No one ever wants to be the object of pity. (Except Ex, he may actually enjoy it—I don’t know.) When a friend recently said, “I feel sorry for you sometimes,” I took it hard. It cut like a proverbial knife even though it was offered in the spirit of compassion. No one wants others to feel “sorry.” Empathy; yes, thank you! “Sorry”; in the words of Cee Lo Green:
Yeah. You’ll be humming that tune for the rest of the day. You’re welcome.
Kind people with lives unmarred by certain brands of trauma often cannot understand what it feels like to stand in the shower until the water begins to run cold, to stand dripping, gripping the safety bar with white knuckles, trembling—trying to muster the courage to simply face another day. Such people can’t really feel anything other than sorry.
It is a long, long way up from the bottom of a pit of despair. It’s dark down there, and damp; rat-infested, wormy, and miserable. With a lot of clawing and God’s grace I got out—but Mary-Mother-of-God, I sure don’t want to go back! Not EVER. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
An entire lifetime can be wasted in fear and worry.
Or not.
I am working very hard to choose not.
If our minds are like gardens to be intentionally cultivated as some people say, then we have to take stock of what is our own soil. You see, I’ve done some gardening. A very long time ago, I moved to a little cabin—I called it a little cabin because that sounded romantic. “Whiskey shack” didn’t sound nearly so lovely. In the sunniest spot, the most perfect site for a garden, there had once been a driveway. When I say a driveway, you may picture a neat strip of suburban concrete. A whiskey shack driveway would have been a place where whiskey-drinkers parked their junky cars, including a collection of cars that stopped running and were waiting for the day when someone would get around to going to the junkyard for some necessary part.
The cars were long gone by the time I moved in and appraised the proposed garden site. It was gravely and weedy, but sunny. I rented a tiller and my then-boyfriend (Ex) wrestled it through the plot three times. The soil was lousy and old pieces of car parts, rusty tools, and rocks kept turning up. Also, broken bottles and jagged pieces of brown broken cans.
The thing with gardens is, generally the better the soil, the better things grow. That first season I chose plants that were weedy and would tolerate poor soil. I planted a cover crop and worked to improve the growing medium year after year. I weeded, watered, and plucked out the bits of trash that turned up, assembling a little museum of junk on the periphery of the plot. Each year, the garden was more beautiful than the years before. I even grew the flowers for a good friend’s wedding in that bit of Earth. Unlike so many couples I knew then, they are still together.
Oooooh! Daisies!
We had a neighbor who was very quiet and kept to herself. Her house was across the winding gravel road and down a piece from ours. She remembered the rusting cars, and the rough men who tended them. She was probably remembering them the day she walked by with her little dog and gestured over the fence toward the mass of daisies bobbing gayly in the June breeze.
“I love you,” she had said quietly.
_____________
“You look nice,” a friend said yesterday. (I nearly always look nice, even though I may have earlier applied a cool pack to reduce the swelling from crying .)
When a person grows up knowing—knowing—that their own mother doesn’t love them—forever after, it is tough to believe that they are worthy of love. It’s an epic mindf*ck, to put it indelicately. (Note to self: after forty-some years, ya gotta get over it. Seriously, you do. It is all part of that mind-garden-tending, tossing aside the rusty cans and pulling up ugly weeds. Sometimes it’s dirty work.)
Truck nuts. Yeah.
I am not a perfect mom, but I am a good mom. Sometimes I’m even an incredible mom. Sometimes, I’m the kind of mom that makes other moms wonder if they are good-enough moms, and they are—they nearly always are. They are probably better moms than I could ever be. Like a cowboy with truck nuts, I am compensating for something.
My kids know—perhaps pathologically—that they are loved.
Bonus! A G-rated arrangement of ‘cluck you’ for your edification:
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You certainly are, “the kind of mom that makes other moms wonder if they are good-enough moms”. I think of you often as I’m struggling with some decision or another. I wonder if I’m drinking enough green tea or I think, “She wouldn’t eat that!”. I remind myself if you can be patient with asperger’s then I should be patient with “just kids”.
Our Moms may have labeled us in ways unfair, unjust, untrue but it is up to us to make ourselves who we truly are and live our lives in the manner befitting our true selves. Not saying it is easy, but we’ll walk the road together. You can be “unloved” and I’ll never be good enough and we’ll still turn out ok with great kids.
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