Mama-gram

A few years ago I listened to a voicemail from my mother in which she sounded strangled by fear--she is in the middle of clearing her throat when the voicemail recording kicks in and I had to listen to it twice to know what that choking sound was: subtext. I meant to call her back immediately but conveniently forgot, so the following morning there was an email from her asking if I'd gotten her voicemail.  After the throat clearing, she had asked me to ask my friend Beth to ask her brother and his wife (both radiologists) what they thought about the new information on mammograms. I called my mom and said I would.

I didn’t really want to know what radiologists think about mammograms.  Offhand, I’d say radiologists seem…biased.  Ask me what I think about yoga.  What am I going to say?  “It’s not for everyone”?  No.  Anytime anyone ever asks me what I think about yoga, I say, “Everyone should do yoga every day.” 

So I make a mental note to ask the two radiologists, whom my mom has never even actually met, for their opinion on whether she should get a mammogram now, or in 18 months.  

After I commit to doing this, my mother pursues the conversation a little further, trying to get my opinion, I am puzzled to say, and my response is, “Are you…asking what I think about mammograms?” I am surprised, because she knows I am not a big advocate of western methods, but I am also lured, because I teach in mother-daughter circles that our breasts are our energetic attachment to our female lineage.  So here we are, my mother and I, attached, by breasts.  We have rarely if ever discussed them. My mother did not nurse me.  (An interesting minor detail is that we are at a bank—well, I am, but my mom is 1000 miles away and she is at the bank only by phone.  My dad was a banker for 20 years.  He built banks, for ten more.  He was all about banks. What a context for this conversation.  My parents are divorced, but my dad feels so present to me—since I’m at a bank.  Location, location. I recall that his mother, when she was 89 years old, went to the hospital for her annual mammogram, and was knocked over by an automatic door, and broke her hip!  But her breasts were fine.)

I pull out my car of the bank lot and reply, “Mom. Mammograms don’t save lives.  That is propaganda.  It’s marketing.  Of mammogram equipment.  Sometimes mammograms do find malignant breast lumps.  Sometimes they don’t.  Doctors are wined and dined by people who sell pharmaceutical equipment and meds.  I bet mammograms even actually create breast problems, because every time they give someone a false positive, that woman goes home and worries about her breasts for five long days until her follow-up appointment.”  Perhaps I was being too strident.

“Five days?” my mom says, “Five days? How about six months?” and I am appalled to learn that my mom has been worried sick (her words, not mine) for the last six months about her breasts, because six months ago, she had a false positive—it was only a fold in her breast tissue, they said, after the follow-up—but they advised her to return in six months rather than the usual year because maybe it wasn’t a false positive, maybe there was really something there, and she shouldn’t wait a whole year to find out--just six months. 

So, sitting on that level of dread, my mom heard the new information on tv saying women no longer need an annual mammogram; now you should get one only every two years.  But what about her?  What to do, in her case, already sitting on six months of worry, is her question.  Should she go in, so they could tell her it’s time to officially stop worrying?  Or to officially worry even more? 

I don’t have the answer.  It doesn’t seem like my answer to give.  I say nothing.

“Actually I don’t think I’m going to get breast cancer,” my mom remarks, spontaneously, almost as though she were changing topics. 

“I don’t either,” I say, relieved, and almost puzzled by how she could know this.  When I imagine my mother’s potential toxins…I imagine them in other locations. “You don’t fit in with the profile for women who get breast cancer,” I say, hoping she doesn’t ask me more about the profile, which is based completely on hearsay and intuition and Louise Hay.  “And we don’t have any breast cancer in our family at all, right?” I continue, “so I think your breasts are fine.” 

“I do too,” she says conclusively.

“Well, great!” I say, “Your intuition is your mammogram.”

My mom is somewhat relieved, and then wants to chat about new furniture, and I let her, because I can.  I’m still driving…I have about four miles to listen to her hypothetical floor plan ideas.  Then, as I back into my garage, I make some effort to conclude, and we’re ready to say goodbye.  It had been a satisfying conversation; so many aren’t.  I say goodbye.

