s hearing that I love her in everything else I say and do (as I knew with my mother) -- the caresses, the gleeful meeting of her gaze. And she knows it in the tone of my voice, the pre-words of the oohs and ahs -- the language of infancy. But Molly has changed the structure of the world for me. “Implicit” is no longer good enough. I know that I have to get myself to be able to proclaim my sentiment in word as well as in feeling and deed. I know that I need to teach Molly the adult language of love that comes in words as well as the baby language of love that comes in the display of feelings and in tone of voice. I know that if I am going to raise this baby to be a healthy, loving, productive stalwart member of society, I need to be able to tell her I love her. I need to be able to do this because the words (as well as the feelings) count and they will give Molly a sense of security about her relationship with me which will then, later in her life, carry over to her feelings about her place in the world. I need to be able to tell Molly that I love her because there are two pronouns and one verb in the sentence “I love you”. The “I” and the “you” will tell Molly that she is not me, that we are separate, and the “love” will tell her that our separation is safe. Without this assurance of safe separation, sinking into symbiosis may be a well that has no bottom, a well that she and I won’t be able to climb our way out of. I need to tell Molly that I love her with ease and feeling because it is through me that she will model herself. I need to be able to do this because the most compelling lesson I have learned from being a psychoanalyst is that the feelingful use of language represents we humans at our most profoundly high level of achievement. Without language there is no mature self, there is no integration of thought with feeling. Language is what enables the self to have a solid foundation; language is what allows us to digest feelings throughout the psyche; language integrates body, mind and soul. Language can bring us together, but it is also what separates us into our divisions of separate selves. And, I need to be able to tell her because I need to be able to separate myself from my own mother. I need to divest my long-dead mother of the overarching power she still holds on me. I need to see her as a woman – a mere woman, limited by her circumstances, her upbringing, her character. I need to see her as something other than the mother of my infancy, the mother who gave to me and took from me – the source of all things, the mother who defined for me the way things were, the ways things were meant to be. I need to be able to separate myself from my mother in order to be unseparate from my child. My mother grew up believing that her mother hated her and wanted her dead. My mother raised me to understand that her analysis had helped her to be able to give conscious recognition to her hatred for her mother. I grew up believing that I was the light of my mother's life. Yet, even with her love, even with her embracing our symbiosis, even with my twenty years of analysis in which I, like my mother, have given articulation to a great many words and feelings, still, with all that, I remain impaired in this one crucial way. My analyst has encouraged me to say every thought and every feeling that passes through me. Yet, this one, this most important of all ones, eludes me. If I can get myself to say these words to Molly, then I will raise a child who not only knows that she is the light of her mother's life, but who can say, "I love you" to a man should she choose to be with one later in life, or to her sister should she have one, and, best of all, to her mother. I need to be able to do this for Molly. And I need to do it for myself so that my throat can get unconstricted and I can be free. I need to be able to do this for Molly and the future of the world. I need to be able to tell my child that I love her because the stakes of this conflict are no less than the life and death of her soul, her wholeness. And mine, as well. Moving me off my perch of immobility It is Molly herself who, finally, is able to cure me of this affliction of mine. This is a different understanding than the idea that it is my having Molly that will make the difference. If Molly cures me, then Molly is doing the work; if having Molly cures me, then I do the work. It is Molly who gets me to change; it is her modeling for me how to love, and the inspiration from her assumption of her right to be loved that changes me. This is, too, what I see happening with my sister and her children. My sister’s health has become an issue, and her children are even more affectionate with her than before. I see that my sister's children, at the ages of 22 and 24, are doing for her what Molly is doing for me. They are still teaching her how to love them. It's not sad (that she still needs to be taught); it's lovely and moving (that they still want to teach her). The assumption of the right to be loved I know that my affliction of muteness has to do, as well, with my struggle to feel that I belong to someone. Since my mother’s death, I have never really felt that anyone was solely mine, nor that I was solely anybody’s. Even when I got married, my sense of my not belonging to the man I married and his not belonging to me was so powerful that I couldn't even refer to him as my husband. I heard him refer a few times to me as his wife. It was the kind of thing where you look over your shoulder to see who the person is talking about because you know it's not you. I never felt married to him, so he was never my anything, and I was never his