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Posted: September 11th, 2007 at 12:49am By: Janet Conner
My sister Mary got married in the summer of 1995. Siblings get married every day, but this wedding was special. Mary is our baby. Mom was 44 when Mary was born. Today, we know that 44 is not an ideal age for childbearing — old eggs and all that. I had my own child at 41, and the doctor scared the dickens out of me with statistical charts of the likelihood of Down syndrome, spina bifida, and a host of other genetic problems. He insisted I have amniocentesis, and I did not take a deep breath until the test came back normal. Despite the statistics, my son was perfectly healthy. In fact, he was such a joy that at 43 I thought about having another. When I mentioned a second baby to my doctor, he squinted at me over his glasses, "When do you want to schedule a tubal?" I got the message. The risks were just too great.
One reason he was adamant about not pressing my luck is that Mary was born with severe congenital hips, and congenital hips run in families. The ball sockets of Mary's legs were outside her hip bones. Of course she looked fine on the outside and babies lie around most of the time anyway, so no one noticed anything wrong. One day Mom was playing with Mary as she had played with her four previous babies, pulling Mary's legs down straight and then pushing them up to her chin. This maneuver always sent the rest of us into paroxysms of laughter. It sent Mary into screeches of pain. Mom rushed her to the doctor, and the X-rays told the story.
Two days later our baby was in a bizarrely shapen, cold, wet cast from her armpits to her ankles. The cast held her legs sideways from her hips at a sharp 90-degree angle, then down from her knees at another 90-degree angle. No human can hold this position naturally. The pain must have been excruciating. The baby cried for over a week. But we couldn't get past the plaster to comfort her. The one thing we could do was take turns holding a hairdryer to her cast. She got pneumonia anyway.
The cast was changed every few months so that Mary could grow and the ball socket could move incrementally closer to the hip joint. Each change was pure torture on her and on the whole family. Mary spent the first two years of her life on her back in her crib or strapped onto a narrow chair nailed to a wheeled platform. Her sisters, Claire and I, were her primary companions, but we were in school all day, so Mary spent a lot of time in her crib talking with Jocko, her imaginary friend. She made it clear that we had to set a place at the table for Jocko, offer him food, and include him in our conversations. If one of us accidentally sat where Jocko was sitting, Mary would yelp in anger. When she was almost 3, the cast was finally removed and Mary was able to learn to walk.
I tell you all this so that you'll understand the importance of the blind man's story. Every family has an adored baby, but our family had an adored helpless baby who needed around-the-clock care. And that remained Mary's role for most of her life. When Dad asked me, years later, what he could do to help Mary, I said, "Stop buying her cars. Stop paying for her gas. Stop sending her monthly checks. Stop taking care of everything for her. Let her make some mistakes and figure things out for herself." He paused for a moment, and said softly, "I can't do that." Her brothers and sisters weren't much better. We didn't send her money, but we held the belief that she couldn't stand on her own two feet.
But, of course, she could. She managed to graduate from college and get not one but two master's degrees. She managed to get an internship with the Guthrie, a nationally recognized theater company. She managed to get a job as a stage manager and even direct plays. She managed to pass her boards as a mental health counselor. She managed to get a job as a therapist. She managed to fall in love and decide to get married. This last one is particularly important, because in 1995 Mary and Mary'n were at the front edge of the new wave of gays and lesbians willing to stand up and declare out loud that they are entitled to the same recognition and legal protection the rest of us receive automatically through marriage.
On the evening before her wedding, Mary joined us in Claire's hotel room. There were six people in the room talking over one another about what to wear, who'd done what that day, where we should go for dinner — the usual pre-event chaos. "Listen to me," Mary said. We were not accustomed to taking orders from our baby, so she had to say it several times. But finally, it was clear that Mary was not going to let anyone go anywhere until she'd spoken, so we stopped fussing, sat down, and turned to her.
"I heard a story on NPR yesterday," Mary said, "and I think it's important." Yikes, we thought, a story. Oh well. If we sit still and let her talk, this will end, and we can all go to dinner.
"I think this story is really beautiful," Mary went on. "A man had gone blind in his early 20s. Now, in his 40s, the interviewer asked if he still remembered how people looked. 'No,' he said, 'I had to make a conscious decision to stop seeing them as I remembered them. If I tried to hold on to my memory of them, they'd be stuck in time and never allowed to grow. I wanted my friends to be free to change and grow.'"
