Parenting and Our Parents
Carl Jung said deep transformation happens in the presence of images. They speak to the depths of our soul in a healing way. These transformative images are the core and foundation of In.Sight. They take the form of a story, an essay, a poem, a song, a play, a movie, a dream, an inner vision, a piece of art or even a photograph. After these kinds of encounters, we are not the same because we see things differently.
For me, there is a transformative encounter with the featured image of the child cradled in its parent’s arms. It speaks to the gift I received from mine, especially my father. He gave me the fullness of myself, adoring me in my glory and my imperfection, somehow miraculous in his eyes.
There are no words. Just a feeling of being gazed upon with loving adoration. As I reflect on this image I know that I am deeply and profoundly loved to my very core.
The opportunity to see myself through his eyes was his gift to me that changed my life. Something I can keep and something I can pass on.
We are blessed to be a blessing. That’s our parent/child connection at its very best.
You know his heart is in the right place even if his message is not.
This month we offer Brian Doyle’s Advice to My Son. It’s about the joys and TRIBULATIONS of raising a son (or daughter). If you have a child, I am sure Doyle’s experiences with his son will provoke and inspire you to share your stories.
Also presented Forever Five Years Old by Mary Schmich. There is a fully mature competent adult and an inner child who is still 5 years old in all of us. And no matter how old we get we still miss our mother.
We wonder why we don’t go to see her more even when she makes us crazy which is just about every time we get together with her.
And lastly the poem Singing in the Kitchen by Carrie Newcomer. Her mother was a cautious and private person who when she sang was bold and courageous and intentional in the way she addressed the world. Is it okay to make a joyful noise? Is it okay to live our life singing with full abandon even if we sing in the key of Q…which is most all of us?
We will read as a meditation and reflect on Poem for the Family by Susan Cataldo.
Click on the red links in text to download pdf’s of the essays and poems.
(Advice to My Son, Forever Five Years Old, Singing in the Kitchen, Poem for the Family)
Advice to My Son
Brian Doyle
Don’t eat that. Do ask questions. Do not use that tone of voice with me, young man. Do pick up the wet towel from the floor and hang it either on the closet door or on the back of your bedroom door or in the bathroom as you have been asked to do since the beginning of recorded history. Do not play my old records at 78 revolutions per minute and sing along like you are a squirrel on major recreational medicine. Do ask the girl out even if you are absolutely sure she will say no and your friends will berate you and her friends will point you out in the hallway and whisper the words doofus and geek. Do not do your math homework on the bus early in the morning when you know and I know that you have a history test first period and a science test second period and you have technically actually studied for neither of these rigorous intellectual challenges. Do pick up your own plate after dinner and rinse it in the sink and contemplate the remote possibility of actually picking up any other single dish or plate on the table and bringing it all the way in from the dining room to the kitchen which is as you know a yawning chasm of about seven feet. Do not keep answering a question with a question in a clear and deliberate effort to drive your mother into a frenzy awesome in its implications because if your mother loses her quick and supple mind we will all be in the poorhouse peeling mice for a living. Do write your thank-you notes to aunts uncles grandparents and friends of the family who have showered you with more cash for your birthday than your father has ever in his whole life had on his person or indeed except in miraculous moments in the bank. Do not bump, strike, or hammer your brother or your sister at any time whatsoever no matter who started what or who looked at whom in a manner that clearly and inarguably was a proposal to pummel. Do answer me in a clear and reasonable tone when I ask such forthright questions as: Did you pick up the wet towel from the floor or Have you studied for your history and science tests or Did you or did you not commit an egregious foul upon the corporal person of your brother? Do not leap upon, roll upon, do somersaults upon, do jumping-jacks upon, conduct wrestling matches upon, eat, or use any type of writing or coloring implement upon any bed, chair, couch, table, or counter in the house. Do learn to dribble and shoot the basketball with your left hand because being able to dribble and shoot with both hands is a rare and precious skill and may lead to a professional career that will keep us from the aforementioned peeling of mice in the poorhouse. Do not cut a guy at the knees while playing football because in my experience that leads to bruises in colors even your mother the painter has not imagined in the most feverish of her brilliant dreams. Do get a haircut once a decade on general principle because I say so and I am the dad. Do not think that I have any serious and final answers to any of the serious and pressing questions of life but do know that I love you with a love ferocious and inarticulate and thorough and mysterious and tidal and always will love you even when you have not as yet picked up the wet towel on the floor which if you do not pick that up soon I am going to roar in such a manner that birds in faraway countries will startle and wonder what has shivered the air beneath their holy and extraordinary wings.
Any questions?
FOREVER FIVE YEARS OLD
Mary Schmich
From Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to me now
Sometimes lately I snap awake in the middle of the night and say out loud, “I miss my mother.” In that moment, I feel both middle-age and 5 years old, and my mother appears in front of me as a woman both young and ancient.