anything. Except for my mother, no one has felt entirely secure or solid in my life. If we human beings move in orbits, I have felt my orbit to be a solitary journey, and only on occasions, only for moments (even if those moments have factually stretched out to be years, they still have felt like only moments, times that would inevitably pass) do I intersect with someone else’s orbit. No one has given me the feeling that my mother gave me: that my existence is essential to them; that our orbits intersect because life would be intolerably -- truly unbearably -- dreary otherwise. I feel liked and even loved at times, respected, honored, looked up to, but not needed. Since my mother died, I have missed feeling needed. I think that in order for me to not feel anxious about my daughter and to unconstrict my constricted throat, I need to feel that Molly and I belong together – that she is my daughter, my child, my baby and that I am her mommy, and that there is no one else for us at this time. We two are alone in our orbit of union. I need to have with my child the same feeling that my mother imparted to me, that it is our cosmic destiny to be together. Baby Molly is the best teacher of how to love -- and the assumption of love that comes with a sense of belonging -- I could have. She takes my hand and places it right on her cheek, in just the place, in just the position she desires. Then when she’s had enough of this little exchange of love, she deliberately and knowingly removes my hand. These small acts between us arise from her having the surety of my love; she never doubts that I will want to perform these acts of loving togetherness and loving separation. What is assuaging my anxiety is Molly’s assumption of her right to want my love, to ask for my love. Although I may not have been able to come to a sense of our belonging to each other all on my own, of our counting on each others’ love with the same level of assurance as night following day, she is telling me that it is so and I am believing her. She never imagines that her lot in life is/was/will be anything other than being my one true child. And through this process, through her knowing that she is mine, I come to know that I am hers. It is remarkable that even as a baby, this child – like all children her age, before the acquisition of language – has enough of a self to know what she wants and enough drive to seek what she wants. I know that my job as her mother is to ensure that this sense of entitlement stays with her, that I do not do anything that will take her away from this place of privilege of love. My job as her mother is to follow her innate, healthy instincts about the kind of mother she needs. And so, Molly does, in fact, cure me. Molly’s assumption of her rights as my daughter, her absolute assurance that she and I are meant for each other out of all the children and all the mothers in the world gives me a breakthrough of voice. She has shown me, more forcefully than all the analysis in the world could have, the mythical illusion of the life story I have been living: she proves to me that I belong to someone. And so the words finally do come out. It is day 282 into my being Molly’s mother, and before the day is over, she has heard 97 times from her mother’s own lips that her mother loves her. Once I get how to do it, I can’t stop it feels so good. It helps when the analyst is cured before the patient And then I know what the cure for Melanie is. Her cure is my cure. She needs to hear from me that I love her. She needs, as I did, to have the illusion of her life story dispelled: she needs to come to know that she is not unlovable just because she has never been told that she is loved. Now I am an old pro at this. The words fall off my lips as I tell her I love her. It’s easy to tell her honestly and authentically because it is what I have been feeling for her. She is really quite lovable. She cries from relief at having been told, for the first time in her life, that she is loved. In her next session, she describes the experience she had of observing her mother holding her child for the first time. She said that the phone rang, and she had to run into the other room to get it. Without thinking, she thrust the baby into her mother’s arms. She saw how tentatively her mother held the baby, and at that moment, it seemed inconceivable to her that this woman had given birth, nursed and raised four children. Her mother seemed as vulnerable, as frightened as the newborn. Then the baby began to cry. And Melanie witnessed the transformation in her mother’s face. She explained that it was the face she grew up knowing, the face that she was afraid of: her mother’s fear had turned into anger. And, for the first time, Melanie had an understanding about her mother. She understood that her baby’s crying was inducing in her mother old and painful feelings of inadequacy. And, in that moment, Melanie explains: “I was filled with wholeness.” She understood both her daughter’s feelings of insecurity of being in a strange person’s arms, and simultaneously, her mother’s rage that she was ineffectual in being a good-enough mother. For that instant, Melanie became both her mother and her daughter, and in identifying with both of them, she was able to love them both and felt whole within herself. And from that place of wholeness, Melanie was able to tell her mother, finally, that she loves her. Candles of words of love Baby Molly has lit a candle that I now hold. And then I lit a candle that my patient, Melanie, now holds. And Melanie will light the candle that her own daughter will hold. And so on. Candles of words of love are lit now