Mary was right. It was a profound story. And we understood exactly what she was saying. We had to let go of our image of her as our young, helpless baby. We had to let her change and grow into the responsible, professional adult she was. We had to walk into the church the next day to honor the life commitment being made, not by our baby, but by a 38-year-old woman.
I didn't think of the blind man's story again until this summer, when my mother died of dementia. Now, I think I understand it.
If I had introduced you to my mother five years ago when she was 89, you'd have shaken hands with a black-and-white thinker who was certain of herself and of her answers. If you held the same beliefs, well then, you two could have had a delightful conversation. But if you disagreed with her on anything — Clinton, Elian, monetary policy, Roe, owls in Oregon ... anything — you'd have found the conversation cold and short. And it wasn't enough to agree; you also had to treat her with deference and respect. She loathed going to the bank drive-through and hearing people say, "Have a nice day, Laurene." She would correct them: "It is Mrs. Conner." She wasn't a whole lot less formal with us. She signed birthday and Christmas cards with a succinct "Love, Mother."
My mother had little use for frivolity. She did not watch TV or listen to the radio or go to movies. She had a huge collection of classical records, but stopped playing them years ago. She did not read novels. She did not shop. She did not have lunch with friends. She was pretty bad at small talk, and she couldn't bear gossip. "The mark of small minds," she'd say. Unfortunately, listening to her tablemates in her assisted-living apartment talk about their grandchildren ranked right up there with gossip.
It isn't that Mother hated people; it's just that her country and her church were going to hell in that proverbial basket, and in her mind there was a massive amount of work to be done. Prior to dementia taking away her faculties and macular degeneration taking away her sight, you could find my mother on any given day bent over her typewriter pounding out another treatise on the ramifications of the demise of religious orthodoxy.
This was the woman I'd known my entire life. So, imagine my surprise when my brother Larry, Mary and I visited Mom last May, and her caregivers said: "Oh, your mother is such a dear. She is so sweet and funny. We just love her."
Huh.
My brother Larry turned to me and whispered, "Who are they talking about?" We told her caregivers about her sternness, her long, dense, highly documented articles, and they looked at us and said, "Who are you talking about?" We told them she was quite formal, and they patted her forehead and said, "Who? Our Laurene?" Only they pronounced it not to rhyme with Maureen, but with a long A — Lorraine. The mother I knew would have croaked. But now, when a caregiver called out, "Lorraine!" my mother turned her head happily toward the voice. When Larry called out, "Mom!" she didn't move.
Larry and I live across the country and hadn't seen Mom's gradual decline. Mary visited her every other weekend and had intimate knowledge of the transition.
"This is the blind man, isn't it?" I asked Mary. Although she'd told us that story 12 years before, she immediately knew what I meant. "Yes," she said, "Mom has changed dramatically. Dementia has allowed her to change. If you release your perception of her from the past and come to her, open to who she is today, this will be easier for you and for her."
I turned back to look at my mother, swaddled in blankets in her wheelchair being gently spoon-fed pudding by her caregiver. I blinked my eyes. My strict, judgmental mother was gone. The arch-conservative was gone. The staunch Catholic was gone. In fact, I did not see a political person at all. I saw an adorable, frail old woman relishing the care and feeding of people who love her.
I came to this realization late; the blind man knew it long ago: We have to say goodbye to our vision of the past and let people change and grow. When we do, we become free, too. Free from the old relationships, the old expectations, the old problems. Saying goodbye frees us both to live and to love in a new way.
I'm grateful to Mary for teaching me about the blind man twice — at her wedding and in my mother's last days. It's a profound lesson indeed. Another in this incredibly rich goodbye season.
Now, I have a new aspiration: to start seeing like a blind man in all my relationships — starting with my son, who is a brand-new college freshman. I can think of a few perceptions he'd be thrilled for me to release! I'm ready to say goodbye to them, freeing him to grow and freeing me to be a different kind of mom.
If you should see the blind man, tell him I said, "Thank you!"
Next in the series: Saying goodbye to goodbye.
— — —
Janet Conner, S.E. (Spiritual Explorer), is the creator of the Spiritual Geography map and book series. She is currently working on a new book, "Writing Down the Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within," for Conari Press. The Spiritual Geography books are available through Amazon or Spiritual Geography. Contact Janet at {email janetconner@tampabay.rr.com}janetconner@tampabay.rr.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Janet Conner.
