There is no question in my mind, that my mother was my first clinical supervisor. From as far back as I can remember, she taught me about people. She taught me how to understand their motivations and she taught me how to manipulate them. She was an expert. Over and over again, she could orchestrate everyone around her to get what she wanted. Partly, it was because she was beautiful and she knew it. But she also had a charisma about her that would charm the horns off of a devil.
My earliest memories are of sitting in her lap and we would talk about people. This goes back as far as I can remember. Only recently have I recognized how special these memories are to me. I can remember talking to her about school and the other kids. She would talk to me about people, relationships and most importantly how to respond to people. One day I told her about Lettie Edens. Lettie was in kindergarten with me and I liked her. I think it was my first crush. The problem was that Lettie wasn’t giving me the time of day. My mother listened to my frustration and then asked me if I was sure I wanted this girl’s attention. Without a doubt I wanted Lettie to spend time with me, but I didn’t have a clue how to pull it off.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what you do. I want you to play hard to get. What that means, is that you should ignore her totally. Pretend that you don’t see her or hear her. You play hard to get with her and you’ll get her attention.” On the surface it sounded like the opposite of what I wanted. But, she was right. Before the week was out, Lettie was asking if she could play with me and spend time with me. My first lesson in manipulation was immensely effective. It took me well into adulthood before I learned I could be more successful with people by being direct, rather than manipulative.
Through the years, she often told me how to handle personal situations. She also modeled how to handle people. She ran the family farm and I witnessed her acute ability to get her way. On more than one occasion I watched her deal with drunk farmhands. She could be compassionate, logical and firm. She handled people like a virtuoso violinist. In the morning, I would sit on her lap and we would talk about people. We would process the events of the day before. In addition, she would encourage me to be a friend to people who didn’t have friends. Subtly, she was training me to talk to people who sometimes don’t have people to talk to. She taught me many things. However, there are two memories that stand out over the rest. I believe they helped save my life.
After my father died, we lived alone in the farmhouse for a couple of years. I was attending community college. Without my father there was no buffer between us. We really didn’t know how to be with each other. I was no longer a child, and she was scared to be all alone. I was 19 and really didn’t care at all about college. I wanted to stay out until the middle of the night with my girlfriend. So, my mother and I would fight. When we would fight, there were no holds barred. We both said incredibly mean things to each other. When scenes happen in our house they are just as ugly as scenes in anybody else’s house. Finally, one night she broke through this ongoing battle.
We were having one of our usual fights. We were both screaming and not listening to one another. Finally, she sat down took a deep breath and asked me, “do you know why we have these fights?” I just starred at her. I had no idea. “We are both so sad about losing your father, and we don’t know how to do the sad, so we get angry instead. It’s a way for us to be close, without being too close and crying all the time.” I quietly sat down next to her. In my heart I knew she was right. Once again we cried together. She taught me about emotions and how anger is a terrific mask for sadness.
That was the last time we had one of those fights. But I knew the potential would always be there. After my internship in Connecticut, when she asked me to move home, I said no. I knew we shouldn’t live together again. I didn’t want to go back to being her baby. It was my feeble way of asserting some independence. However, a month later when she was killed, I had to question myself whether I should have moved home. After much work, I know that I was right. The time for us to live together had passed. This leads me to one of the most important things she gave me.
When I started school as a child, I remember my father telling me that I had to stop crying all the time. I just had to stop. I did as I was told. I stopped crying and coincidently, by the time I was in 3rd grade, I was wearing glasses. Although no one will agree with me, I’m convinced holding back the tears, contributed to my decline in vision.
For the next 15 years, crying was not a resource for expressing sadness. However, when my father died, my mother cried openly. We cried together frequently. We never showed this in public. Crying was reserved for being in private. I think she modeled this after Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy had set a standard for how to handle grief in public. However, in private we cried. For a while, we turned the sadness into anger and fought, but she brought us back to the sadness. She taught me to mourn. She taught me to let the pain pass over me and through me. I now see this as entirely ironic that she gave me this gift, as six years later when she was killed, allowing myself the tears saved my life. If I had avoided the pain of losing her, I would not have survived. I’m convinced that when you shut those kind of feelings off, they come out somewhere else in the body. We all know people who have died of a broken heart. But she gave me permission to feel my pain and it made all the difference.
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