Lent Day 33 - Mom

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

We had been busy with the mountain of responsibilities that came with moving halfway across the country. Heather was finishing up residency in Columbia, SC, and we would be moving to Houston for her fellowship. It was a huge move, and not just the distance. The distance itself was prohibitive - 15 hours by car with no stops; two days with kids and dogs. But we were also leaving the first home we had owned, which we would be renting to a new couple who was moving to Columbia for residency. Our family was returning to the world of home rentals. Heather and I had gone to Houston a couple of times, trying to nail down housing in a far-flung and expensive region: a rude awakening after three years in lower cost of living South Carolina. Our final trip to Houston was on Mother’s Day weekend. We were able to find a house, thankfully. While waiting in the airport for our flight home, my mom called me. “I said I would tell you when you needed to come home to see me. You need to come home.” She wasn’t doing well physically, but she said that she would be fine until we had time to come - and she would tell me if anything changed. This could NOT be a worse time. When I got back to Columbia, I had to finish packing the house, cleaning the house, shepherding our kids through the end of school and departure from their friends, and observing Heather’s graduation ceremonies. I had no clue how I would get down to West Palm Beach until after our move was completed. I wasn’t able to; there was no way. The drive from Columbia to South Florida wasn’t as bad as the one to Houston, but it was still awful. Google Maps lies and says it is 8 1/2 hours, but we never made it in less than 10. When the trip includes three kids and two dogs, those estimates are never right. So a solid 24 hours of the trip would be driving - meaning it couldn’t be a quick weekend trip. I wanted to get down there, to give the kids a chance to see Grammy again. Maybe, if I really believed things were as bad as they were, I would have found a way

It was hard figuring out when exactly to head back because it was hard knowing exactly what was going on. To an outsider, that may seem like a bizarre comment. But, that was just how things were with my mom. The first time she told me she was dying, I was 10 years old. She was recuperating from knee surgery and developed a blood clot in her leg - which was going to break loose and go into her heart or lung or brain and kill her. She was laying on the sofa in our living room with a cold wet washcloth on her leg. That’s how I knew she wasn’t doing well; she never laid down during the day. She called me over to tell me that she was quite possibly, probably going to die. And she wanted to tell me whatever she said - I honestly don’t remember. (It was NOT about being married twice before or about my brother being from her second marriage. She waited to drop that on me for another few months.) Being a ten year old, I assumed that my mom was telling me the truth, so I really thought she was going to die. She didn’t. God healed her. He broke the blood clot up. It wasn’t the medication or the fact that only 6-10% of blood clots do break free and kill people. It was prayer. 

That story goes a long way in explaining why I wasn’t sure what was really going on in June 2016. Over the 32 years between those two events, my mom told me she was dying so many times I couldn’t count. She was convinced my dad was going to poison her - going so far as making sure that I agreed to have an autopsy done if she died to look for toxins. That was when I was in Middle School. Any time she discovered a new ailment, things immediately went from 0 to 100 with her. She immediately bought into the worst case scenario. She was a self-diagnoser before it was cool, before the internet existed. She had purchased several books that she would refer to, trying to figure out what was wrong with her. I can easily believe she was a hypochondriac, and I don’t use that term lightly. I was accused by doctors when I was younger of making things up, which turned out to NOT be true. So I don’t throw around that label often. My mom was convinced she was afflicted with all sorts of diseases. She developed a pattern with doctors. In this era before digital medical records, she would go to a doctor and present her symptoms, often pushing for a diagnosis. When the doctor didn’t agree, didn’t order the right tests, didn’t present the right test results she would get angry with them and switch doctors. BUT, when she went to the new doctor she would tell them that she definitively had the ailment. They didn’t have a way to check, so they assumed she was telling the truth. This led to her records indicating she had all sorts of things - many of which were never diagnosed. There legitimately were some issues that doctors had trouble diagnosing, which made the whole thing such a mess. A lot of it, I think, was that they were trying too work through a mixture of conjecture and facts which didn’t add up. She thought she had lupus for a while. She told people she had lupus, told doctors she had lupus. She didn’t have lupus. 

