From August 1st, 1991 ...

I’m haunted by my mother’s illness.  It bothers me in some deep, profound way… 

I’ve been forced to confront her early and permanent rejection of me once and for all.

    Today it is partially hazy outside.  Miles is still asleep because I let him stay up late last night and watch stupid late-night TV.  Why I’ve gotten into the habit of watching these late-night shows, I don’t know.  They are usually about crime and sex.  Perhaps we are all so repressed that we need these images to help us accept sleep.  Why else would there be an audience for these sad displays of cruelty and blood-shed? 

    At any rate, I am troubled by the conflict between my need to make a living and my deep desire to explore the world of God — just as Jung describes in the first section of Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  I recognize in myself the dichotomy he describes. 

    I haven’t yet gotten to the part where he resolves his conflict.  But it’s refreshing to read someone else talking about such things.  Most people never seem to have this problem. 

    The city is horrible.  I’ve really turned against it recently.  Last night we went down to the museum and the library.  At the library they’re removed many of the chairs to make things more difficult for the street people who seek refuge there, as well as their body lice.  To economize they use the lowest possible wattage of light bulb, so that one must peer through the dim, fetid air to make out the titles of books. 

    The museum was equally disappointing.  The gift shop had the usual assortment of junk, including cheap plaster statues of Marilyn Monroe.  The paintings in the exhibit all looked glazed over with yellow curd.  The exhibit walls had all been painted a garish clay color. 

    There is nothing to feed the soul here.  This is the deadest place I’ve ever lived and I’m just waking up to that fact. 

    The economic situation we find ourselves in is potentially grim indeed.  We could lose our house and every thing in it if Peter got laid off.  At this point I doubt I could bring in much without a technical degree.  I know I’m not looking at any of this clearly, so I try to forge ahead with life as it is, but I worry all the time.  Not to the point that I’m coming apart over all of this, but it’s there: the petty details, the bills, the dread of falling. 

    And none of that corresponds to my vision of myself studying great things. 

How long can I go on studying on my own, at home?  Right now, I am making progress on my math. 

    Why am I worrying about all these stupid things?  I need to have more faith in myself.  I’ve survived my childhood, haven’t I? 

    But I’m haunted by my mother’s illness.  It bothers me in some deep, profound way…  I’ve been forced to confront her early and permanent rejection of me once and for all.  Before I tried to keep that knowledge under wraps.  But I no longer can do this.  So I’m liberated, on the one hand, and deeply saddened on the other hand. 

    My grief seems stamped on my face, at least every time I look in the mirror it seems so.  And I find myself withdrawing from the role of Great Mother for good.  Just as well. 

    Sometimes my health seems horrible.  Right now I’m okay, but I get these tight bands circling my chest and my back aches and my breathing takes conscious effort.  I have the feeling that it is not only my mother that is going to die, but also some part of myself. 

    Perhaps out of these ashes something new will emerge. 

    Miles is awake.  The Summer is hard.  There’s nothing for him to do — until next week when he goes to art classes.  The swim team is over and he won’t go over there without it.  Two hundred dollars down the tube.  The summer has turned out to be a disappointment for me — I thought I’d have more students, more work, and more money. 

    I’ve had too much time to think, to feel pain, to mull over the puzzling question of mortality.  So I feel this heaviness, which I’m just beginning to shed. 

    Oh well, time to get on with the day. 

One morning when I was little I woke up early, went out to pick up the paper and saw the street empty before me.  I walked down our front walk to the gate and looked down toward the Blue Hills.  I took a tentative step onto the sidewalk, leaving the gate swinging open behind me.  The air was cool and fresh, the birds were singing.  I started to dance down the street and toward the hills. 

I danced wildly, with abandon.  I danced onto the front yards of our neighbors and back onto the sidewalk.  I knew I was taking a terrible chance, since all I had on was a nightgown.  But the dance possessed me.  The music was all in my body. 

    Fortunately for me and everyone around me, I’m in much better spirits.  Perhaps we all are, having witnessed the sudden emergence of the Russian people, the “kidnap” of Gorbachev, the emergence of Yeltsin as world leader.  We’ve been glued to the TV and radio whenever possible.  Last year it was the Desert War.  This year, the collapse of Communism. 

    I wonder how much of all this Miles will remember.  He watches all this history-in-the-making with us.  And what a lot there will be to remember.  The images that flicker on the TV in our living room at night are like tales told around the fire. 

    I was cleaning out the refrigerator room last night and came across a journal I’d kept three years ago.  It was amazing. 