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My sister Mary got married in the summer of 1995. Siblings get married every day, but this wedding was special. Mary is our baby. Mom was 44 when Mary was born. Today, we know that 44 is not an ideal age for childbearing — old eggs and all that. I had my own child at 41, and the doctor scared the dickens out of me with statistical charts of the likelihood of Down syndrome, spina bifida, and a host of other genetic problems. He insisted I have amniocentesis, and I did not take a deep breath until the test came back normal. Despite the statistics, my son was perfectly healthy. In fact, he was such a joy that at 43 I thought about having another. When I mentioned a second baby to my doctor, he squinted at me over his glasses, "When do you want to schedule a tubal?" I got the message. The risks were just too great.
One reason he was adamant about not pressing my luck is that Mary was born with severe congenital hips, and congenital hips run in families. The ball sockets of Mary's legs were outside her hip bones. Of course she looked fine on the outside and babies lie around most of the time anyway, so no one noticed anything wrong. One day Mom was playing with Mary as she had played with her four previous babies, pulling Mary's legs down straight and then pushing them up to her chin. This maneuver always sent the rest of us into paroxysms of laughter. It sent Mary into screeches of pain. Mom rushed her to the doctor, and the X-rays told the story.
Two days later our baby was in a bizarrely shapen, cold, wet cast from her armpits to her ankles. The cast held her legs sideways from her hips at a sharp 90-degree angle, then down from her knees at another 90-degree angle. No human can hold this position naturally. The pain must have been excruciating. The baby cried for over a week. But we couldn't get past the plaster to comfort her. The one thing we could do was take turns holding a hairdryer to her cast. She got pneumonia anyway.
The cast was changed every few months so that Mary could grow and the ball socket could move incrementally closer to the hip joint. Each change was pure torture on her and on the whole family. Mary spent the first two years of her life on her back in her crib or strapped onto a narrow chair nailed to a wheeled platform. Her sisters, Claire and I, were her primary companions, but we were in school all day, so Mary spent a lot of time in her crib talking with Jocko, her imaginary friend. She made it clear that we had to set a place at the table for Jocko, offer him food, and include him in our conversations. If one of us accidentally sat where Jocko was sitting, Mary would yelp in anger. When she was almost 3, the cast was finally removed and Mary was able to learn to walk.
I tell you all this so that you'll understand the importance of the blind man's story. Every family has an adored baby, but our family had an adored helpless baby who needed around-the-clock care. And that remained Mary's role for most of her life. When Dad asked me, years later, what he could do to help Mary, I said, "Stop buying her cars. Stop paying for her gas. Stop sending her monthly checks. Stop taking care of everything for her. Let her make some mistakes and figure things out for herself." He paused for a moment, and said softly, "I can't do that." Her brothers and sisters weren't much better. We didn't send her money, but we held the belief that she couldn't stand on her own two feet.
But, of course, she could. She managed to graduate from college and get not one but two master's degrees. She managed to get an internship with the Guthrie, a nationally recognized theater company. She managed to get a job as a stage manager and even direct plays. She managed to pass her boards as a mental health counselor. She managed to get a job as a therapist. She managed to fall in love and decide to get married. This last one is particularly important, because in 1995 Mary and Mary'n were at the front edge of the new wave of gays and lesbians willing to stand up and declare out loud that they are entitled to the same recognition and legal protection the rest of us receive automatically through marriage.
On the evening before her wedding, Mary joined us in Claire's hotel room. There were six people in the room talking over one another about what to wear, who'd done what that day, where we should go for dinner — the usual pre-event chaos. "Listen to me," Mary said. We were not accustomed to taking orders from our baby, so she had to say it several times. But finally, it was clear that Mary was not going to let anyone go anywhere until she'd spoken, so we stopped fussing, sat down, and turned to her.
"I heard a story on NPR yesterday," Mary said, "and I think it's important." Yikes, we thought, a story. Oh well. If we sit still and let her talk, this will end, and we can all go to dinner.
"I think this story is really beautiful," Mary went on. "A man had gone blind in his early 20s. Now, in his 40s, the interviewer asked if he still remembered how people looked. 'No,' he said, 'I had to make a conscious decision to stop seeing them as I remembered them. If I tried to hold on to my memory of them, they'd be stuck in time and never allowed to grow. I wanted my friends to be free to change and grow.'"