“Eat,” she says, out of the blue, the implication, I guess, being that I don’t.  My instinctive response would be:  I do eat.  So I tried something new.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m not going to eat until Saturday,” I teased.

“Well, how’s our Lily?” she asks, as if changing the subject.

“Lily is great.  She’s the happiest, healthiest person I know.”  Which is true.

“Well, do you really think she eats enough protein?  I don’t.” 

My instinctive response would be:  She gets plenty of protein.  So I go with the tease, again.  Knowing what I know about the creative power of my words, it does not bear repeating here because it was horrifying.  But my clever description of a teenager who doesn't eat protein disarmed her.

I assured her that her granddaughter is healthy.  My mother has regularly asked the protein question since Lily was one.  There is nothing I can say or do that would make my mom feel satisfied that Lily has gotten enough protein in the last 13 years.  Rather than continuing to try, to assure her and provide evidence of adequate protein intake, I was liberated by her words--I had an epiphany: that she is hanging onto us using a chain called “worry,” and rather than trying to convince her that there is no need to hang onto it, I could release my end.  It seems like only a minor release to, in turn, let go of any link I have unconsciously attached to my daughter, trusting that the Universe will support her with the resources she needs to be happy and successful on her own terms. No worries.

It all started because…breast milk apparently did not have enough protein, according to Lily’s grandmother.  If you look in my baby book that my mother diligently filled out for my first three years, until my brother was born, you will see that my first meal from a jar was...lamb.  When I was four days old.  She feels about meat the way I feel about yoga and Beth’s brother and sister-in-law feel about x-rays.  You should eat it. Every day. And my intention as a daughter and a mother and as a teacher of mothers and daughters, is to allow our difference in beliefs to coexist peacefully.

I sigh and remind myself that I teach moms to allow the Divine Feminine energy of our ancestry to be not a chain, but, simply, a mirror and a lens.  She mirrors for me a way that I don’t want to be. And I can, perhaps, be a new lens that helps her see the world. Or not.

Having released the rope that binds me to my mother’s happiness has allowed me to notice that she is not actually comfortable being happy.  She is not comfortable with any answer that doesn’t provide something to worry about.  My disarming tactic is to say the opposite of what I’ve been saying all my life.  I didn’t know what was going to happen the first time, or what will happen next time.  Shaking up the energy allows us to create something new.

There is nothing I need to do or change in regard to my interactions with my mother.  If you don’t want to rock the boat, there is no need.  But I am sort of a rocker of boats, so it’s hard not to go there.  What’s more important than that is to become acquainted with the dynamic and make sure I am not passing it down, un-evolved, to my daughter. 

My Brother as Mirror: A Family Drama

I sat next to my brother at my dad’s wedding dinner five years ago.  It was difficult to avoid; my mother wasn’t there—since it was my dad’s wedding—and there we were, the close relatives of my father, all two of us.  My daughter spent the evening writing funny notes to my cousin, sitting beside me but in a totally different world—she is so blessed—while I sat beside my brother listening to his monologue, which was one third victimhood, one third scarcity and lack, and one third humorous commentary on current events.  I tried not to wonder if he had showered recently, or if he was high, and just observed with my best witness consciousness—not the easiest point of view to attain at a family event, but I had just come from a long and blissful week of tantra in Northern California.  I had seen dolphins and whales from edge of a cliff.  While having sex. The last thing I wanted to do was turn around and spend—well, money, first of all, and—time in the midst of my relatives.  The Universe was offering me a buzz kill, and I was declining.  I’d smile through it.  I love the pictures from my dad’s wedding; I look radiant.  Darn glad my dad was marrying a woman 20 years younger who is an elder care giver.  I could not have written a better plot for myself.  So I had managed to buy tickets for my daughter and myself that let us land in time for the wedding and leave the following morning, which felt very corporate, and I kind of liked it. 

