Mango Feelings

Last night, we hosted three friends for dinner. This set of friends is, among other roles, our HBO set: every Sunday night, we watch whatever the current HBO show is. Right now it's Carnivale, which I didn't watch last season, but which I'm into now. It's very Twin Peaks, right down to Samson the midget, who actually WAS in Twin Peaks.

The menu was vegan-fusion-Indian: curried tempeh with skillet-grain medley, two kinds of sauce (vegan cucumber-mint raita, which features cilantro, and yogurt-tahini sauce, which doesn't... because one of said friends thinks cilantro tastes like soap), carrot salad with mango-chutney dressing, and -- for desert -- tapioca mango coconut pudding, which turned out to be DELICIOUS but which didn't "set up" especially well so it, too, was like a sauce. So basically I made some rice and several sauces: white sauce, orange sauce, bright mint green sauce. TASTY sauces.

Also, quinoa. Which if you don't know how to pronounce it is KEEN-wah which is, let's face it, one of those words and pronunciations that reminds you how fun it is to be an English speaker! With our crazy lack of consistency in spellings and sayings!

Earlier in the day, while I was cooking said dinner (actually, what I was doing was cutting the flesh from mangoes and popping it into the blender for pureeing... a task that was very messy-juicy, and that I was performing VERY SLOWLY, for hours it seems), I talked to my mom on the phone.

It was one of the best conversations we've had lately. And partly it's because I had already gotten into the wine so I began the conversation in a floating place, a mango-cutting place, a place where my habitual reactions to my mother (annoyance, defensiveness) were purled into a mango-wine-good-daughter knit.

My mom's youngest sister was killed last November in a car wreck, while en route to Las Vegas to celebrate her 50th birthday. Her own youngest son was also in the car but he was okay. It was two or three in the morning, a last minute trip. Things like drinking? Were they wearing seatbelts? My brother once asked and my mom apparently said "Why does that matter now?" From which, draw your own conclusions.

Some more backstory is in order. Mom met Dad in San Francisco in the mid seventies. Dad had just gotten back from his required stint in Vietnam, a stint he served largely in Turkey, where he worked as mess cook, cracking hundreds of eggs each meal. (This is an irrelevant detail: it's just one that I like.) The fact that my dad did his patriotic duty tells you something important about him, relevant to the rest of the course of the story. My dad, like my mom, is a baby-boomer, whose teenage years were the sixties. Does my dad like the military? Emphatically not. Is my dad a peace-nik? Yes. Did he have long hair in the sixties, and did he play folk guitar in a band around his college town, and did he wear little silver Beatles glasses? Yes, yes, and yes.

So why did my father, this peaceful, folk-singing, anti-establishment Democrat (a rarity in the town where we both grew up!), agree to go into the army?

Duty.

I need to pursue this a bit with my father. Our dinner-friend J., who is exactly the same age as my parents, didn't go into the army, because -- he says -- everyone on college campuses knew the draft-avoiding tricks. Drink a bunch of diet coke. A BUNCH. Then you test as pre-diabetic (or something) and you're excused.

Why my dad didn't do something like this isn't exactly clear. Still, what IS clear is that my dad has a strong streak of duty. He willingly performs the tasks and roles expected of him, slotted for him in the grand plot of family by mere genetic accident. Most particularly, for the story I'm telling here, my father has willingly accepted the implied duties of the "only son." He fixes cars, indulges my grandfather's sometimes-capricious home-improvement desires... and so on and so on. Now my paternal grandparents are both elderly and my grandmother has advanced Alzheimers. A nearby son is a NECESSITY at this point. However, it seems like this necessity -- and being the one who performs necessity -- is something my father has groomed himself for his whole life.

At the cost, it needs be said, of his health, his once-lithe figure, his music-hobby, poetry-writing and other "selfish" dreams.

So after my young dad met my young mom in the seventies in San Francisco, and after they flirted and dawdled and dandled and inadvertantly conceived me, and after this "speeded up" their sort of plan to get married... well, where did the young couple decide to live?

Yes. In the midwest. In the country. One mile from my father's parents.

My mom's family is from a metropolis in the west, and they all live out there, and as a consequence of following my dad to the midwest, she's been somewhat "removed" from the lives of her own family members. Most particularly, of her two sisters.

So the death of her youngest sister hit mom in a particularly tricky way. Guilt, I think, and some anger over not having been able to spend more time with her before she died. But even stranger and more hurtful, it seems, is the way mom is treated as an outsider by the family there.

