Healing Backwards, Parenting Forwards

My "Oh Shit" Mother's Day moment

When my mother died, I was so angry.

I was grieving, yes, but my grief didn’t look like a process; it looked like anger. I was not sliding out of denial on my way to bargaining. I was just pissed. Royally, epically, ecumenically…pissed.

At times, particularly when my mother’s increasing frailty made itself known, I wondered in an almost academic way how it was possible to be so angry with a woman who was dying. Where were the intense feelings of fear, sadness, despair? Wasn’t I supposed to be overwhelmed by the impending loss, not spitting rocket fuel and vinegar?

There is a litany of obvious reasons why the anger was justified:

• The fact that she had let her cancer grow unchecked to the point that “terminal” was the only possible diagnosis.

• The fact that she had somehow run through the profit from the sale of her house that was supposed to take the place of the retirement funds she hadn’t saved in the span of less than twenty-four months.

• The 10.5% interest rate she accepted when she bought her car that made her monthly payments exorbitant and impossible to keep up on a fixed income.

• The credit card collectors that called regularly, many of them apologizing to her (not knowing it was me on the line), because my mother had somehow become their compatriot and confidante.

• All of the things I didn’t know that I discovered in those last three months of her life.

But, the anger didn’t feel transactional. It didn’t ebb and flow with these realizations, wasn’t wedded to their discovery. It just existed.

The sadness surfaced only when I exhausted the anger. I’d return from a run and double over in my mother’s driveway, tears mixing with sweat, as I gasped for air, hands on my knees. I would come in the house quietly, afraid to wake her or my sleeping baby, expecting the wave of tenderness to hold, but the second I saw her, the anger would take over again. I could feel it twist my insides, the softness evaporating, the heat of the anger turning any and everything else to steam.

I thought the anger would end with her death. The finality of her passing a crossing over from the rage of those last few months to the loss that now stood in its place.

That is not what happened.

Instead, the anger became a weapon without a target, a heat-seeking missile that would dial in on anyone within range, firing at the slightest provocation. My husband intercepted most of the blasts. Confused, but conscious that my reactions were fueled by grief, he gave me a wide berth. But these outbursts went on for months, and at some point, he recognized both his own limit and mine. I begged him to find me a therapist. One that would be authorized to understand our military life because I was not capable of editing or covering or even lying at that point. I just wanted the evil out of me.

The therapy wasn’t great, but the time to just spew was. And little by little, as I deconstructed not my mother’s death, really, but her life…my life, I began to realize that the anger had been built over a lifetime. A carefully constructed log cabin of sticks and newspaper and dryer lint. Her diagnosis was just the match that lit the whole thing on fire.

And so, as the months and years went on, as the fire finally died out and the embers smoldered, I started the process of healing. There was no one wound, no clear starting point. Everything had to be undone, because there were so many lies, so many secrets, so many questions I would never get the answer to.

I don’t remember where I first heard the term, “healing backwards”, but I subconsciously assigned this moniker to the process. Knowing where the bodies were buried, I slowly went grave digging. I worked my way backwards, unearthing the parts of my childhood that I didn’t understand and hadn’t realized how profoundly they had shaped me. I was desperate to discern what had actually happened, both to her and because of her.

The best that I have been able to piece together is that my mother got stuck somewhere along the developmental pathway. She never became a fully formed adult, and so it is unsurprising, although still somewhat unforgiveable that when her marriage fell apart, she turned to the next oldest person in the room to parentify.

Me.

My daughter turned 2-years old the week my mother died. My mother was at her birthday party, even though she was forty-five minutes late after releasing her bladder on the passenger seat of her friend’s car and having to start the preparation process all over again. Birthdays were that important to her. My daughter was that important to her. She was days from dying, hours from a morphine haze, and yet she showed up.

I clung to that as I excavated the worst of who she was. As I tried to make peace with how much she loved me and how deeply her decisions hurt me.

My mother was a good mother. It’s what made her deceit so much harder to accept. My mother loved me openly, loudly, and without restraint. I never questioned her devotion to me. She always showed up. Always.

