Walking the Wall

When something terrible happens to someone else, people
often use the word “unbearable.” Living through a child’s death, a
spouse’s, enduring some other kind of permanent loss–it’s unbearable,
it’s too awful to be borne, and the person or people to whom it’s
happened take on a kind of horrible glow in your mind, because they are
in fact bearing it, or trying to: doing the thing that it’s impossible
to do. The glow can be blinding at first–it can be all you see–and
although it diminishes as years pass it never goes out entirely, so
that late some night when you are wandering the back pathways of your
mind you may stop at the sudden sight of someone up ahead, signaling
even now with a faint but terrible light (p.9, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, by Ann Packer).

I always find it fascinating how so often what we are
reading coincides with other things we see or hear about and often with our own memories, all pulling
together to make some point that is somehow important enough to reach
out to scattered ideas and images and pull them together for emphasis.
I thought the beginning of this book was powerful and the point that it
made, and then today on a lazy Sunday afternoon I sat down with my
knitting to watch (listen to) the Joy Luck Club and I could feel the
string pull to gather in the ideas. It was devastating to watch these
mother’s and daughter’s and the miscommunication that came from not
really understanding the other, not really seeing the other, all
magnified by the cultural differences. Each of these women had gone
through an experience that marked them, changed them, made them relate
to their daughters differently–but the daughters couldn’t see that
“horrible glow” that happens to people, or could see it but didn’t
understand where it came from. So they spent most of their lives not
connecting, it was very sad.

I know I had that glow when Michael was so sick, I know that I looked
in such a way that people didn’t know what to say to me, and so most
often said nothing. I remember walking around and wondering how
it was that the world was still moving, one day I would look at a
mother laughing with their child and be angry, how could they be
laughing when my child was dying, I would rage inside. Another day it
might be the opposite and a mother might be yelling at their child and
I just wanted to grab her and shake her until her teeth rattled and
scream, “What is wrong with you!? Your child is healthy, make her
happy!” I know that the experience changed me, it changed me in
positive
ways, but it also changed me in at least one negative way that I am
aware of (and work to counter act) changing the way that
I relate to my children on some levels, and it bothers me that they
might grow up and wonder, like the daughters of these women, why I was
that way. I hope that I have fixed it well enough, or can one day
explain it well enough and much sooner than these mothers managed.

The scene I found the most poignant was the one with June (Ming-Na Wen)
and her mother when the daughter finally confronts her mother about
never being “enough” for her…and for once her mother hears what she
is really saying underneath it and tells her more than once, “I. See.
You.” It would seem that is what we want from so many of our
relationships, to really be seen as we are, not through expectations
and their desires for us, but for who we are–and to not just be seen,
but to be enough, just as we are. Enough.