Mary was right. It was a profound story. And we understood exactly what she was saying. We had to let go of our image of her as our young, helpless baby. We had to let her change and grow into the responsible, professional adult she was. We had to walk into the church the next day to honor the life commitment being made, not by our baby, but by a 38-year-old woman.
I didn't think of the blind man's story again until this summer, when my mother died of dementia. Now, I think I understand it.
If I had introduced you to my mother five years ago when she was 89, you'd have shaken hands with a black-and-white thinker who was certain of herself and of her answers. If you held the same beliefs, well then, you two could have had a delightful conversation. But if you disagreed with her on anything — Clinton, Elian, monetary policy, Roe, owls in Oregon ... anything — you'd have found the conversation cold and short. And it wasn't enough to agree; you also had to treat her with deference and respect. She loathed going to the bank drive-through and hearing people say, "Have a nice day, Laurene." She would correct them: "It is Mrs. Conner." She wasn't a whole lot less formal with us. She signed birthday and Christmas cards with a succinct "Love, Mother."
My mother had little use for frivolity. She did not watch TV or listen to the radio or go to movies. She had a huge collection of classical records, but stopped playing them years ago. She did not read novels. She did not shop. She did not have lunch with friends. She was pretty bad at small talk, and she couldn't bear gossip. "The mark of small minds," she'd say. Unfortunately, listening to her tablemates in her assisted-living apartment talk about their grandchildren ranked right up there with gossip.
It isn't that Mother hated people; it's just that her country and her church were going to hell in that proverbial basket, and in her mind there was a massive amount of work to be done. Prior to dementia taking away her faculties and macular degeneration taking away her sight, you could find my mother on any given day bent over her typewriter pounding out another treatise on the ramifications of the demise of religious orthodoxy.
This was the woman I'd known my entire life. So, imagine my surprise when my brother Larry, Mary and I visited Mom last May, and her caregivers said: "Oh, your mother is such a dear. She is so sweet and funny. We just love her."
Huh.
My brother Larry turned to me and whispered, "Who are they talking about?" We told her caregivers about her sternness, her long, dense, highly documented articles, and they looked at us and said, "Who are you talking about?" We told them she was quite formal, and they patted her forehead and said, "Who? Our Laurene?" Only they pronounced it not to rhyme with Maureen, but with a long A — Lorraine. The mother I knew would have croaked. But now, when a caregiver called out, "Lorraine!" my mother turned her head happily toward the voice. When Larry called out, "Mom!" she didn't move.
Larry and I live across the country and hadn't seen Mom's gradual decline. Mary visited her every other weekend and had intimate knowledge of the transition.
"This is the blind man, isn't it?" I asked Mary. Although she'd told us that story 12 years before, she immediately knew what I meant. "Yes," she said, "Mom has changed dramatically. Dementia has allowed her to change. If you release your perception of her from the past and come to her, open to who she is today, this will be easier for you and for her."
I turned back to look at my mother, swaddled in blankets in her wheelchair being gently spoon-fed pudding by her caregiver. I blinked my eyes. My strict, judgmental mother was gone. The arch-conservative was gone. The staunch Catholic was gone. In fact, I did not see a political person at all. I saw an adorable, frail old woman relishing the care and feeding of people who love her.
I came to this realization late; the blind man knew it long ago: We have to say goodbye to our vision of the past and let people change and grow. When we do, we become free, too. Free from the old relationships, the old expectations, the old problems. Saying goodbye frees us both to live and to love in a new way.
I'm grateful to Mary for teaching me about the blind man twice — at her wedding and in my mother's last days. It's a profound lesson indeed. Another in this incredibly rich goodbye season.
Now, I have a new aspiration: to start seeing like a blind man in all my relationships — starting with my son, who is a brand-new college freshman. I can think of a few perceptions he'd be thrilled for me to release! I'm ready to say goodbye to them, freeing him to grow and freeing me to be a different kind of mom.
If you should see the blind man, tell him I said, "Thank you!"
Next in the series: Saying goodbye to goodbye.
— — —
Janet Conner, S.E. (Spiritual Explorer), is the creator of the Spiritual Geography map and book series. She is currently working on a new book, "Writing Down the Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within," for Conari Press. The Spiritual Geography books are available through Amazon or Spiritual Geography. Contact Janet at {email janetconner@tampabay.rr.com}janetconner@tampabay.rr.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Janet Conner.
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