Obviously, mom flew out the moment she heard about the accident. She was out there for two and a half weeks. During that time, though mom specifically did not complain about it, it seems that the family out there, locked in their own weird lives and their own intimate grief, didn't really let mom feel a part of the family, and intimate part of what was going on. She remained an outsider.

Our conversation last night, while I peeled the slipper mango flesh from around the fibery pits, involved repurcussions of this. Mom is alone in the particulars of her grief. Me, my brothers, my father never spent much time with this sister who died. She was a fun aunt; it's sad. But her death leaves no hole in my daily life. Meanwhile, the siblings and nieces and nephews in the Western contingent don't do much to indulge mom's needs. Mom wants to talk with her other sister, to reminisce about their youngest sister. This sister, though, doesn't want to talk. She's willing to write her feelings over e-mail, but not to talk about it on the phone. My mom insists that she is a VERBAL person and needs to talk.

Then, too, there's a sort of ghoulish feature of the funeral home that allows a permanent website memorial for the dead loved one, on which friends and family can publish their writings. The dead aunt's daughter, my cousin, wrote a paragraph praising my other aunt, and wrote "Mom, you have such a great sister" -- about my other aunt.

This totally hurt *my* mom's feelings -- since she TOO is a sister, and she loves and keeps up with and visits as often as she can the family out there. She's also mad that this niece never acknowledged or said thank you for pictures my mom sent to her.

***

Fast forward to talking to my mom.

"Mom, it makes sense that you feel hurt. It's okay."

"I know she's grieving in her own way, it's just, J. had TWO sisters."

"I know."

"When I visited, I wanted to sit in J.'s house and just, ABSORB her presence. I just wanted to be in her stuff for a little while. And V. wouldn't let me."

"She wouldn't?"

"I think she was suspicious, like she thought I would steal something. It's the same with last time I talked to her. I asked if she had gone through her mom's things. I just wanted to say, that must have been hard for you. But I guess she thought I was going to say I wanted something, because she said no my brothers and I agreed we weren't going to for awhile ."

Here was arrive at a natural inclination of mine... which is to try to temper people's judgementalness. So I said something about how this all seemed extreme. But that about the not sending a thank-you card for the pictures, I'm a little sympathetic to that, because it can feel overwhelming to fulfill requests from family members you don't necessarily know well. (Thinking of my own erstwhile stress over my in-laws-to-be... stress which, weirdly, is now gone, because of all the time I spent talking to them while CV was in the hospital.)

"I guess she just wants her mother all to herself."

"I guess so, mom. I'm sorry. It really sucks. It makes sense that you feel hurt."

This part was easy... my mom really needed her feelings validated, even though I think she felt bad about having them, the hurt feelings. And I could certainly validate them, because I could see she needed it but ALSO because I do think that they are legitimate feelings and that frankly my cousins seem to have acted somewhat callously.

The part that was more, well, complicated, involved recognizing how some of my mom's bad feelings come from her own tendency to not allow room for other people to have different reactions from hers. This is one I've run into PERSONALLY, one of the reasons I often feel guilty and defensive when considering my mom. She, too, likes to write little scripts for me to fill, as "only daughter." Only Daughter is a character who visits most weekends, who likes to meet at the town halfway between her and me for lunch and shopping, who gets married and knocked up promptly (obviously I've already waited a good 5 years longer than Only Daughter ideal), who thinks it makes perfect sense to make CV sleep on the couch when we visit the parents, since obviously we can't SHARE a bedroom -- we aren't married!

It's this same Expectation of Role Filling that I hear in my mother's comments about the aunt who doesn't want to talk about J. on the phone, but only over e-mail. It's as if I can hear how, in my mother's idea, what a Bereaved Sister does, is talk to her other Bereaved Sister in a particular way. And if Bereaved Sister has different ideas about how she can deal? Well!

I'm often not so good at Only Daughter, as scripted... but last night I did just fine.

So that was interesting.

As was this:
"Have you considered seeing a counselor, mom? I need to give you some context for this... everyone I know has seen or is seeing a counselor, I'VE seen a counselor; I think it's just helpful to talk to someone who can give you some objective validation or can listen."

"Why would I see a counselor, when I have such a daughter?"


Now see? Mom, sometimes we get on great and that is fabulous. But just because I can sometimes be there doesn't mean it's fair to expect me to take on ALL the burden of counseling you through your grief!

Complicated. Bittersweet.

Like mango tapioca pudding, before you add extra sugar.