that weren’t able to be lit before. Baby Molly has resolved the inheritance of mothers of muteness that has gone on for I know not how many generations back from my patient’s ancestors as well as from my own. There will be a fire soon. Chapter 3: The Journey of the Soul between Life and Death Having shared with Molly the first few months of her life, we proceed into entering new territory. I watch vigilantly as Molly throws all of her sensations into expressions of her voice. I am awaiting the first sign that our heavenly period of symbiosis is ending. I await an indicator that she shares the destiny of all other humans, and has begun the descent from being perfectly unified to being internally divided, capable of conflict, ambivalence and yes, even deceit. I try to retain awareness that I, as her mother, need in order to help my child make the transition to the next phase of development in which the emphasis will be on her mind. I want to help her to make this transformation without her losing the memory and connection to her soul. One morning -- Molly is eight months old now -- I wake up to see her just sitting there on my bed. She isn’t laughing as she usually is. She looks pensive. She is staring; she is still and not making contact with either Gregg or me. Gregg is watching her, so I ask him, “What's up?” Molly has gotten into the habit of chewing the windowsill above our bed. She’ll struggle to move herself over to the head of the bed, position her little body exactly in alignment so her mouth is level with the sill, and then CHOMP. We have just begun to teach her the meaning of "no," and the lesson has been around this windowsill. Gregg has just said “no” to her. Molly isn’t moving, isn’t making any sounds. I ask what she's doing. He says, “She's dealing with it." I am witnessing, before my very eyes, the formation of conscience, a super-ego. Or, is it conflict? A burgeoning morality? The first consciously experienced anger? But none of that seems important. The only important question is: Is learning to "deal with it" a psychic process that is going to result in her not waking up to her own laughter any more? I think that, in fact, this learning to “deal with it” is the first visible sign I have of Molly’s separation from her baby- soul. I think this is the first sign of the growth of her own ego and, thus, her inevitable separation from me. As long as baby Molly is still living entirely from her soul, she is a unified being; she is whole and she is free. But when she will start living more from her mind, when she will begin to be capable of thoughtfulness and deliberation, she will become capable, too, of conflict and of things like denial, or twisting the truth, or blaming people, or self-attack. The first and quintessential experience of separation Molly’s emerging sense of individuality -- all babies’ growth into their own sense of self -- began most emphatically at birth. In his understanding of the psychological development of the child, Freud gave the event of birth primary importance. Freud posited birth as the main trauma of life, an event fraught with a danger and destructiveness from which we might never recover. During the time of symbiotic union in pregnancy, that small living creature inside its mother’s dark womb is a unified being. It is not just the union with mother that causes this unification of self; there is, too, an internal unification within its own being. The fetus knows no conflict, no ambivalence. After this relatively peaceful time in the womb, rather suddenly, from the fetus’s point of view, its world begins to turn topsy-turvy. The walls that had nestled it in safely and tightly begin to vibrate; it begins sliding downward, not knowing where it will land, and in one great, dazzling tour de force, it is forcibly ejected from its sweet home. For Freud, the birth trauma, the first and quintessential experience of separation, the experience of being ejected from one’s home without desire and without control, is the major trauma from which we spend the rest of our lives recovering. Trauma and separation are indivisible. Every other later trauma, every other emotional experience we have which feels intolerably overwhelming, is a repeat performance, a mere approximation of this initial prototypic trauma. In each trauma, from birth to death and all that lies between, the main emotional component is the feeling of helplessness. Mother as sorceress Perhaps it is here, at the trauma of birth, that the infant begins its interest in magic. Everyone in distress wants to be saved: we see this mechanism in the dying and the abused; we see it in religious prayer as well as pagan witchcraft. We see it in children when the only wrinkle in their life is that they are merely frustrated or angry, and the salvation to be had is simply the rescue from their own uncomfortable feelings. Most of us want some change in our lives, and we imagine and hope that it may befall us unexpectedly, magically. Lotto and gambling are the contemporary versions of deus ex machina. The infant passing through the birth canal experiences itself as in distress. (We even use the word “distress” to describe a difficult birth.) And, then, it is over. Next, there are those awful few moments when the lights are too bright, and Baby is even hit on the back (Baby may be thinking: “Whoa. Nothing like this ever happened before. Where am I and who are these nasty people?”). But finally, there is salvation. There is a warm spot, a soothing sound, and sweet tasting food. This is heaven. This is Mother. Mother is the first sorcerer for the child. From the first contact on, there is never a doubt in