Somehow my father chose an excellent Romanian restaurant, and although there was practically nothing I could eat, given my austere Ayurvedic dietary restrictions, it was certainly a huge step up from what I’d expected when I’d heard the words “Romanian restaurant.”  Plus I got to dance with my dad, which is always a treat, because he chants the beat in my ear, which, one, really demystifies the whole dancing thing for me and, two, makes me feel taken care of.  One two three, one two three.

Sitting beside my younger brother I received knowing glances from our aunts and cousin, who see him more regularly than I do—which isn’t difficult, since we don’t know each other’s phone numbers and my brother hasn’t showed up for a family event in several years.  But they know him.

“Dad stole three grand from me,” my brother mentioned, after his witty and articulate update on the state of the bumblebees and how it is affecting the future economy. 

“He did?” I asked.  Maybe someone with…balls…or a few Landmark Forums would have called him on it immediately, but I wasn’t there to start a fight.  The last time I had called him on anything—years ago, certainly well before my now 12-year-old was born—he had thrown a beer at me, from across the room.  He had held onto the glass, but just whipped the beer itself across the kitchen, and as I stood, stunned, wondering if I was in a past life memory about being cowboys in a saloon, my dad had gotten a dish towel and started soaking it up.  A pragmatic move I guess, as opposed to holding onto any shred of hope that Nick would suddenly snap into some level of sanity, or even momentary clarity, let alone clean it up.

I sat at my dad’s wedding dinner and looked at the sumptuous, beef-laden platters and listened to the drama of the three grand, eagerly awaiting the moment when I was alone with my dad, so I could mention it. 

“That’s ridiculous,” my father said, when we took a walk in the fresh air later in the evening.  I of course had known it was ridiculous but just wanted to have that moment of sharing, bonding, with my dad, more amusement on my part than his.  He said that if anything, my brother had taken money from him, mostly in the form of bills that my dad has paid of my brother’s without being reimbursed.

Once I had returned to Chicago and friends asked how the wedding was, I said, “My brother is a living tribute to my family’s deepest ancestral dysfunctions.”  Where I am hyperaware of any shred of victimhood, or feeling of financial lack, and consequently change my attitude or my energy or my verbiage on the spot, my brother spouts it out, uncontrolled; ancestral lack is running his life. 

Granted, a little medication would take the edge off for him, if he’d consent to a prescription, but I am not sure how, even with medication, a person could dig himself out of a hole he doesn’t know he’s in, and I knew during our conversation and actually ever since the thrown beer, that to point out to him that he is responsible for his own life results in conflict.  We were surrounded by food.  I was wearing an absolutely heavenly dress.  Not a good combination if he were to get angry.  I was unwilling to be a perpetrator of even the most subtle truth, under those circumstances, or any, actually, which is why I don’t know my brother’s phone number.

“Do you mind sitting on the other side of me,” he had requested, “so I can hear you; I can’t hear out of this ear because of my accident.  I’m just lucky I have any ear at all. Hey, if you sit on the other side of me, you won’t have to look at the carnage.”  

That was enticing motivation to change seats.  The accident—that would be the DUI, the result of which in Arizona is an immediate loss of driving privileges.  He rides a bike everywhere, or his girlfriend drives him—his girlfriend, whom he apparently hates, so much he wouldn’t go visit her after her mastectomy, his girlfriend who is the exact same age as my dad’s bride, who I am thrilled to say is indeed a happy, nurturing, Romanian eldercare giver twenty years younger than my dad, which gives me no end of relief, since my brother is clearly ill-equipped to handle caring for my dad, if ever the time comes, even though they both live in Phoenix.  I suspect my dad will outlive my brother, though.

My father has been to Romania several times in the last 15 years, representing a bank that never did get off the ground, leaving him and my mom fairly devoid of savings—between the bank and my brother’s legal bills.  My parents would rather have no money at all than have their son in jail, where he deserves to be, where he might actually have the valuable experience of hitting bottom.  So—my inheritance.  That’s where it is!  Two DUI accidents and a bank that was so bound for success that even I invested a few thousand.  No one in my nuclear family has a single cent.  And it’s not our fault.