The maddening thing, though, was that when she WAS diagnosed with something, she wouldn’t always take care of it. She told everyone she had MS. Her doctors didn’t agree with her, but she kept on telling doctors she did. At one point, I was with her at an appointment. The doctor told her there was a world-renowned MS clinic in Orlando - which is where we lived! My mom could go there to deal with her MS - or whatever was making my mom believe she had MS. Nope. She refused to go. I told her I would drive her. Nope. I argued with her. Nope. She said the doctor was just pushing her off onto someone else, so she wasn’t going to go. When she was diagnosed with cancer, they did one surgery that got most of the cancer. But then it came back … or possibly came back … or was going to come back. That was how things would be communicated to me. She told me that it had come back, which meant that it was more severe than they anticipated, which meant that it was going to kill her faster. I was devastated. I found out on the way to a therapy appointment, so I was a wreck at it. Heather offered to come with me. I told the therapist what my mom had said, and he was confused why I was so upset. Did the doctor say that she was going to die from it? Uh… no? It was over four years before she finally did die. But, she also refused any radiation or chemo or follow up procedures, despite me pleading with her to at least look into them. She would alternate between desperately wanting medical science to figure out what was wrong and mistrusting medical science and hanging everything on prayer. She was sick; I know that she was. I just never knew exactly what was real, what was imagined, and what was being ignored. This is why I wasn’t sure exactly how bad things were in June 2016. 

My oldest son, the dogs, and I made the exhausting trip to Houston with our loaded down SUV. We stopped in Atlanta the first night, since we had gotten going later than we thought we would. Then we stopped in Louisiana - soon to become my nemesis on that drive - on the second night. My Rheumatoid Arthritis was in full flare - between the packing and stress and driving and stress and stress. We finally got to Houston on the third day. The next week or so was spent unloading, unpacking, setting up. My son and I also explored the city, trying out restaurants and movie theaters. I tried to make it enjoyable for him, since he was stuck doing a bunch of manual labor he didn’t want to in the vicious Texas heat. Soon Heather, her mom, and the other children made their way to join us. I was getting more frequent phone calls from my sister that things were going downhill quickly with my mom. I think that she had a stroke and fell in the shower at some point. She didn’t call 911, didn’t set up a follow up appointment - another pattern of hers. She would call me at night, tell me she thought she was having a heart attack or something. I would advise her to call 911. The next morning I would call to check on her. She would be back to normal, never having called 911. She would say she was glad she hadn’t called because she didn’t need to; I told her that one time that wouldn’t be the case. Guess I was right. She told me she had fallen in the shower, but she didn’t seem right to me. That was reinforced as I talked to my sister. I was getting anxious that I wouldn’t get down there soon enough. I couldn’t leave until Heather got to Texas, and she couldn’t get there for over a week after I had arrived. The second wave of my family made it to Texas, and I got a flight to Florida. I made it there on June 27. She was definitely declining quickly. She slipped away in the late afternoon on Wednesday the 29th. 

I didn’t handle her death well. (That’s an understatement.) You know those stress tests you can take online? Where you pick the events you are going through, and the test tells you how much stress you are under? Heather and I used to take those for laughs because our numbers were so outrageous. I took one around the time of our move. The guide said that if you had 190 points, you were in danger of having a physical breakdown. When my mom died, my score was 380. I finally broke. It all had been too much. I fell into a major depression. First, things hurt too much. Then, I just didn’t feel anything. I was doing the bare minimum of what I needed to do, but it took a supreme effort to just do that. Heather wasn’t sure the right way to help. She carried as much as she could, while also serving as a fellow at the top program in the country - bending under more demands than any person should have. I never actually thought THROUGH suicide, but I thought ABOUT it. A year later, the kids were with Heather’s parents for a visit. I ended up curled up on the floor of our closet, crying harder than I ever had - convinced I was useless, worthless, unloveable, unloved, a colossal waste of space. A burden on everyone. That was the low point. I attempted to contact the staff members at the church we had been attending, telling them how bad I felt. Nobody acknowledged my emails. Actually, THAT was the low point. When you feel like you don’t matter at all, and then you manage to send up a flare, and then people ignore you and prove you don’t matter at all. 

