Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

It’s a new day and a new year. Like the Roman god Janus, I am looking both ahead and back. As little as two or three years ago, this would have bothered me, because I knew that the past had some sort of grip on me that I could never quite elude, no matter how consciously I tried, no matter how many blog posts about “living in the present” I wrote; no matter how many books, meditations, and messages reminding me “the present is a gift” that I consumed.

Things are different now. Understanding why the past held so much power and seeing the many ways in which it affected my present lets me live comfortably with yesterday.

Awakening Memory by Tom Morris is a book I purchased last April, after learning of its existence through a post by a local artist, whose art is featured on the cover. The long subtitle, “How to Use Memoir Writing to Explore Where You Have Been, Who You Are, and Where You Are Going,” was intriguing enough to make me pull the trigger, and it has gone back and forth between the IN PROCESS shelf and the one that holds books written by people with last names from Montgomery to O’Brien. This morning I pulled it off the IN PROCESS shelf, where it has mostly been languishing among about a dozen other books and found a couple of interesting passages. I’ll share one here:

The best memoirists seek self-knowledge distilled from doubt and questions. This can be challenging work. Only consider how easily, and often unawares, we can “adjust” (“forget,” invent, remake, conventionalize) the past to serve some idea of our self and “life”; how readily we can “edit” memories for enlistment in acts of wishful dissembling; the difficulty of disentangling who our “I” is from who it has been made to be; how we normalize what shouldn’t be adapted to; and the aches, the resentments, the willing of “wellness” and “competence,” the emotional blankness, the masking, and the platitudes, … each of which is a sign of frustrated life.

What Morris is describing sounds like the repressions of childhood trauma (which may be as “innocuous” as not being allowed to express your feelings). These can manifest as fears; anxieties; narcissism; a drive to achieve, excel, be recognized, respected, or even understood. We might think there’s something wrong with us because we don’t quite fit in; we may try to reconcile ourselves to what is “normal,” even when (especially when) we know it’s wrong for us (if not for everyone). Alice Miller sums it up succinctly in the opening pages of The Drama of the Gifted Child:

We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it. Most people do exactly the opposite. Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists. They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.

I’ve come to think of it as a wound that’s never healed. We know it’s there, and we work hard to keep it from being scratched, picked at, opened again. We cover it with Band-Aids and get nervous at the thought of running out. A rude comment, an innocent question, or even something silly like losing a video game feels like fingers reaching to strip the gauze and fabric from our skin and we overreact. But the wound won’t heal until we expose it to the air by ripping off the Band-Aid. We won’t know why we fear commitment, get nervous in a social situation, invest too much time and passion in things over which we have no control, like televised sports or politics, until we finally stop trying to cover the wound and start to probe it. Our bodies remember what was done to us as children, when we were powerless to defend or express ourselves, when doing so carried the risk of losing the love of those we needed for our very survival. As Miller says, the risk is gone, and it’s time to let our bodies finally tell their stories.

This is the poem I wrote about my mother, the one that moved me in the right direction, but never quite got me there:

Singing the Chants

My mother held on to the past
like she was clutching a baby to her breast,
trying to keep it an infant forever.

The bone china teacups
never broke, never got stained,
never got used.

The pewter dish, shaped like the sixties
(a wedding gift not to her taste),
never left its box or the house.

Her hope chest, hard to close,
sat as sentinel at the foot of her bed,
perhaps holding all of the hope she ever had.

There was the friend who said something insensitive,
the brother who did not appreciate all she did for him,
the sister who took all my mother thought she had left.

The last time I saw my mother, wasted and woozy,
with four women watching over her—
two of us kin, one bound by love,
and a fourth, assigned by the hospice agency,
she left the room without her body.
I pray she left behind her baggage, too,
but knowing her as I do,
she likely slipped some resentment
somewhere inside her soul,
the way she hid a twenty
in a change purse, an address book, a pocket of,
well, a pocketbook: black in the winter, white in the summer.

I guess no one taught her that the past has to grow, too.
We need to give it legs, so it can walk away when it’s ready.