When my friend and colleague Mary* turned eighty, she told me that there was one thing she really loved about being old. “When I think about my childhood,” she said, “these days I go immediately to all the good memories. The bad ones just don’t seem as present anymore.”
I have thought of her comment often in the years since my mother died.
Like many mothers and daughters, Mom and I had a complicated relationship. The fact that we were very similar in many ways didn’t help. As her best friend told me once, we just rubbed each other the wrong way.
It’s easy to focus on all of the things that went wrong between us, which we did plenty when she was alive. “If you would just stop doing…” Whatever it was, we were both convinced that the other was to blame. Or at least, that was one version of things. We were each also deeply worried that we had caused the problems, but that wasn’t something we were going to admit to each other. I knew I often felt to blame for our difficulties, but I only learned that my mom felt the same way from my dad, after she died.
The kind of psychotherapy I practice, called psychodynamic, insight, or talk therapy, is infamous for causing ruptures between parents and their children. The traditional goal of the therapeutic work was to help clients find ways to understand some of the problematic experiences of childhood that impact their way of being in the world as adults. Unfortunately, there are many problems with this approach. One of the biggest is that it focuses on negative and painful experiences, and sometimes fails to recognize the value of positive, affirming ones. It was only as I got older that I realized my mother was deeply psychologically minded, a sympathetic and caring listener, a loyal and fierce protector, and one of the most generous human beings I’ve ever known. Where I once resented people telling me I reminded them of her, I now take it as a compliment.
It seems that Mary was onto something about aging and memories. A friend recently told me that she had been writing letters to her mother, who has been dead for many years. “Our relationship is better now than it ever was before,” she said. “I’m able to share some wonderful memories of my childhood with her. Why couldn’t I do that when I was younger?”
Another friend has been going through letters her mother saved. “She has all the letters I sent to her from camp and college and after that as well,” my friend said. “I’m slowly reading them – and I’m amazed at how much I’d let myself forget. I’ve spent years thinking about the painful moments, but almost none thinking about the happy times.”
Unfortunately, modern psychotherapy has much to answer for in terms of those forgotten good memories. It seems to me that my colleagues and I can sometimes be so focused on childhood trauma that we fail to give credit to parents who, while flawed and sometimes painfully hurtful, also provided important positive experiences to their children.
Fortunately, Mary wasn’t alone in discovering that age offers a new perspective on those relationships. Numerous authors are echoing her words to me. Take a look at Hilda Chazanovitz’ poignant essay about her “loving, complex relationship” with her mother (click here to read it), and Kristine Lloyd’s essay on Oldster
These articles, along with my friend and colleague Judith Ruskay Rabinor’s touching book, The Girl in the Red Boots, are powerful reminders of how much our perspective — and memory — shifts as we age. I wish I could have shared some of the warm and loving memories about my mom that have been surfacing in recent years. I know we still would have argued and fought and even hurt one another’s feelings, but it would have been nice to have more of the positive mixed in with the other stuff. I hope this post will be enough encouragement for those of you whose mothers are still with you to say some of those things, not just on Mother’s Day, but throughout the year. They won’t magically shift a difficult relationship, but they might be a starting point.
And, if you’re not there yet, or your mom is no longer alive, maybe, as a gift to yourself on Mother’s Day, you could write your own essay about the complexity of your relationship with your mother, or your children, or someone who has been like a mother to you. It doesn’t have to be a fancy piece of writing. A page or two—maybe just a paragraph—of memories and thoughts and feelings. See if you can find a way to describe the mix of emotions that go into that relationship. Because complexity is what makes rich and meaningful relationships.
*names and identifying info changed to protect privacy
Photo credit: 123RF Stock Image ID: 201271822 (photographer Inkdrop)