I told Heather that my mom had kind of served as a lighthouse of sorts for me. I would be living my life, doing what needed done. I would think about things I encountered, consider my beliefs. And then I would look to that beacon to make sure I hadn’t drifted too far away. When my mom died, I lost that lighthouse. I felt adrift without any guidance on how I was supposed to get back to … where? I didn’t even know where I was supposed to be going. It felt like the world had gone bananas. More and more, I was disappointed by things happening with the Church - not the least of which being the way ours had failed me when I needed them most. The last straw in a long history of church-instigated abuse. After that breakdown in the closet, I hit the point where I realized I was hurting my family by being so disconnected. Fixing it for myself wasn’t enough, but the fact I was hurting my wife and kids was enough to get me to start clawing my way out of the pit. We had quit going to church after the email incident; I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that place. And I was done looking for a church. We had never found a church in Columbia. We had tried so many places, but we kept hitting the same problems. Celebrity worship of staff members. Overly programmed services that felt like mini-concerts. Emotional terrorism in sermons. Guilt. Shame. Meanness. Heather and I had gotten to the point where we refused to put our kids into a place where they were going to get hurt, which led us to never land anywhere. We finally found a place in Texas where we thought we could heal and grow, only to get curb stomped by that place. If my mom had been around, she probably would have encouraged me to not give up - although, I never would have been in that mess if she was still around. I was angry and confused and hurt. I had very little belief that there even was a healthy church in Houston. I mean, Joel Osteen was there. And multiple mega-churches - which as a rule we refused to even try. We kept seeing car stickers for RPC, which I assumed was another multi-campus megachurch with a douchebag celebrity pastor. I refused to even try it based on that belief. Summer rolled into Fall. One day I saw my youngest son’s teacher - who he loved and whose son he had befriended - in her car. It had an RPC sticker. For some reason, that made me want to try it. Our first Sunday was the first Sunday that the new campus pastor was there. He said that people could email him to have coffee or lunch. I did, so we met up for lunch. And I made one of the best friends I have ever had. We got involved in the church, and we started to heal. I started to get out of the massive pit. I didn’t cry walking through Target any more. (Yeah, that happened QUITE a few times.) I made some friends. 

What does that have to do with my mom? In that year after she died, my entire world was flattened. It wasn’t just that my home had been damaged; it had been leveled. If I had not been so devastated, I probably would have just patched things up and kept going. I would have looked up and seen the beacon of my mom and piloted myself back into the same place. But, the beacon was gone. Not only that, I wasn't sure I had been in the right harbor in the first place! As I went to rebuild my life, The pieces didn’t make sense. The belief structures I had didn’t all add up any more. I never stopped believing in God or Jesus or the Bible - the three default answers in Sunday School. But everything else was shaky. The loss of that lighthouse that was my mom actually freed me to really examine what I was rebuilding. I didn’t see it that way then, mind you. I hated it. I felt off balance all the time. I felt like I had nothing to hold onto. It was like learning to walk all over again, but then finding out that I had been walking wrong the first time. Like I had been wearing my shoes backwards or something. 

This was a very uncomfortable thought, which struck at the very foundation of my being. When I told my therapist back in Orlando about some of the things that I had gone through growing up, he seemed shocked. It wasn’t about WHAT I went through; lots of people have crappy parents and traumatic experiences. It was that I considered it normal. Like the whole thing about my mom saying she was dying. He said that it wasn’t normal, wasn’t healthy, wasn’t good. No ten year old should have had to carry that weight. It was a jarring comment, largely because it struck at my mom and how she had parented me. Up until that point, I had enjoyed sharing my therapy discoveries with her. She didn’t always like them, but she listened … kind of. This one, though … I couldn’t tell her that. “Oh mom, my therapist said you really damaged me by making me carry the weight of your impending death for 30 years. Cool huh?” I found his comment interesting, enlightening, disturbing. But I don’t know if I fully embraced it. I had felt my mom wasn’t always the most stable with her opinions, but I wasn’t ready to see her as actually damaging to me. That was my dad. There was a very clear rule while I was growing up: My mom was the hero, my dad was the villain. It was an easy position to accept. My dad was the one exploding in anger, beating my brother, cheating on my mom, cursing and screaming, glowering in the corner, watching inappropriate things on TV, reading Stephen King books. She was the one sitting quietly in her chair, reading her Bible, singing and writing Christian songs, sacrificing, praying, forgiving, loving. She was the one who was right, so what she did was right. I believed that because it was repeated over and over again. She was trustworthy; he was not. 

