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Key points
- The older we get, the more our parents' words come out of our mouths.
- Preserving your parents' memory for your children keeps them alive even after you're gone.
- Lacking emotional closure with our parents, we can't let go of the old struggles, which is why achieving it before they pass is important.
At 72, my mother declared that she no longer had the stamina to burn the candle at both ends; if she went out for lunch, to an afternoon meeting or card game, or played nine holes of golf during the day, she was too tired to do anything else that night.
I’m older now than she was then, well past my sell-by date, which is the age she was when she died; in fact, I sometimes wake up in the morning surprised that I’m still here and she isn't, although she’s particularly present this week, the anniversary of her passing, decades ago. When I told my grown kids my own candle only burns one end at a time these days, they said, as they often do, “You’re channeling Bubbe again, Mom.”
I find myself doing that more and more often lately. By turns, her voice in my head is comforting, critical, admiring, or annoying, but I’m usually pleased to hear it. Sometimes it feels as though her every pronouncement, observation, rule, or judgment was not only valid but worthy of being preserved in my memory and repeated to my kids.
My parents were an important presence in their lives, forged during the long summer months they spent together a continent away from me in the house of my childhood. As a single parent, for nine months of the year, I was keenly aware of my sole responsibility for them, but those summers gave me the freedom I needed to keep me sane the rest of the time, especially when they were being relentless in their demands; I’d count the months and then the weeks and finally the days until school got out and I put them on the plane to the east coast. As soon as they left, I felt not only free to come and go as I liked but also unworried and unburdened, secure in the knowledge that they were with the only people in the world besides me who’d throw themselves in front of a speeding car to save them if necessary. My father became the father my son wanted and never had; one of the delights of my life is seeing how much like my father he is with his own son.
The only words we ever had about their parenting stemmed from my mother’s obsession with weight. When I was a plump little 6-year-old, she told me the story she never stopped repeating about how she was a fat girl until she went to college, where she was every boy's friend but not anyone's girl. Before she returned to campus as a sophomore, she had starved off so many pounds that nobody recognized her; she was suddenly the belle of the ball, newly in demand and popular with all the boys who had previously ignored her.
But what burrowed into my unconscious was what she said about her erstwhile platonic pals: "Men are stupid. They didn't realize I was the same person after I lost the weight as I was before." That message colored my relationships with men in ways I didn't realize until therapy unearthed them years later. But what I observed before then, from childhood on, was the eating disorder she suffered until she developed the colon cancer that killed her. I remain convinced that it, rather than some errant cells, was the cause of it; the body remembers and sometimes takes its revenge.
Her obsession with what her daughters and even her husband ate and weighed was a defining aspect of my adolescence and started even earlier in my daughter’s life. It began innocently enough: “This is the only time in your life those chubby arms and thighs will ever be beautiful,” she’d say, tucking that deliciously plump little body into a onesie. But the first time I overheard her tell my daughter, at 10, that she was too fat to wear a two-piece bathing suit, my rage and resentment boiled over.
I promised my mother that if she ever mentioned Jenny’s weight or criticized her body again, it would be the last time she ever saw either of us. “I’m not going to let you do the same thing to her that you did to me,” I warned her. She backed off, but not before reminding me tartly that I'd been making my own choices about what I put in my mouth for years now, and it was time to stop blaming her and take responsibility for it myself, which is why I channel her words when my clients report that their grown kids blame them for problems they're capable of solving themselves: As long as they can blame someone else, they don't have to do that.
My mother and I had a noisy relationship and not all the noise was laughter, but before she died I settled my business with her, achieving the emotional closure that too often is short-circuited by a parent's death. Without it, we keep fighting the old battles, rehashing the old arguments in our heads; because we’ll never be able to win them, we feel the same anger and frustration we felt when they were alive.
That’s why I listen when I hear her voice in my head, probably more than I once did. She gets my attention at unexpected times, like when I read of an old family friend’s passing and she reminds me to write a condolence note, or when I’m in a fender bender and check to be sure my underwear is clean, or forget to remind my kids that I love them before we part ways.
Most of the time, I’m glad to feel her presence again. Often we share our despair over the state of our politics; I imagine her turning over in her grave about the latest outrage while reminding me again that I should have run for office or at least gone to law school. But I also imagine her boasting to all her pals in the hereafter about her granddaughter, who was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated summa cum laude, while reminding me that I didn't perform nearly as well in my own academic career.
“Bubbe would be proud of me,” says my new graduate, and when I agree that in fact, she is, it pleases me to know that not only do I carry my mother around in my heart and my head, but my grown kids do, too.