the infant’s mind that Mother can perform magic; she has the ability to alleviate pain and agony and transform it into comfort and satisfaction. The mother’s first job, after birth, is to help her infant tolerate his feelings that are responsive to this trauma of losing his first home. She must keep her infant close to her so that she can aid in de-traumatizing the sense of helplessness and fear that accompanies birth. Symbiosis was automatic in the womb; it was in the very biology of the situation; Baby and Mother shared bloodstreams, nutrients and oxygen. Pregnant mothers don’t need to know anything to accomplish the task of biological symbiosis. It is the body’s own innate brilliance that does it. But now, after birth, the two are separated. Yet, in this state of separation, the infant still has the same need for psychological symbiosis as he had when he was inside the womb. And for this task, the mother must have a variety of qualities that may or may not be automatic: compassion, patience, warmth, intuition – all of what comprises mother love. In creating a psychological world of symbiosis -- a world now not of physiological oneness but of psychic oneness -- for her infant and herself, the mother enables her child to hold onto, for just a little while longer, the unity of self that was experienced in her womb. The mother must establish a strong psychological bond between herself and her infant, after birth, so that the event of the disruption of the biological symbiosis during birth is mastered without long-lasting damage. Freud referred to the experience of symbiosis between mother and child as “oceanic,” meaning vast and deep – and maybe there’s even a little of foreverness about it. I suspect that the bond between mother and infant is the strongest possible bond between human beings. When I have asked women what the difference was between their love for their children and their love for their husbands, a frequent answer was that they would, without forethought and without hesitation, give their lives for their children. They do not offer themselves as sacrificial lambs with the same lack of reservation, nor the same frequency, for their husbands, parents or other loved ones. It is, I believe, the symbiosis that confers on mothers this willingness to sacrifice. Just as biological symbiosis gives way to the separation of birth, psychological symbiosis, too, must be relinquished. The inevitable movement from symbiosis to separation -- even its first stage: birth -- is met with conflict by any loving mother. This “psychic birth” – the “second birth” as psychoanalytic researcher Margaret Mahler has termed it – is just as fraught with danger and difficulty as is the biological birth. The stakes of how these two processes -- symbiosis and separation -- are managed by the mother and experienced by the child is no less than the full emotional health of the child. Further, successful separation is a lifelong pursuit for both. It only begins with birth. It then continues as the growing toddler explores ways of being away from mother. This desire of the baby is not yet conscious, but is more like an imprint, a biological calling, the same as the baby bird’s need to fly. Yet, ultimately, a conscious decision is made, and mother and child separate -- in fact, need to separate -- out of mutual desire and understanding as well as for the physical and emotional health of each. But there is, I think, a deeper reason than the rupturing of the biological symbiosis that makes birth so pivotal in the psycho-physiological development of the infant. It is at birth, in the initial separation from the mother, that the possibility of separating from one’s soul first comes into being. The movement from a unified self to a self capable of division and conflict is natural and inevitable, and this separation of selves commences when the infant begins the descent from blissful symbiosis with the mother. This departure from symbiosis represents, too, the point at which the mind begins its journey into a sense of an independent self. It is for this reason that contemporary Freudian researchers have moved away from Freud’s original premise that posited birth as the major trauma, from which all other traumas derive. Birth is only the event of biological separation. Equally traumatic to the fact of biological separation is the breaking of the narcissistic bond, the sense of symbiotic oneness, the once- in-a-lifetime union that exists between mother and infant as well as between mother and fetus. The event of psychological separation holds equal importance, and, as well, holds the possibility of trauma. Italian psychoanalytic researcher Alexandra Piontelli has demonstrated that even a fetus has a mental life, awareness, and ego functioning. She describes that a baby can be born ready for the event of birth, welcoming it; or, a baby can be born unprepared for the event of birth, seemingly dreading it. Piontelli’s research demonstrates conclusively that the psychic life of the child follows a continuous pattern from inside the womb to after birth. Piontelli has taken sonograms of twin fetuses during various periods of the pregnancies. She has documented that within the womb, already, there are characteristic ways that both unborn babies relate to each other. In their watery first home, the twins develop tell-tale signs of paradigmatic patterns of relating to one another. Piontelli has observed, and documented elaborate womb-rituals of relatedness. Typically, for instance, one unborn baby will dominate over the other; one unborn baby will be more active than the other. Piontelli observed one baby who favored