I was in the bathroom when the phone rang, and didn’t bother trying to answer, thinking that whoever it was would leave a message, and they did. It was one of my ex-wives–I have three–and she was calling to remind me, sort of, that tomorrow is mother’s day. My mother, Willie Lou, had called her on the ex-wife’s birthday a few days ago, and had apparently brought her up to date on the saga of the alienated son–one of them, at least–namely me. The ex-wife’s tone was angry and self-righteous, informing me that Willie Lou had called, that tomorrow was MOTHER’S day (emphasis hers,) and telling me not to “chicken-shit” out and to return her call.
I had been about to make my afternoon half-cup of coffee–I like it espresso strength–so I went ahead with that, and when the grinder and microwave noise were over I called her back.
I’ll admit there were moments between hearing the message and making the call when I felt the little rushes of adrenalin that accompany anger–something I hadn’t felt for a very long time–but by the time I called, I had gotten the situation in perspective, and those long-forgotten reflexes had been replaced by somewhat incredulous amusement.
She answered the phone by saying, “Speak,” in a still-offended sort of tone, and I assumed from that that she had caller id and knew it was me. I answered in a jovial kind of way, “Hello, hello! How are you…”
“Norman?” she queried.
“Yessss,” I answered, stretching it out a bit, at which point she hung up the phone.
I laughed, hanging up on my end. What? I wondered. Did she just want to express her displeasure by hanging up on me? Was she reacting to my obvious lack of contrition? I guess we’ll never know. It’s been several hours now and no further word…
So why would talking to Willie Lou make my ex so angry, you might wonder. If you had listened to Bare Brains, Episodes Twelve and Thirteen, you would have a pretty good idea, but in case you haven’t, I’ll try to give you a shorter version here.
In Episode Twelve I talked about why I didn’t go to my father’s–Hatcher’s–funeral, and in Thirteen, I talked about the possibility–raised by my current wife, Eve–that hostility toward Willie Lou, which I hadn’t talked about earlier, might have played a part in that decision. I will never know, really, whether or to what degree some residual earlier anger might have been involved. As you may know from earlier posts, we only get the final version of our brain’s decisions; we are not privy to all the neural interactions that lead up to the final final, although some of the major considerations may pop into consciousness along the way, which we construe as our thinking about it.
A perfect lead-in to my views on motherhood and filial piety is humorously presented in a video of a performance by Mrs. Hughes, in which she’s talking about how her son changed when he became a teenager:
“We’d been fighting all day and he came over to me and he goes, “So, why’d you have me?’
“Well actually, we didn’t know it’d be you. (Laughter) We were hoping for someone with a job.”
No mother or father knows what their child will be like. They have fantasies and expectations, and those motivate any decision to have a baby, but they do not perform all those parental sacrifices on behalf of the person that the baby will actually become. That future person remains unknown until it actually takes form, and even then, it will very likely remain unknown, so filtered by the parents’ hopes and dreams that its reality remains invisible to them.
Such was certainly the case with both my parents. I grew up to be someone who was totally unknowable by them, an alien in the family, and in the small community where I grew up. Their lack of comprehension was not their fault, of course, although in my less enlightened years I blamed them for not knowing and loving the person I had become, and yes, I felt anger.
That anger was largely transformed by understanding, and rarely appears to me in recognizable form, but again, who knows how it plays into my behavior toward Willie Lou. I cannot deny the possibility, because I am as incapable of knowing my own thought processes as she is of knowing me.
There are many more considerations which play into my current views than I can talk about here, but they involve the degree to which memories of common events are actually similar, the social and biological evolutionary under-pinnings of familial bonds, etc. To put it concisely, there is an 87-year-old woman in Florida who contributed part of my DNA. Her cultural and personal history led her to behave toward me in ways consistent with that history. We were present at many of the same events for a period of years, although there were huge differences in the ways we perceived and remembered those events. Currently, our social, political, and personal values have almost nothing in common.
Because of these differences, I have not called or visited her since Hatcher’s death. She calls me on occasion, and we have the kinds of newsy conversations we have almost always had in the past. I am attentive and interested, but I do not initiate communication, because to do so encourages her to think that perhaps her fantasies of who I am are true, and that I may, after all, become the dutiful, loving son she wants me to be. Those fantasies of hers become expectations, the same expectations her own mother had of her sons, and probably, the same expectations her grandmother had, etc., etc. At some point I have to confront her with the reality that those expectations are unwarranted, at which time she becomes very unhappy, but not for long: the hope generated by her history springs eternal…
If you hadn’t guessed, my ex-wife’s values and expectations are very similar to Willie Lou’s, and very different from mine. Neither of them have an inkling of my values and their derivation. It has never occurred to them, nor is it comprehensible to them, that a person could refuse to be constrained by the values of the people who parented them.
My history has exposed me to ways of thinking far flung from those in which I was raised, and endowed me with values whose origins are vastly distant from the small southern town in which I grew up. Why should I be bound by the values of people who were shaped by a different culture, no matter what my biological and historical relationship to them was? Do I owe them something because their views of life say that I do? Do I owe them something because they were shaped by a certain culture, even as I was shaped by a far different culture?
None of us deserves credit or blame, loyalty or anger, because of the shape we were given by the life we had. I cannot make my mother or my ex-wife happy except by pretending to be who they want me to be, and I will not give up my own life because it is different from theirs. Neither they nor I have any choice about who we are.
We all live as we must.
Constrained