Psychotherapy

My oldest daughter is talking to someone. She is talking to someone outside of her peer group, someone of my peer group, about me. She is seeing a therapist. It is my own version of I Stand Here Ironing, Tillie Olsen’s amazing short story published 1961. My daughter is hardly a child at 28, and she is working through stuff, of which of course I am supportive. I think talk therapy is amazing. I think that in therapy, we have the opportunity to find a way to connect with someone who has all sorts of talents and insights different from our friends, our families or our co-workers. Therapy gives a person a dedicated amount of time and space, and a safe place to talk and be listened to. I believe it can be cathartic. I believe it can be healing, and I believe it can be hell on moms.

Because therapy still has vestiges of blaming mom. It seems that most of our ideals of American life really don’t go back to the fifties, they go back much further than that. And from what I understand, once upper class women had ‘help’ around the house, they didn’t have much to do, so then their responsibility was to raise moral children. It was their job. This was not from the fifties, especially since we now know, many families in the fifties were miserable and some moms were on tranquilizers, and some were drinking and some were well, let’s just leave it at miserable. Staying home in the suburbs was not the pretty picture some have painted. I'm sure lots of moms were just trying to keep themselves, and their children alive in the fifties, just like moms always have. My own mom, in the fifties was busy having children, eight of them!

The fifties too, saw mostly white men studying communication and the family, outside of context, and deciding what was 'best' for families. If some of our values/norms come from this past, they come from this privileged past. From people who held onto beliefs from the distant past, like mothers are responsible for the morality of their children. These are the people who had the means to become doctors, and psychologists and time to do research (often on the less privileged) and write books. I would say, these views were often patriarchal and privileged. Even someone like Phil Zimbardo, who seems like a pretty smart guy and who facilitated the Stanford Prison Experiment had to have his girl-friend intervene, she was like, “Dude, what are you thinking?”

Now families being what they are, I seriously don’t believe that people have changed much over a whole lot of time. Read the Old Testament, and you have Jerry Springer, and Oprah and all the trauma and drama we have now. Think about it, sweet Mary, mother of Jesus was a teen mom, who got pregnant before marriage, and this, this was moving into the New Testament. One young mom raises the Messiah, and wow, this really raises the bar. We are young girls, we have sex, we have babies, and now we are supposed to understand how to raise a healthy young person into a healthy young adult and everything and anything we do and say, can and will be used against us in the coming years.

Who could imagine this life-long gig, and there are days I wonder, can I keep doing this? There is no disclaimer for mothers that reads: Birther beware, you will be a mother for a long long time, and you may not live long enough to unravel all the secrets of the universe to becoming a good parent. So then we have to be the ‘good enough’ mother. The mother who can forgive her own past mistakes and just keep loving both herself and these people who used to be your children and are now adults and are asking you why?

Ok, this is what my youngest told me not too long ago. “Mom, you are our mother, you will always be our mother. You can’t just be done now, and say, ‘I was a good mother,’ it doesn’t work like that. You are not done, some days, when we like you and we think you have been good to us, we will say, ‘You are a good mother.’ And some days, when we are angry with you, we will think you are a crappy mother, and that’s just how life is. You don’t get to choose if you are a good mother, that’s for your children to decide.”

At first I was upset, tears in my eyes, wanting some closure to this mother gig. After all, my youngest is now twenty, and I’ve given nearly 30 years of my life to this, mostly all on my own. But she was right, I’m not done, I’ll never be done, there is no closure to motherhood and my children have the right, even the responsibility to interpret their lives, and my part in them, however they choose.