lying regularly on its right side, spooning her twin; another incessantly strove for the position where she could cradle her arm around her brother. One sonogram showed the larger baby curved over the back of the smaller twin, incessantly kicking his brother with his right foot. Then Piontelli filmed the babies’ interactions with each other after birth – at three months, six months, up to 2 years. The precise same patterns of relating were observed at each stage of development; the twin who was dominant in the womb is, similarly, dominant in the playpen; the twin who was the more active of the two in the womb is the more active one in the crib. The girl who was cradling her arm around her brother still acts protectively and affectionately toward him as they scamper around the house. Even the boy who was kicking his smaller brother in the womb, observed later playing in the bathtub – is still curled over the back of his brother, still kicking him with his right foot. It is as though no time at all had passed between womb and crib, womb and playpen, womb and tub, womb and outside world. The womb allows for the creation of a narcissistic space. The unborn child has little awareness beyond his own self and the small environment in which he resides. This is the bliss of the womb. Life is mostly sensation and pure symbiosis with Mother. But after birth, infancy is equally symbiotic for both mother and child. The infant retains the same high degree of narcissistic self-involvement in his needs whether he is inside or outside the womb. Symbiosis between mother and fetus is an inevitable biochemical fact but, between mother and infant, it is a psychological reality as well. The human baby is born after nine months not because he is finished with his symbiotic dependence on mother, but because the size of his head determines the time of birth. Were his head to grow any larger, he would not be able to make the successful journey down his mother’s uterine canal and out into the world. Not by any means is the newborn finished with his symbiosis. The human infant is born utterly prematurely in terms of his emotional and psychological needs. He stays dependent and emotionally attached to his mother longer than any other animal species. For quite some time after birth, he still needs his mother’s unconditional, undivided attention. For quite some time, he holds fiercely onto his symbiosis and his narcissism. The epiphany of separateness The major trauma, then, is perhaps not at birth, as Freud suggested, but, rather is at the point in which children come to consciously experience that they do not own their mothers; and the converse is true, as well: mothers do not own their children. Mothers are capable of having a life separate, away and unconcerned with the child, and the child is, similarly, capable of having a life separate, away and unconcerned with the mother. This epiphany of separateness can take place any time in the life of a child. It can take place, and most often does, repetitively. We do not give up our narcissism without a good fight, and it usually takes many lessons before we come to understand that we are not the only satellite circling around our mother. Birth is only the first of the many possibilities of this awareness. This change in consciousness can happen in big and obvious ways, like the first day of school for a child, or the going off to college, or a marriage. But it can happen, too, in small and subtle ways, undetected except in retrospection, much like physical growth. I had an epiphany of separateness when I was told by my mother that she would no longer be making my car insurance payments. This renunciation of my mother’s assignment of tasks happened when I was well into my twenties and had moved away from home. I was in disbelief at her abnegation of responsibility. This was a mother who I did not know, this mother of separateness. Her decision caused a profound sadness in me, even fear. This was a trivial decision for my mother, one of mere convenience, and whose emotional impact she could not have predicted on me. But I felt wounded and frightened (and maybe a little angry too) because I understood that we were veering from the kind of overreaching mothering that I had been used to. Momentary events that last only an instant; small events whose impact stretch out over a lifetime. These are the events that became milestones in the inexorable path toward separation and reunion that I and my mother took, that all mothers and children are destined to take. And now, in being Molly’s mother, I know that her unfettered happiness, the unadulterated use of her voice -- the absolute unification of her cries and her laughs, of her being itself -- won't, can’t last. Separation from one’s baby-soul is natural and inevitable, and this separation begins when the infant begins the descent from blissful symbiosis with the mother. And so, in those first few exquisite months of symbiotic togetherness between Molly and myself, I remain aware that the day will arrive when Molly's mind will become detached from her soul. I know that Molly will outgrow the time when her baby-soul defines all of who she is. I know that her mind will eventually be able to do things of which her soul is incapable. This development of mind, the ever-expanding cognitive development that will mark the next several years of her life, is inevitable and essential for her further survival. The world of mindscapes Stern calls this psychic space that Molly is now able to inhabit the World of Mindscapes. It is here, generally at the age of one year, that Baby discovers that he has his own private mindscape, a