JOURNAL, Tuesday, April 9th

Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Mamma’s going to buy you a mockingbird. (trad.)

It’s so depressing these days, getting up early to write. Since the clocks have changed to daylight saving time we enjoy the longer evenings of sunsets that hold back until well after supper, but we pay for it at the other end of the day, getting up in the dark. It’s as if nature is laughing at all the progress we’ve made in the last few weeks at pushing back the night to an earlier and earlier sunrise. “Fooled ya,” says the morning to our sense of accomplishment. “You have to start back where you were six weeks ago when it was dull and drizzly and it felt as if there was hardly any light at all in the world.”

I woke this morning after a dream that has me so angry that I think I’m just venting against the burden of the morning’s darkness. It was just a snippet of the dream that bothers me, a sliver at the end of a story that I can’t even remember. Someone or something is holding me facedown, pushing against my back so I can’t get up from the ground on the edge of a pond where I lay. It’s trying to push my head under the water, trying to drown me. It occurs to me, as I struggle and fight to free myself, that this is a rather ineffective assassin: the pond of water in which it wants to drown me is several inches below the earth where I’m lying, so all that’s happening is I’m getting my hair and forehead wet. But it’s the oppressive weight, the pressure against my back that bothers me most, until I realize that mom is standing beside the figure that keeps me pinned down, and she looks down at my struggling figure, laughing at me with her over exuberant laugh, always too loud and too full of anticipation.

What a pathetic piece of work I am. I’ve not seen my mother in nearly twenty years, yet I allow her to invade my dreams and take up precious emotional energy in me that deserves a more worthy recipient. She’s of no consequence to me; it’s not as if I have to live with her or deal with her on a regular basis. What’s the point of going through all the pain only to remember how betrayed and lonely I’ve felt for most of my life – I don’t want to do it…

Yet since the retreat in February, I’ve known that no matter how much I try to deny it or wish it weren’t so, her hold on me, on the little girl who used to lean against her pregnant tummy listening for sounds of the baby within, is as strong as any bond could be.

Jean once told me that it’s the therapist’s job to help people tell more optimistic stories about themselves. And she, Jean, has succeeded in doing just that in so many areas of my life. But I know that I resist talking to her about mom; I know how much work there is to do…too much.

It occurred to me the other day, as I was writing of the different people that I blamed for Claire’s death that I never really blamed mom. I think that’s because I reserved my anger towards her for my own stolen childhood: she had failed miserably at being my mother, she took me away from Sophie, she exposed me to a sense of evil at the farm that makes me shudder to this day. The wounded relationship between us was tattered enough in itself, it didn’t need guilt around Claire’s death to make it any more ugly.

But strange as it is to express it, I think that what I’ve resented the most in our relationship is that mom used herself to create me – as if knowing how damaged she was by her depression, she should have looked for more acceptable, more perfect genetic material to make me, her baby. After all, she would never have used sub-standard ingredients in her baking; am I not as important as a bran muffin, or a loaf of twelve-grain bread.

How ridiculous does this sound? Yet deep inside, I’ve always resented that she would pass on her defective gene pool to me. I’ve spent most of my adolescence and beyond, waiting for my own depression to take over. I’ve worked so hard to try and avoid this: I’ve always tried to stay in control, I never drank all through university, I seldom take drugs of any kind, even to the point of worrying about the steroid inhalers and the Ventolin that I took for my asthma. I’ve always wanted to maintain a clear mind so that I could be alert to the “signs”…when it would be my turn to face her depression.

My first year of teaching, I remember going back to work on Monday morning after the Christmas break feeling fine, if perhaps not as rested as I’d hoped to be after that first term from hell. I remember standing in the hallway watching as the kids filed into the library for the first class of the day. The bell rang; I looked into the room of agitated faces, and I had a total meltdown, not knowing what to do with all the energy that had been unleashed in them over the holidays.

I began to shake in a full-blown anxiety attack. I left the class alone and managed to make my way into the staff room where I collapsed into a gasping mass. I lied: I told the principal that I had a fever; it must be the flu. Someone, I think it was the secretary, drove me home and as I closed my apartment door behind me, I dropped to the floor and sobbed uncontrollably. I lay there crying into the old oriental rug, grimy with the dirt of previous tenants that I’d not been able to clean away. After the initial wave receded, I lifted myself and went to the bedroom where it started again. I cried for three days. I cried into towels and screamed into pillows. I’d stop long enough to wipe my face and blow my nose, then I’d start again. I had no real idea what I was crying about: nothing and everything, about life and hope and despair and fear. Mainly I cried from fear; I was anticipating that this episode signaled my entrance into mom’s world of insanity and unreliability.

Isn’t it strange that of all the things about being Sarah Burchill’s daughter that I could worry about, the one that was most ominous to me, the one that most terrified me in its consequences, even at this crisis point in my life, was that I would be irresponsible and unreliable just like her.

After three days, just like the flu, I remember waking up and feeling as if I wanted to get dressed and have something to eat. It took me another couple of days to get back to normal, but right from the bacon and eggs that I prepared for myself that morning, I knew that the worst was over. I also knew that I’d come through something very dark and powerful, but the important thing was that I’d come through it. That knowledge, however, didn’t keep me from anticipating the next time that I’d be cut down in the middle of the flow of life, and forced to empty myself in what felt like an infinite wash of tears.

I remember reading Timothy Findley’s book, Headhunter a few years ago and I was so taken by this line that I wrote it down: “I would never not be I,” she was thinking, ”But I would gladly, this night have been born some other I, not mad.” The poetry and longing of those words stunned me when I read them. They sum up the only wish that I’ve ever had for my mother, and what I would have wanted in a relationship with her. There were so many reasons why I loved her and admired her and wanted to be like the wonderful part of her. But always the madness, disguised as anger, sadness, insensitivity and selfishness would intrude upon our lives.

And so I must admit that the worst of mom’s legacy to me at this point in my life is the uncertainty. I trust myself enough now to believe that her demons probably won’t be part of my life. I believe as I approach my thirties and go beyond the usual age for mental illness to present itself, that I’ll be okay. But how can I ask Danny to commit to the uncertainty that would haunt our every thought of children, even if conception were possible? How could I live with myself, knowing that the emotional turmoil that could destroy any happiness that we would have as a family, had come from me? How can I accept that responsibility? How do I know if my longing for the wonderful family life that I see portrayed in the photos in Jean’s office is a selfish wish, or a selfless one in which I want to give of myself to Danny and our children?

I’m so afraid.


Copyright 2003