Lying there in the dark, I often feel her fingers graze my neck the way they did one Thanksgiving afternoon when she was 35 and I lazed in her lap while she fiddled with my hair.
And always on those wakeful nights, I feel what my fingers feel all these years later whenever I lean down to hug her hello or goodbye. I feel her papery, soft skin and the shrinking bones that seem hardly sturdier than eggshells.
Finally, I sink back to sleep, away from the black questions of 3 a.m., away from wondering: How will I bear it when my mother’s gone? Why don’t I see her more while she’s still here?
There are perfectly good reasons I don’t see my mother more. They’re the same reasons millions of other people don’t see their mothers more. We live in a world that makes it easy and acceptable for children and their parents to live like citizens of independent countries.
I have a life and people I care about in the city where I live. My mother has a life and people she cares about in the city where she lives. To see each other, we have to jump the hurdles of money, time and distance. The busier I am and the frailer she gets, the higher these hurdles seem.
Like so many people I know, I tell myself that the geographical gap between me and my mother – to whom I am otherwise very close – is natural, even right. Parents send their children into the world like kites, and the generous ones, the brave ones, the ones like my mother, eventually relax their grip on the string and take both pride and courage from watching their children fly.
Or so I tell myself. The adult in me believes it; the 5-year-old just wants her mama.
And that’s the problem. Inside most every busy, competent adult is a 5-year-old who still needs her mother. The older my mother gets, the more often that 5-year-old in me emerges in the middle of the night, grieving prematurely for a loss that, with some luck, will not come for a long time.
“You feel that way even though she probably made you crazy the last time you talked to her, right?” says a friend who is made routinely crazy by a mother she adores.
Of course my mother makes me crazy. Doesn’t yours? And she makes me crazier now than she ever did when I was younger. Now she makes me crazy just by getting old. The 5-year-old in me wants her to cut it out. Get over it. Shape up, Mother.
My impatience is irrational, unfair, immature, and I would never admit it if so many other perfectly reasonable adults hadn’t admitted the same unreasonable, childish thoughts to me.
The craziness I feel over my mother getting old – the impatience and anger bred of fear – is compounded by the distance. From 2,000 miles away, all I can do is listen, advise, harangue and hope across the telephone wires.
“I decided I was going to die,” my mother, who never complains, said on the phone not long ago. She slipped this fact into our chitchat as idly as if she were announcing her plans for breakfast.
She laughed. I didn’t. She explained the symptoms that for several days had led her to this conclusion.
“So,” she said, “I started getting my affairs organized. You know, that old thing of not wanting to be wearing dirty underwear when you go to the hospital.”
She said she was better now, however, and had decided to live another 20 years. She was still laughing. I still wasn’t. I hung up and bought a plane ticket.
And on this Mother’s Day, my inner 5-year-old would like to make a suggestion to all the adult 5-year-olds out there: Go see your mother. Let her make you crazy while she still can.
Singing in the Kitchen
Carrie Newcomer
My mother sang with full abandon
With the kitchen radio
When she was washing dishes.
She liked the old songs,
And she’d swing her hips,
Sashaying as much as a woman can
When elbow-deep in soapy water.
I would sit on the hardwood steps
Filled with pride and wonderment,
Whispering into my dog’s ear,
With sage five year-old assurance,
“My mother has the voice of an angel.”
As I recall, my dog agreed.
Years later,
Standing side by side on Sunday morning,
I was horrified,
In the way only a teenager can be horrified
When her mother is singing
Loudly and confidently,
Completely and consistently
Off key,
In church,
In public,
In front of her friends.
But now I understand
That my mother was a cautious soul,
Private and intentional,
And so I am grateful
That she taught me how to hold my little sister’s hand
And look both ways before I crossed the street.
But I am also thankful
That either she did not know,
Or she did not care,
That her voice was not smooth or perfectly pitched.
She sang anyway,
Because some things just have to be
Exactly what they are,
And a song must be sung
One way or another.
Poem for the Family
by Susan Cataldo
Before I went to sleep, the soft lamplights
from the tenements across the street,
still, in the night, resembled peace.
There is something I forgot to be grateful
for. But I’m not uneasy. This poem
is enough gratitude for the day. That leaf
tapping against the window, enough
music for the night. My love’s even
breathing, a lullaby for me.
Gentle is the sun’s touch
as it brushes the earth’s revolutions.
Fragrant is the moon in February’s
sky. Stars look down & witness,
never judge. The City moves
beneath me, out of sight.
O let this poem be a planet
or a haven. Heaven for a poet
homeward bound. Rest my son’s head
upon sweet dreams & contentment.
Let me turn out the light to rest