But what if that wasn’t true? What if my therapist was right, that my mom actually had hurt me through her actions? The healthier I got, the more I realized that things were not nearly so black and white. My dad wasn’t the perpetual villain, and my mom wasn’t the never-wavering hero. There were some really great things about my dad, and there were some really messed up things about my mom. You might think that is an obvious statement, but it took me YEARS to be able to think that, let alone write or say it. A popular term these days is “deconstructing one’s faith.” I hate it - mostly because everyone uses it. I am always suspicious of anything that has too many people doing it. (Another thing I got from my mom.) But, for lack of a better descriptor, I have spent several years deconstructing my faith. I have basically torn down everything to the barest bones: God, Jesus, the Bible. Then I have gone back through to see which things were worth adding back on. Turns out … not a lot of them. I went to seminary briefly, and I remember one class where the professor talked about the Law. First, there were the Ten Commandments. These were the skeleton of the rules the Jewish people should follow. Then, because people need things spelled out for them, there was the book of Leviticus, where a bunch of specific applications of the Law were introduced. Like, the Ten Commandments say we shouldn’t covet our neighbor’s property. That led to the inevitable, “Yeah, but what about…” questions. So Leviticus took it further and said, “Don’t have sex with your neighbor’s donkey.” Ten Commandments became 613 laws. Well, those specific applications were not enough for people. So over hundreds of years, more and more rules were added to the Law. If a well known rabbi taught something, it would get added. Like the edict to tithe 10% of earnings to the Temple. That wasn’t clear enough. So somebody said, “Byearnings, we mean EVERYTHING. So if you go and buy a jar of apple pie spice, you need to give 10% of that. If you get a case of Kickstart, you have to give 1 1/2 cans to the priests.” By the time Jesus rolled up, there were thousands of commandments - the vast majority of them being generated by tradition. Jesus broke them all down to two: love God, love others. 
This same exact problem had replicated itself with the modern church. Jesus established the Church (capital C). He gave it marching orders: go into all the world making disciples and baptizing them. So basically there were three rules for Christians to follow: Love God, Love Others, Make Disciples. Then Paul came along. People were already fighting about what those three laws entailed. So he wrote a bunch of letters to churches all over the place, explaining things and putting the rules into specific scenarios. Naturally, everything that Paul said was codified into the new improved Law. Law 2: Electric Boogaloo. Except there would be no boogalooing! Because dancing was evil and immoral. Jesus didn’t say that. Paul didn’t say that. Some other dude hundreds and hundreds of years later said it. Because those three rules had become Paulified. Then the Church got all bloated and gross and misguided. Martin Luther nailed 95 grievances on the wall. Denominations popped up all over the place, fighting over the minutiae of the new Law. Popular pastors taught things, adding onto the Law with more commandments. No dancing, no cards, no instruments, no ugly shag carpet. Pray the Lord’s Prayer, pray the Prayer of Jabez. Celebrate Christmas. Take spiritual gifts tests. Go to membership classes. Men should never make less money than their wives. All that matters is the number of people praying a prayer of salvation. All of that stuff. NONE of it is in the Bible. 

The end result? For someone like me, who spent their entire life in church and Christian school and more church and church staff and parachurch organizations and Christian non profit ministries, I was wrapped into a massive pretzel where I could barely move. I felt guilty all time. I felt worthless and useless. I felt like I could never measure up. None of that is what God wanted. And, the person MOST responsible for that train wreck was my mother. So I started getting more and more angry at her. The more I pulled at threads, the more I realized that she was the one who taught or reinforced those beliefs. And it pissed me off. I know that she was doing the best she could do, that she was trying to figure things out on her own. She wasn’t evil; she was misguided. She was learning things and then passing them on to me - just like years later I would pass them on to my kids and my students. The cycle of guilt and abuse and legalism kept spinning. This is where I hit a conundrum. She’s my mom, and I love her. I know she did her best, but I also know that she made a lot of big mistakes. How do I handle that? I don’t want to perform a character assassination on her. She was a good woman and a great mom. But I need to be able to deal with this stuff if I have any hope of moving forward. I also have to be able to separate what she was responsible for and what the Church in general is responsible for. She didn’t cause every problem, although she seemed to be involved in most of them in some way. I started writing her a letter, and it turned into an angry screaming thing. It didn’t make me feel better, so I stopped. I guess there are just some questions that I want to ask her. I know I can’t get answers, but these are the things that make me mad when I think about them. 