mental landscape that is invisible to others. The core constituents of this mindscape are thoughts and feelings, but included are also intentions, desires, attention, and memories. Baby’s world has shifted from an almost entirely physical, immediate (Now) experience to one that is laden with hidden subjective events spread over past, present and immediate future. And, too, Baby realizes that the (M)Other who has been discovered in the previous Immediate Social World, is herself capable of having a mindscape. Baby and Mother may share a mindscape. Or they may have a different mindscape, what is sometimes called the theory of separate minds. And when there is separation, when the possibility of fitting mental states between people, there is, as well, the possibility of misreadings, and of failure to fit. In the ensuing time, after my first observation of Molly’s mind-expansion, after the window-sill chomp and her entrance into Mindscapes, I see further evidence of a departure from her baby- soul. I see a keen mind that is infinitely curious and imaginative, and I see that sometimes these qualities are infused with aspects of coyness, shyness and embarrassment – each a sign of conflict, of a divided self. I also see signs of deeper (and thus darker) variants of this split – shame and manipulativeness. These are all mental machinations; they create a rich internal life. The fact of a divided self also creates an unconscious that is unique, wholly that person’s own, a hidden world that is sometimes filled with terrors and horrors, the monsters and goblins of childhood that convert later in the adult life to more complex mental constructions of fears and pains. But as long as one lives from the soul, as long as one is still not separate from his or her soul-being, these mind-manipulations are unnecessary; even not possible. Mind and deceit; soul and truthfulness The mind is much more complex than the pure simplicity of the soul; the mind is what gives us the ability to think and feel one way and yet to present ourselves differently. Unlike the soul, the mind is capable of defending itself against truth. In the long journey away from our mothers and toward individuation, we remember the honesty and depth of true feeling that comes from soul-living; but we also learn deceit. The human being can hide himself in ways that no other animal can. An infant -- even a month-old infant -- can already learn to hide his discomfort if his caregiver responds punitively to his cries of distress. Even in infancy, human beings can learn to be depressed, learn to disconnect from knowing what they want and need in order to accommodate themselves to the world. After that first anguished cry of birth, growing up is a long travel of learning to use our voices, our minds and our bodies in more effective ways. But we also learn to use the various expressions in more deceitful ways. The deceit may start in hiding from another what we truly think or feel. But it is a short step from hiding from another to deceiving ourselves, forgetting our true nature. It is this deceit, an internal hiding which represents our journey away from our center, that will cause the separation from our souls, from our internal homes that are our centers, from the innate essence of our being. I have had patients begin their analyses telling me that they adored their fathers and abhorred their mothers. By the end of their analyses, they came to understand that the love for the father was a defense against anger at his emotional distance, and that the hatred of the mother masked an appreciation of her true and unswerving involvement. Similarly, I have had women proclaim to me that they have a perfectly satisfactory marriage, and then later confide that they had fooled themselves into believing that their husband loved them even when they knew, on a deeper level, that he did not. The soul can’t lie and it can’t be deceived. It is true, and it demands truth. It has a sensitivity to purity and honesty that the mind may not have. Perhaps it is that we are born into our souls; then the slings and arrows of early maturation cause us to swerve away, at times, from our souls, and perhaps growing up is really a search back to that soul-state of completion and wholeness. Soul separation; soul retrieval As there are those who attest that the soul is fully entrenched in the body by the time of birth, there are, too, those who say that the soul wholly takes its departure from the body at the time of death. I think, though, that those who say the soul waits to leave the body at death are wrong. Having been with my mother at the moment of her death, I suppose I can say that something – my mother’s soul perhaps – did happily take flight from that decrepit body at that last exhalation. And, too, some piece of my own soul drifted out with hers when she died. Her death marked for me the final, from-which-there-is-no-return end of our symbiosis, end of hope for union and togetherness. I felt that there would never in my life be a love for me as strong, as unconditionally accepting, as unambivalent as was hers. For me, her death was an emotional event unlike any other. It was an event from which my psyche and my soul, now many years later, are still recovering. It is a mourning for which there is no end. From experiencing the grief at the loss of my mother, from having grown up with my mother telling me that her own mother might as well have been dead from the beginning for all the good she did her as a mother, and from listening to my patients talk about their varied but almost always difficult relationships with their mothers, I see that helplessness and