On one of my dad’s trips to Romania he went to visit family.  Before his first trip, his business associate had informed him that he had been using the equivalent of hillbilly Romanian grammar all his life—my dad is quite the English stickler and would be horrified if I ever said the word “ain’t,” which he apparently was saying in Romanian.  Who knew?  He just spoke the Romanian his parents had spoken.  But that wasn’t going to cut it in the banking industry.  Or even in the city.  So he brushed up.  And on one of his trips he went out to the country to visit relatives he’d never met.  He knew a couple of cousins in the city, a professor and a dentist.  But the other side of the family was a day trip.  So he arrived, probably nattily dressed, because my mom had trained him well, and was offered wine, which they served him in a tin cup.  He drank, politely. After he  eventually placed the empty tin cup back on the table—apparently he was the only one partaking---the head of the household picked up the cup, refilled it, and took a sip, which is when my father realized that this family owned only one wine cup.

I have been told that our ancestors were shepherds—that my father’s father was a shepherd.  It is an absolutely stunning realization to me, that my edge—it is just an edge and not a full-blown acted out fear, not a shadow that I’d don and act out of at a wedding dinner for example—that my edge of slight, teeny tiny fear of homelessness stems from these shepherds.  My life made so much more sense, once I’d learned of the shepherds.  No wonder I dislike and even fear moving.  No wonder I was destined to choose a life partner who would lose all of our money, plus. --Plus enough more to potentially keep us in debt forever.  It would be so much cooler if we were vampires.

I would like to be able to break in now with a riveting drama.  Something that ties together the one wine cup, with our inheritance. This is all I have: my brother and I have three alcoholic grandparents, just short of 100% destiny toward self-destruction.  So we as siblings inherited a wine cup, but only one.  And he got it.  It could have been a silver spoon, but nooo.  If you do the genetics, there is a certain probability, a likelihood of who will inherit being a victim to alcohol: 50-50.  I win.

Maybe there is something else at work in the world of families, something else less quantifiable. 

I received an unquantifiable gift sitting next to my brother.  I am still stunned, when I realize what an incredible mirror he is, spouting off the worst of what our lineage has to offer.  Our family can’t do anything!  We can’t even hear!  Due to circumstances beyond our control!  And we couldn’t afford to do anything anyway, even if we had the freedom, because we’re broke; money’s hard to make, and there is great unfairness involved.  

Thank you, Nick! 

My mom told me, a few years ago--and why she never thought to tell me sooner, I’ll never know; had it just occurred to her that second?--that three of her father’s three brothers had committed suicide.  Let me rephrase that.  All three of my grandfather’s brothers killed themselves.  What’s up with that?  I’m not going anywhere with that, I’m just wanting to take the ancestral burden off of my dad’s cup-sharing relatives.   Lest anyone blame my father for my brother’s carnage, I just needed to mention that my mom’s side of the family has some undertow as well. 

I am sorry that my brother has turned into such a vivid cartoon of my ancestral dysfunction.  He was a brilliant and creative child, very sensitive, probably too sensitive.  Super cute.  It probably didn’t serve him well, or more likely my parents didn’t know what to do with a sensitive, cute boy.  Neither did they know what to do with a tomboyish girl.  Somehow I managed.  Somehow he didn’t. 

I have invested zero energy in him for so long that I can honestly say I’m near neutral.  He feels more like a second cousin, sad but true.  Sometimes I feel a tiny bit of guilt—it barely registers.  I love whatever energy of him, whatever Love we share, the energy that We both Are.  I am sad that he seems to be a shell around that Love, impenetrable.  There has been a part of me over the years that has wondered if it is my responsibility to pull him up, but I have attempted to resuscitate a few dead men in my life, and I’ve never been successful, and it’s been, ultimately, draining.  

The best I can do is just honor the Light that he is, and when I think of him, hold him in the Light.  Think of him as that Light.  And not as a bottomless pit of wasted money.