My mother, myself: how her profession influenced - and reflects - my own work
|
Version 0 of 1. I had been living in Los Angeles for a little over a year when my parents came to visit – finally, reluctantly. They were upset that I’d moved so far away from Chicago; they would have preferred I relocate to New York City, but they told me that they just wanted me to be happy. As we were driving down the city’s winding streets, in the course of a broader conversation, Mom turned around and said to me: “You know I heard that kids of psychiatrists are the craziest of all.” That is indeed something people say. But the cliche’s gist is that psychiatrist parents mess up their offspring, but watching my mother work instilled qualities that led directly to my choice to be a writer. I have a childhood memory of one of my mother’s patients, a woman I’ll call Bonnie, ringing our home phone. She was always looking for my mother late in the evening. We never knew how she got that number, but my mom always took her calls. As my father would mutter under his breath, cursing Bonnie for calling again, I would wonder if she was OK. I know my mom did, too, because she always picked up the phone and talked to her in a calm voice, explaining that the voices in her head weren’t real. I considered following my mom into the mental health field, though via social work or psychology, because I never understood her fascination with administering drugs. Psychology seemed like a reasonable path because, like my mother, I was sensitive to that point where it could be hard to differentiate emotional boundaries between me and another person. Though my mother and I share this, we rarely discuss it. Instead, it becomes apparent through our chosen professions. Mom spends time listening to patients’ thought patterns and ideas, perched in an office on the fifth floor of a lime-green building in Chicago, while I, a writer, inevitably find myself listening to and inspired by ideas around me. Like my mother, I am listening for stories I can tell — a narrative throughline, a theme or moment that sparks synchronicities, magical-seeming events that unfold in unexpected ways. The thing that we both know is, sometimes it’s easy to get lost in someone else’s story. It is, after all, part of both our jobs. The trick is mastering when to return to our own narratives. For my mom, this return happens through exchanges with others that are separate from the delicate conversations she has for work. On a recent trip to Chicago, Mom had been going on about a beautician she goes to, almost religiously, for her manicures and pedicures. She is a Russian Jewish immigrant named Inna – a short, stout woman whose aggressive care-taking reminds me of my mother’s mother. My mom and I had never gotten a mani/pedi together — something I assumed was a rite of passage for most mother-daughter relationships — and so I asked her if we could go. Rather than encountering a salon full of other patrons, we ended up at Inna’s house. In a back room, I placed my foot on her knee and she painted my toenails while she barked at my mother as I remember my grandmother doing, commanding her to take better care of herself. My grandmother has been dead for years, but Inna is alive and well. Mom’s need to be reminded about basic self-care reminds me of my own patterns, getting so wrapped up in whatever I’m writing that I forget to eat. It’s not something I do on purpose; writing is hyper-stimulating, and eating seems boring in comparison. But I’ve learned how to do it, like mom does, by reaching out to others, mostly older friends and mentors. We’re just too similar – and lack enough boundaries – to be the reality check for one another. Her devotion to others’ stories made me who I am, but I had to learn from others how to preserve that sense of self. |