Tabula Rasa

While binge-watching a tv show about the history of a particular Viking hero, and researching the exploits and overlaps referenced in this semi-historical narrative, there came one of those moments - a life changing realization through the eyes of a mostly fictitious character arc. A child is introduced to him, with the clear blue eyes of a person that meant a great deal to him and was killed in a jealous rage by one of his other companions. In the blank, innocent look of this child-of-his-lost-companion, this great Viking warrior paused and gently touched his fingertips to the boy's face. I felt, with the sharpness of a cut, the history of those two figures, made manifest in the presence of his descendant... and I understood for probably the first time the intensity of looking into the face of one's child or grandchild, or that of a close friend. How in the eyes of those-that-came-before-us, we are also a culmination of so many preexisting circumstances, a physical manifestation of a million little moments and rainy days and hard choices and secret shared smiles and successes and failures and how-are-we-going-to-survive-this; we are all creatures born in the crest of a wave, in the dynamic tensions of a butterfly that flapped its wings on the other side of the world, like the stars and Aphrodite, merely an expression of the teeming currents moving invisibly in the darkness underneath and before what we can actually see.

John Locke had it all wrong, maybe what the bible was trying to say was actually a poorly worded version of something more true. Less 'The sins of the fathers being visited upon the children', more how so many of our actions and gestures we perform every day, and the threads we may confuse as our own may be habits and patterns that are discernable across many generations, part of the primordial stuff that we come into being inside of, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

Just as we often envision ourselves as truly individual beings, I think it is hard to have a really clear sense of our parents and their parents in a context before we transformed them into something else, an identity that they can never discard. What dies to make room for this magical induction, this double baptism, for this new name they will take with them to the grave? And what of those parts of myself that are so like my primary caregivers that I am so angry at and ashamed of? I am not so interested in the person my mother is currently trying to convince everyone that she is, since it is an elaborate defense against choices made when we were both young, and no one is around to hold her accountable. I do however wish I could dig into some of her earlier feelings and experiences, separate from her intensely obsessive and controlling reaction to me as her offspring/pawn/property, and her insistence that I'm just acting like an angry, adolescent brat, rather than a human being who deserves to be listened to, considered, who may be emotionally intelligent or possessing a valid argument about how her choices have realtime and lasting impacts on the children who were left in her care and won't go away until she is willing to be in the pain of addressing them with us. How do I learn about this person and the ways we are similar, without triggering her many layered defenses? Her father used to call her 'the Hulk', her rage was so uncontrollable when she was younger. I suspect my Grandmother fiscally supports my mother because she feels so deeply guilty for what she stood by and allowed to happen in the household my mother grew up in, and I've heard from my sister that Grama told her just how much like her father my mother is. While I may have found a container for rage that has been incredibly fortuitous for me professionally, I know, sometimes more than others, how that taking over/taking control/unable to turn it off mechanism is a direct channeling of the woman who raised me.

'Hollow' is the word my little brother used, describing to me what trying to talk to her is like. It is deeply unsettling to me, this person who calls herself a mother, but has never once asked any of her children how they feel about anything, or why. That someone in her place could be so uncurious about our hopes and fears and choices. But maybe that is what was modeled to her, maybe there is an unheard, neglected child buried deep within her being that is so hungry it makes her blind to us. Is it possible to go unarmed after all this time and anger in search for my mother's soul, locked so deep in the fortress of her stories, and not get lost?

I don't know that I'm quite brave or strong enough to fumble around in her darkness to untangle our shared threads, but I can feel the places in my body where I've ignored pain have created weaknesses in other compensatory places, and I've begun to chase those uncomfortable places to look for what lives on the other side. As strong as I may become though, only she can choose to wade through her scar tissue and liberate those pathways between herself and the rest of the world.

Between herself and her children, who have been waiting our whole lives for her to make that choice.