• Why did you make me feel like I only was loved and worth anything when I did everything right? 
• My whole life, I felt worthless if I didn’t live up to your standard or the church’s standard. I should have had worth no matter what. You should have been there for Holly no matter what.
• This extended to my kids. You would get angry at my daughter because she didn’t want to play with the toys you got, because she needed Heather more. I’m not glad you’re gone, but I’m glad that you aren’t here to judge my daughter. She’s freaking awesome, and that would be more than I could take.
• Why didn’t you learn to listen? I didn’t always need you to start spouting advice or excuses. I needed you to HEAR me. 
• Why didn’t you realize that people didn’t have to agree with you? That their opinions were valid even if they were different. 
• You made such a big deal all the time about sacrificing for other people. There were things that maybe you should have considered because they mattered to other people.
• I wanted you to pursue treatments for your cancer. It wouldn’t have cured it, but it probably would have extended your life. You missed out on so much because you were stubborn.
• I wanted you to be buried, not tossed into the ocean. I wanted to be able to have SOMETHING to visit. 
• Why did you have to make things you vs. Dad? 
• You made him the bad guy all the time. Sometimes you pushed him, antagonized him, made things worse. You didn’t have any compassion for him.
• You made it seem like all of his medical issues were his fault. He got diabetes because he was irresponsible. You know how much that messed me up when I got diagnosed? 
• Everything about him was portrayed as bad. You would get mad at him when he was being silly, when he talked to people in the store, when he sang. Those were good things.
• I’m not saying he didn’t do anything wrong, but he didn’t do EVERYTHING wrong.
• But if he was so bad, why didn’t you leave with us?
• Things were bad. We felt unsafe. You told us we were unsafe, you were unsafe. Why did you stay? When he hit Chris, when he cheated on you multiple times, when he exploded in anger. We shouldn’t have stayed. 
• Why did you let us believe in a mean spiteful God?
• The concept of kindness was never a part of my thought process. I couldn’t be kind to myself because I had to think of myself as a worm. 
• Unconditional love. Forgiveness. Mercy. Those were not part of the God that I was taught about. This may be the most damaging thing you taught me. It affected everything.
• Why did you tell everyone our business? 
• I would talk to you about things that should have been private, but you told so many people. Like health and financial things. Sometimes you would say it was to get prayer, but it felt like gossip instead.
• People would have opinions about me or my family, and the only way they would even know enough to have an opinion would be if you told them. 
• Why wouldn’t you tell us anything about you? 
• I know next to nothing about you. What did you play with as a kid? What books did you like? Did you go to prom? What music did you like? You never told us any details or stories about your life. It was like you hated who you were, and you just buried it. I mean, it took you until I was ten to find out about your marriages and Chris. So, this doesn’t surprise me
• Or you would tell me to read your book, the fictionalized version of your life. I didn’t want to get it from your book! I wanted YOU to tell me. 

I know I can’t get answers to these things, but I think it is a compromise with me writing a letter screaming at her. Maybe by putting them on (virtual) paper, I’ll be able to confront them and forgive her. The hardest part of all of this is how the image of my mom has been tarnished. I still love her and miss her. And the image I have of her is more accurate. She was human, flawed and weak. Maybe she didn’t think she could show that. Maybe she battle the same things I did when it came to worth. Maybe she thought she had to portray perfection so her kids would try to model it. I would rather have seen the honest truth. I would have rather known that she struggled and failed - and then picked herself back up. I would rather have seen kindness and compassion and mercy. Then I would have learned to offer those things, and I wouldn’t have had to wait until I was in my late 30s. She was a great mom. When we were young, she did so much to make our lives richer, to make us feel special. I wish that could have persisted.