About Forgiveness

So My Mother Died ©2004
When my mother died the eleven o'clock news said nothing.
The flag flew high at the post office.
My morning coffee still smelled good.
My kids still wanted their supper.
When my mother died the sun still found my prisms
And my Christmas cactus bloomed.
When my mother died the willows didn't weep real tears;
I did.

My mom was a miracle of a mom ... when she was not drunk and when psychosis was not her mistress. This means that most of the time, my mom was a miracle of a mom.

But to deny the depth of her darkness is to deny the depth of our love, the depth of both our strengths. I am not sure that forgiveness is about accepting that horrible things were done and we say it's okay. I am not sure but that real forgiveness lies in looking at the darkness full in the face and accepting that there were riches we gleaned from the very worst of the other person. That the person we want to forgive was, perhaps, a source of magic in part because of the darkness.

I start with two poems I wrote about my mother's pain and of my worst responses to it. When my mom was in a psychotic state, she was violent. She lost control. She would then, after the haze was lifted, remember... and drink to forget. There were three moms. Drunk mom, Mommy, and "Not mommy." She fought the psychosis with every fiber of her being, but sometimes she lost--rarely, in fact. Yet those times when she did lose the fight were horrific and terrifying. And it took me many, many years to understand just how much she worked to cage that. To kill it. I wrote this early on, when I was trying to understand, trying to put myself in her position and experience what her pain must have been.

Lion's Eye ©1985
Spring-tight tension, beyond my control
It watches without blinking,
Ready to attack; I'm held rooted, fixed by
The lion's eye.

Gold-brown, glittering mellow,
Colors of sun-dried grass,
Glints of blind-bright dancing water, my joy,
My lion's eye.

My child cries so close,
I refuse to hear, so hypnotized
By the dry-ice murdering beauty behind
My lion's eye.

Her fear encroaches,
I wrench free her bleeding hand
To loft my molten topaz, sacred cup,
This lion's eye.

Back-hand slap. There, she’s silent.
Amber-kissed lips parted,
I drink deep the warming flame from the lid of
The lion's eye.

Fangs pierce my soul without pain,
Claws rip my flesh without blood,
Blessed Southern silk-gold Comfort, sweetest love,
My lion's eye.

I loved her.

When I was little and climbed into her lap for comfort, when I was too small to understand that the vacant stare and amber drink meant stay away, I would find myself on the floor before I'd even found my comfy spot. I would sit, stunned, holding my hand to the burning spot on my cheek. I was lucky. I had my sister to whisk me away to her land of drawings and paper dolls and color wheels and asymmetry and other big words. I also had Mommy as herself 59 days out of 60, and, back then drunk Mommy only about 3 days out of 30. Yet you know something's amiss. You sensed that the house wasn't right, that always, always, there was an undercurrent, the possibility of an explosion. Maybe that's why Jean Ellen was always there, ready to soothe at just the right times.

It was not until I was around thirteen that I began to again sense, more than understand why it was that mother got very strange when our father went on his semi-annual business trips with his secretary. Or why my mother wanted the gift of the secretary's piano in the basement, where she never saw it; or why she left the house when Jean Ellen was given the blue convertible Marie had driven for so long.

I learned that my father was not faithful and early on, I learned to be variously angry with him for his arrogance and sleaziness and angry with her for "driving him away." Oh, the allure of the country western song. The drama of it all.

In college, she once crashed a party I was at. She humiliated me, called me names, rambled on about wanting my father to come home. I was furious, but something about her, after I'd brought her home and she let her hair down and danced in the moonlight. My heart opened. I did not understand to what, exactly. Not until my own loneliness in my marriage, in almost every relationship I ever knew, smacked me in the face. Not to ever feel pretty enough, smart enough... enough. Or to be told you are too smart, too attractive, too alive. All of them added up to a loneliness I saw in my mother.

I learned that she was a woman who was desperately alone, who loved people with every fiber of her being, never leaving enough to be able to love herself. She had subjugated her own dreams to my dad's. She had settled for less than she knew she could be, and she began, once I was out of the house, to kill herself a bit faster, to drink more and to do it more often. I left her alone.

Naturally.

Dervish of the Empty Nest ©2001
Mama dances all alone in the moonlight,
When Daddy doesn’t bother to lie,
Kickin’ off the saddle shoes, Lettin’ down her braids,
Waltzing with her bottle of Rye.

Mumbling to the boys from the college,
Prettiest faculty bride.
Young men tussled for a dance, for a twirl,
For a midday tumbledown ride.

Mama silhouetted by the starlight,
Round eyes lifted to the sky:
Dulled ears listening, straining for his footsteps,
While tears start their tumbledown slide.

She dances on, lonely in the moonlight,
Praying for my father to lie,
Barefoot and glowing; dervish in the dead night,
Whispering to her bottle of Rye.


I learned to see my mother as she really was, her wit, her compassion, her pain, her passionate love for my dad and the best of who he was, her imagination and her many talents. She was not her drinking. That was a sickness that ate her up and spit her out.

Perhaps the biggest thing to learn about forgiveness is that very often there is nothing to forgive; instead we accept the absolute humanity and we choose to love that and let all the rest fly away.

I did not understand my own poem until after my father died. In those two years, as my mother's drinking cycled so far out of control that I had to walk away from her entirely unless she got help, and, ironically, only then did I come to understand her. Thank God I did. I will always be grateful. My own stupidity, selfishness, struggles, and pain opened at last that enormous castle door I'd shut against her. Six months before she died, she got sober. Mom and I were able to talk, to connect, to be with one another in a way that none of the others were able to do. I don't know why; it doesn't matter.

Jetty got Mommy back. And the daughter got to know the woman at last.

Before she went into the hospital, before the liver failure killed her. we were sitting in her living room, sharing some iced tea. She was looking at some empty liquor bottles she had made my brother Jack and me leave there. We had not discussed that she was dying, though I knew it. I was the only child who had said to her that I knew this was so, and we had agreed to leave it alone. I was so sick of secrets, though, I had had to say that much. She was staring into an empty bourbon bottle and then looked at me, tears in her eyes.

"You know what really stinks now, Jetty? All this time I've worked so hard to kill myself? Well, now that I've actually gone and succeeded, turns out I really don't much want to die. Isn't that a kicker?"

I loved my mother. I love her so much my heart hurts. Isn't that a kicker?