Mom, Speaking from the Heart, Lifting, Numbing Mine

           Walking through the ward at Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in California's wine country, Mom smiled as we passed a patient near my brother's ward.

            “You don’t mean that smile, you bitch!”  the patient hissed.

               “You’re right," my mother said, quietly and sadly.  "I’m worried about my son, and I really don’t feel much like smiling.” 

            "Well," the patient replied,  taken back by my mother's gentle tone, "God bless.”

            I admired Mom for not taking offense or being dismissive but instead communicating her real feelings to the patient  who had challenged and insulted her.  She kept that attitude even at Aegis, when she had Alzheimer’s and was sure she was going to die by—if not before—her 90^th birthday.

            This was the mother, wise woman and counselor, seeker of peace and greater understanding whom  I accompanied for years of visits to see my brother, who entered Napa because of neurological and psychological problems at the age other people entered college.  We visited him together except for the years when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, followed by a year teaching in Spain and two in Algeria.  I was a great letter writer,  but my mother was not, so even though she and her partner Kathy visited me for a few days in Algeria, there was an additional distance created by the geographic one, and even though growing up I’d felt very close to her,  as an adult it seemed that aside from family gatherings for birthdays and holidays, my mother and I got together only to see my brother.  I became someone she depended on for that.

              So when I was a victim (and to some extent a perpetrator) of violence on my thirty-seventh birthday and called to talk to her on the phone as I was trying to figure out how to get my son and me into a woman's shelter--Mother and I agreed that w wouldn't be safe in her home because my husband would know to look there--her final words to me were, “I hope this doesn’t keep you from going to see David with me on Wednesday.”  She called back a few minutes later, apologizing because she realized that with all I’d been through, her concerns seemed callous, and I knew they did, and yet I also understood she was speaking from need, and I think that I understood need—mine and hers.  So what hurt wasn’t that she was being unsympathetic to my plight.  What hurt was that my relationship with my mother had been defined.  We were a team taking care of my brother’s special needs.