    I totally blocked out the call I’d made to my mother in April of that year.  I called her at the library and spoke candidly but calmly about my feelings about my father.  She laid a zinger on me, asking me “Remember when you were great?”  She told me she’d call me back, but she never did.  Of course, I’d called her at the library because that provided some protection from my father’s meddling.  But not enough, I guess. 

    That summer I went back to school and finished my degree.  At the end of summer, I called my parents again, I guess to tell them I got my degree. 

    I look back at that and see how that was the turning point.  The oldest child realizes that she might as well toss off the mantle once and for all. 

    The pain I felt in my relationship with my mother astounds me.  It comes seeping out of the pages like blood. 

    The. other thing I could see more clearly, looking at myself with some perspective now, is how dominated by my superego I’ve been.  Incredible. 

    And the fear of being “put out on the street” — comes from my father’s endless confidential monologues  about their dire financial situation.  Which was really a diatribe against my mother’s mismanagement of funds.  He was the child whining about Mommy — but of course, he could suddenly switch to thundering Wotan if you offended him. 

    One morning when I was little I woke up early, went out to pick up the paper and saw the street empty before me.  I walked down our front walk to the gate and looked down toward the Blue Hills.  I took a tentative step onto the sidewalk, leaving the gate swinging open behind me.  The air was cool and fresh, the birds were singing.  I started to dance down the street and toward the hills. 

    I danced wildly, with abandon.  I danced onto the front yards of our neighbors and back onto the sidewalk.  I knew I was taking a terrible chance, since all I had on was a nightgown.  But the dance possessed me.  The music was all in my body. 

    Then I danced back to the house.  I got to the gate and saw my mother standing in the doorway.  My sense was that she had just gotten there, but she was frowning. 

    “What are you doing down there” she asked crossly.  “Get in the house.” 

I mumbled some response.  I climbed the stairs thinking there might be some trial in my father’s kangaroo court for this crazed behavior, but I doubted it.  His newspaper was intact, neatly folded on the top step where I’d left it. 

    It looks like my mother had a greater lock on my Id than my father did, because she was the gatekeeper. 

I think my mother resented my flamboyance as a manifestation of my high spirits.  She took no pleasure in this animated, dancing daughter. 

    I’m not sorry she’s dying, not really.  It’s a relief to see that I don’t need to feel guilty.  I made contact with her — opened the door — and she shut it for good. 

    It’s funny, all these years I’ve looked for a “father” to look up to — and never found one.  I’ve idealized the masculine as God and Jesus, but these figures are in my head or books.  They’re not flesh and blood. 

    My own father was a weak and whiny child as well as a bully.  He wasn’t the type of father to lead you, nor the kind that acknowledges his weakness but expresses love.  I mean. he wasn’t the jolly lower-class Dad that a lot of kids had in our neighborhood. 

    What can I let go? 

    I think the fear that if I indulge my Id, the world will collapse — that would be one thing to let go. 

    Well, the Irish have a problem with the Id, don’t they?  The cliché about their character is that they’re drunks, yet there’s no group more austere, more Puritanical on God’s earth.  Their fear of wildness, of music, of the dance, of fertility comes from the Church’s influence — the Jansenist Church.  Because the Irish character in truth embraces life.  It has been shackled by the Church for centuries. 

    You couldn’t imagine my mother “letting go”.  She never had a loose moment in her life.  So to see her now, keeping journals of her sins, expressing herself loudly and inappropriately in public — to see her Id emerge…  Why who would have guessed she ever had one?  It’s like watching a prim bespectacled banker become the town drunk. 

    Now I’ve never taken much to Freud’s system of hydraulics but I have to admit, when I use these mechanics, of Superego and Id, it makes sense. 

    I think males have had the burden of trying to identify with the superego.  Perhaps homosexuals refuse to do this or nature does not allow them to.  Perhaps that is why they so often are better at expressing the Id. 

    And now we have a generation of women trying to identify with the Superego.  Perhaps this was necessary, to break the projection of male Id that women have carried for centuries. 

    But our society, with its Puritanical roots, has enough Superego.  Women can do better than that. 

    I had a fear of being “out on the street”.  Today we are bombarded with images of “street people” and are duly horrified.  Yet one of the founders of our culture was a street person.  Jesus was the original homeless man.  He exhorted his followers to be “street people”. 

    We just saw the power of the Russian people when they “took to the streets”.

    Isn’t there a moral here, for me personally, but perhaps also for our society. 

    Right now in New York they say people are rioting in the streets over ethnic differences between blacks and Jews.  It is chaos, but it is also the power of people to take this action.