A Mama’s Boy, After All

As a child, I was said to be my father’s son.  I looked like him and acted like him; or so friends and family would often tell me.  And just as he was anointed the more talented parent, I was the anointed child—smart, athletic, and resembling him, which meant good looking. 

As it turned out, though, I wasn’t that much like my father.  He was dark skinned—swarthy, they called it—with wavy, jet black hair, while, as a young child, early on when these comparisons were set in stone, I was blond, curly-haired, and fair skinned.  He was often brooding; my temperament, or so I am told, was even and sunny. 

But if anyone contradicted these powerful family truths, they were immediately corrected.  It was as though some sacred family or cultural truth had been breached and needed rebuilding.  So I remained my father’s—not my mother’s—son for decades to come.

This turned out to be a great advantage.  It pointed to a clear, well regarded path.  I knew what to do to please my family.  And, though they were rarely overt in doling out praise, I heard each faint note, which served as a friendly signal to my journey.

These days I’ve been thinking about my mother.  Though she died almost 20 years ago, I’ve only recently understood how much I’ve been her son, too.  Throughout her long life, she could never claimed me.  Whenever I did something well, especially when there was any public acclaim, she’d distance herself.  She’d say “I’m so surprised.” Almost every way that I stood out “surprised” her.  After all, it couldn’t be her influence.

And, if she couldn’t claim me, I couldn’t claim her.  I could enjoy her—she was fun—but I couldn’t identify with her.  That was my—no that was our—great loss. 

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I challenged her.  I had given a talk at a professional conference in Washington DC that she attended.  People laughed at the concluding anecdote and applauded at length.  I can still see her walking down the center aisle as people left.  I approached her, thankful for her attendance.  As we hugged, she said: “I didn’t know you could be funny.” 

That evening, as we sipped our gin martinis, I finally told her: “It’s a little insulting that you’re always surprised when I do well.  It feels like you’re pushing me away.”  She teared up and I pulled my chair a little closer to hers.   

I knew that it was her insecurity that stopped her from embracing my successes and I told her so.  Then we had a long, long talk, but I don’t  think I was at my persuasive best.  I doubt that she ever believed that any part of my talents had much to do with her.  She was glad for me but I remained at a kind of distance—still my father’s son.   

Her honesty and humility were touching.  But her inability to claim me also felt rejecting and sometimes made me lonely.  Had she been able to identify with me, it would have made it so much easier for me to claim, as my heritage, much that I loved and admired about her. 

Often these days, I want to tell her that I have always been her son, too.  In fact, after all these years, I belong to, maybe I identify with, her more than with my father.  Over time, I have grown grateful for her fierce and adventurous spirit, which I now believe has inspired and emboldened me far more than my father’s gloomy brilliance. 

The shift in identification has taken place in several phases, in many ways over the last 40 years of my life.  Here are a few telling moments. 

I was in graduate school at Harvard, studying history, literature, and philosophy and, on the side, writing poetry.  These are the fields my father wanted so badly to cultivate.  But he was a poor boy, an orphan boy, and he left CCNY to support what family he had left.  It left him feeling inadequate and depressed.  Half consciously, I was living his dream and trying to reverse his nightmare.  It was not really mine. 

I remember realizing the burden that his dream represented. He was literally a very large man and bigger still in my dreams.  One day, though, and metaphorically speaking, I lifted him off of my shoulders.  I left Harvard (and—oh how proud he was that I was studying there) to work at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, whose mission was to support poor and underrepresented people.  That fit his values but his imagined home was at the university, and I had abandoned him as I left.

My mother worried a bit about making such an abrupt transition, and without any obvious qualifications, but she loved that I was living the family values.  And, to do so, I was willing to fly without a net. She had never gone to college, had never finished a proper high school education.  She was clear that education was good—but in the service of something.

Years later, in her sixties, she went back to school to be a paralegal, working for the elderly poor.  She was proud that I was following our north star.  And, so, our paths aligned.

The second moment was more mundane.  As I shaved one morning, I had been looking in the mirror and saw a face that resembled my mother, not my father.  At first, I was alarmed.  His was the handsome one.  With time, though, I relaxed into it.  It represented a kind of freedom, a freedom to do as I chose, not as I was chosen to do.  That’s what my mother eventually came to represent.

Third.  My mother loved the book, Kon Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s story of crossing the Pacific on a Polynesian, straw-built raft.  That was a life she admired and, just a bit, dreamed of.  Whenever I changed from one type of work to another—from history to politics to psychotherapy to organization building—I half consciously set out across an ocean, not quite knowing what I’d meet but thrilled to face the challenges.  And, as I eventually learned, I wasn’t meeting those challenges alone.  She was with me.

Let me step back for just a moment.  As a psychotherapist, I learned to pay particular attention to major life transitions, whether natural and developmental, like adolescence, marriage, the birth of a child, divorce, illness, and the loss of a loved one, and divorce.  When people move through these crises, something in their psyches opens, absorbs new information, extracts information that had been dormant, and then reconfigures itself. The reconfiguration is easy to see in an adolescent, less so in an adult, but very much there.

We generally have two parents, each of whom influence our development.  Often we identify primarily with one, which means that the ways that we emulate the other are submerged or even suppressed.  The influence of the less dominant parent is dim and acted on in limited ways.  In that way, I was my father’s son but also filled with so much of my mother, yearning to be free.    

With each crisis and crossroad in my life, more and more of my mother’s influence and character, has entered or reentered my own.  I became or felt that I became more like her.  My father died when I was 26.  When that orphan child, with all of his depression and disappointments died, my access to my mother blossomed.  And ever since, I have felt more and more identified with her spirit.  It has been a reluctant liberation because I loved my father and felt that, with each transition, I was abandoning him.  But I have also, each time, been grateful to the times I could say goodbye to him.

Of course, there are so many other times when my mother’s and my spirits met.  The time when I was building a house in the New Hampshire woods and she came for a night or two, sleeping in a tent.  The evening when she joined a party I had thrown in my Cambridge commune and she, in her sixties, said: “Let me try one of those joints,”  She was unimpressed, preferring her gin.  Listening to jazz, enjoying a drink—or two—and dining on crabs in Alexandria, Virginia.  Walking through DC museums and choosing prints for her walls or mine. She was a good pal and always up for some fun and capital C culture. 

I have a photograph of my mother sitting on a shelf above my desk. She’s standing at the center of a group of elderly people—people about my current age—holding a Gray Panther sign.  She’s been marching, as she had marched for decades and for so many progressive causes. She’s in her element and she looks so, so happy.    

Images of her smile, slightly shy and slightly sly, come to me often now.  They are unbidden but probably not surprising—maybe because I’m conscious and alive at just the age when she had begun her ineluctable decline into dementia. I wish I could hug her and thank her and tell her how wonderful she was, how lucky I was to have her.  But she is long gone, and maybe I’m thinking about the days when I will be gone and remembered, however I’m remembered, by my children.