despair can be as powerful determinants of soul loss as death itself. In sharing with my mother the process of her death, I know that the actual moment she died, life itself left her body; but I suspect, that long before that one moment when death grabbed ascendancy of her soul, my mother’s soul had already become disconnected from some portion of who she was. I feel that a part of my own soul took flight with her that day when she died, and that even now, there still exists a hole in me because of that part of my soul’s attachment to her and its abandonment of me. Perhaps my soul began to leave me even before her death, though: through our various mini-deaths, and my own consequent mini-deaths: the disagreements we had with each other, the differences in choices and attitudes between us, psychic separations that we took from each other throughout our life together; and my ensuing pain – my fleeing from my pain, defending against my pain – leaving my self because of wanting to leave my pain. I know that my patients, too, often feel only half-whole, without a full soul because of pain they feel, pain that originated in their relationships with their mothers, and that now follows them in their adult relationships with their loved ones. Abusing her trust Separation from one’s soul comes about most often when either the original union with mother is inadequate or when the process of separation between mother and child is mismanaged. In the case when the process of separation from mother is interrupted or forced prematurely, there can be a long-lasting sense of disconnection, a perpetual search back to that place of harmony that was taken away too quickly or too violently. Other times the initial symbiosis never takes place at all, thus making the state of separation too emphatic of a feeling and a lifelong wound. In each of these cases, as well as other situations of disharmony, there is a soul-separation, a sense of dislocation, a split separating mind and body from soul. Each of these divisions within the self is like a mini-death. The physical process of soul-separation that takes place at the point of death -- separation from the body, is, then, sometimes only the final and ultimate expression of a psychic process that began long before. I can create moments of soul-separation for Molly. Molly’s innocent, trusting spirit is nowhere more evident than when she tries to go to sleep. Molly never wants to go to sleep. So entranced is she with this world that the idea of missing one single moment of it in sleep consciousness is anathema to her. Every night it takes about an hour, no matter her level of exhaustion from the day's events, to get her to settle down enough to close her eyes and let sleep overtake her. The last few minutes involve a game. I say: "Good night Molly. I love you. See you in the morning." And she obediently closes her eyes, breathes deeply, only to spring her eyes open a moment later with a big fooled-you kind of smile on her face. We repeat this little drama five, six times. Sometimes it goes on for 15 minutes before she will cooperate with me and leave her eyes closed long enough for sleep to come. I play this game with her because her spirit is energetic and amusing. It is her sense of humor -- a little game that she invented, and of which, she is in her own little childlike way, proud. And maybe, too, she doesn’ t want to say good night to me because she is leaving me in her sleep. When Molly gets older, she will confer on me the power of instructing her, giving her orders about what to do, what to say, even what to feel. Up to a certain age, she will, likely, do whatever I tell her to do. I might tell toddler Molly to go across the room to get her doll. She will do this obediently, willingly, happily. It will never occur to her that she should object to doing this. I am her Mommy. She trusts me. How easy it would be to tell her -- just as rationally and just as calmly instead of going to get her doll -- to engage in some act of destruction. I could give her permission to be cruel to other children by not intervening when she is; I could communicate to her that she should honor her mother, but not her father, by constantly criticizing her father and showing him no love. It is in my power to construct this child in a million different ways. And she would let me. She might develop a stomach ulcer in order to let me, she might live a secret life that would give her nightmares and fear of men or women for the rest of her life. But she would let me because I am her Mommy and she trusts me. I have the power to subvert this child from living from her soul. It is because of her love for me that I have this power. Right now, at this period in her life, instead of playing her go-to-sleep game with her, I could become irritable or forceful and demand that she go to sleep immediately. Indeed, there is nothing more I want in life at these fatigued moments at the end of the day than for her to go to sleep immediately. But this would not be fair to her. This would begin to curtail the expression of her spirit. If we stopped playing her go-to-sleep game, I fear that she would begin her descent into the blank lifelessness of soul-displacement. Perhaps all of life, between birth and death, is an attempt to regain our first experience of harmony, the living from the soul that characterizes the newborn. Perhaps it is our mothers who, most of all, grant us the power to live from our souls, or to depart from our souls. And, perhaps it is at the time of death that we return most wholly to the “actual me” that we were born into. |
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