And so when I became a mother, I wasn’t worried that I didn’t know how to do it. I had such a strong example of mothering to draw from. What terrified me is that my mother didn’t fail out loud. She failed in secret. Her faults festering for me to find as I grew older and her mess grew bigger.

As a result, I was determined to handle my hard stuff. My daughter will have her own hard stuff. I didn’t want her one day discovering that she had to handle mine too.

Apparently, I might have course corrected too aggressively. In my effort to ensure my daughter always knows that my shit is mine to handle, I may have inadvertently given her the idea that I am our family’s go-to hard things handler.

For Mother’s Day this past week, she gave me a present. She’s still in grade school where they turn making Mother’s Day gifts into a science lesson (I got a dead plant), an art lesson (in a bag she decorated), and a writing lesson (see below) all at once. My daughter’s answers to the prompts about me, her mother, are telling…

“You are so good at…holding in hard things.”

Fuck me.

As she proudly read this masterpiece out loud to me, insisting that this soliloquy occur amidst the chaos of school pick up, I half heard it the first time. Taking the paper from her hand and accepting the hug she proudly plastered on me, my eyes quickly scanned the page for what I thought I heard. Confirmed. That’s exactly what I thought she said. As the parents around me ooed and awed at what a sweet gift it was, I awkwardly smiled and half laughed.

When we got to the car, I had to sit there for a second. She yammered on in the backseat about the playground and popsicles and something Pokemon related, and I tried to regulate my breathing. My body wanted to laugh, cry, and throw up simultaneously.

What have I done?

I’ve had some time to process since receiving my daughter’s gift. On first glance, you might be wondering why I was so appalled. Isn’t that exactly the lesson I have been trying to teach her? That I, her mother, handle my own hard things?

Yes, and that is how I am now choosing to receive it.

But, my original reaction stems from a much deeper worry, a fear that fills me because it is something I truly do not know how to change.

What if I am so good at handling hard things that I don’t know how to teach my daughter how to handle hard things for herself?

Have I so absorbed the ability to take on the weight of the world around me that I can no longer see what is mine to manage vs someone else’s? What if I don’t even know what the line should be between what she should carry vs the pieces I pick up to help sherpa her along the way?

I may be healing backwards, but damnit, I need to parent forward! I do not want the inverse of my own pain to be projected down to my daughter. I refuse to create in-capacity to keep her safe from over-capacity.

So, admittedly, I panicked. Seeing my naked self so clearly reflected in my daughter’s eyes scared me.

But, that means I’m not hiding from her.

That means she knows who I am.

That means she trusts that I can carry hard things, not that I will.

There is nothing more challenging than being fully human in front of your kid. Being seen. And as a result of that experience, I now kinda get it. Why my mother hid herself from me. Why she let me find out instead of telling me herself. Why she died before she could be discovered.

Being fully human in front of me was too hard.

I am telling a small part of my mother’s story, really, our story, at the Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! event this weekend (details below). Every time I talk about the complicated nature of who she was, and how that shaped me, the anger fades a bit more.

It is unbelievable, some of what I share, and I think I keep saying it out loud any chance I get because part of me is still trying to make sense of it.

But what I can see clearly now is that my mom let fear keep her from being fully known. By me or by anyone, really. And while that created so many problems, it also must have been so piercingly painful.

Maybe she did do hard things after all.

I will continue to unwind the past, working my way backward, releasing the anger as I go. And I will stumble my way forward, starting with my mother’s practice of showing up, but only as my authentic self. If my daughter knows who I am, if she can call me out that clearly, then I must be doing something right.

I will be telling my story as a featured writer in the next edition of Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! The slam is an online feminist storytelling event created and hosted by Nan Tepper of The Next Write Thing and Style YOUR Stack.

I will be joining nine other tremendous storytellers to share our unfiltered take on being mothers and daughters and having mothers and daughters in UNDER FOUR MINUTES! 😬

Buy your ticket by clicking on the button below. If you can’t be there LIVE, not to worry! A ticket will also get you the recorded version which is well worth the price of admission.

Thank you for supporting me and this tremendous effort to highlight women storytellers here on Substack!