J. seems to have been really in the grip of la grippe -- feverish, sleeping, scarily hard to rouse -- for about twelve hours, max. Now it looks like the battle is already over, and the rest is a mop-up operation (which may take days, since it was an extraordinarily messy battle). It's good to know that although Monday is his 77th birthday, his immune system still kicks butt. Most of the people who survived what he did are long gone.
There's a real symmetry to life, as women know well, as we're usually the ones mopping up the spilled food and bodily fluids, and being called on to show a patience and gentleness we may not feel. As I push J. around in his wheelchair (yes, he could get a power chair, but he'd drive it like a teen-ager, at risk of his life and ten years off mine), I identify wryly with the mothers pushing toddlers in strollers. Only mine weighs 250 pounds and is growing more, not less, dependent.
Back when we visited his mother and cousins in the Transylvanian Saxon community of Romania, I observed that everyone there treats small children very gently, moves slowly around them, speaks softly, and keeps them in safe, enclosed spaces, like a family courtyard where they can play freely under a grandmother's watchful eye. It creates an atmosphere of humid, nest-like calm that couldn't be further from the American solo mom yanking her screaming kids through the airport. As J gets older -- and younger -- I can see that he deeply expects to return to that same kind of slow, gentle touch and treatment. Unfortunately, it couldn't be more alien to me.
I come from a line of fierce, impatient, nonmaternal women, vivacious spitfires poorly cut out for nurturing, yellers and yankers. I was going to joke and say "Shaken-baby syndrome was our rock-a-bye baby," but that would be an unfair exaggeration. We were not abused, but neither were we coddled. Touch in my family was sharp, abrupt, intense, and that's what I expect and even thrive on. I can barely discipline myself to move as slowly and speak as softly around J. as he now needs and expects when he's feeling fragile. I want to scream at the tepidity of it all.
Caretaking is quite a discipline. You come up against all your most justified selfishness and find it wanting. When I am not kind -- which is often -- I want to make excuses. I want to say, "Remember all the times you were mean and impatient and yelled at me? As ye sow so shall ye reap, baby." Or, more painfully, "You didn't let me be a mother, and now you expect me to be one to you? Fuhgeddaboudit." But it doesn't wash.
One of the things I want to write about in THE SPIRITUAL SURVIVAL KIT is what a challenging spiritual exercise the Golden Rule, that seeming singsong kindergarten platitude, really is. You can't just "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you," because that would be based on who you are, not on who they are. You have to go deeper and treat them the way they would like to be treated, just as you would want to be treated the way you like to be treated -- even when there is no resemblance between the two at all. You must give what you most crave: to be seen, recognized as who you are. You have to give up your own eyes and try to see them through God's eyes. I try not to say "I can't do it" and stick to the truth, which is that most of the time, I won't.
- amba
Amba,
Your courage to say what you feel is an inspiration. What we have learned as children is not always what we want, long for or who we are. Therefore if we see others through "God's eyes" surely we are seeing them through ours - from somewhere deep inside who we truly are?
I remember when I saw the Chinese movie Blue Kite, the gentle, kind way adults treated children. All of us need, yearn for that gentleness of touch somehow. Our pain about our unborn children - could that be part of it too?
I identify with what you say here from many angles - my childhood, marriages, Gilad, children I have cared for and educated along the way. This posting moves me very much. I wrap my arms around you from afar - only if you permit.
Posted by: Tamar | February 19, 2005 at 11:26 AM
So funny how you remember the "yellers and yankers" of our childhood. As a kid,I always needed a lot of cuddling and gentleness. I actually got it from Mom, when she wasn't yelling. Also from Martha. And Rosie, of blessed memory.
Posted by: AmbivaBro | February 19, 2005 at 06:40 PM
13 years on, you had a much mellower mom. And you were lucky to be "under" Marty instead of "over" her. As we've often discussed, she's the one person in the family who wasn't wired with her emotions routed and filtered through her cerebral cortex.
God bless her, she didn't have a 7-second delay. This made her a maddening younger sibling (at least for one who'd been successfully shamed out of emotionalism; that just didn't work on her wiring) but probably an oasis of an older one.
Posted by: amba | February 19, 2005 at 09:51 PM