4
Under the Waves
Simon Critchley, a philosopher, says we discover what our relationship with our mother is like when our fathers are no longer in the picture. I’m sure his philosophy is linked to some Freudian notion about fathers and sons wrestling for the love of the mother, all very Oedipal. I don’t know what I think about that, but my relationship with my mom has been every bit as conflicted as my relationship with my father.
Once, my parents and I went to Hawaii together. On our first morning, I suggested a drive around the island, but my mother wanted to go swimming. So, off we all went, beyond pale British people, down to the gorgeous edge of the Pacific Ocean. My mom couldn’t wait to swim; I’d never seen her so lighthearted and giddy, like a child. She’d spent a year preparing for this moment by learning to swim at her local public pool. As my dad hid in the shadows of a covered lounge chair, my mother threw down her stuff and aimed straight for the water.
“Hold on, mom. I’ll come with you,” I said.
“Don’t worry about me,” she replied. “I’ll be just fine.”
I watched her go down to the water with a boldness I had never seen and she waded straight out. I’d never seen her in a swimsuit, let alone swim, and I thought she seemed a little unprepared for the strength of the ocean. After all, a swimming pool in England is a far cry from the Pacific Ocean. She didn’t make it very far out before I could see her struggling, disappearing under the waves only to reappear seconds later and flap around confusedly. I jumped in and swam out to her. She was in trouble, and it took a minute or two to get her sorted out and back toward the shore.
She was scared and flustered. “I couldn’t feel the bottom,” she said. “I couldn’t feel the bottom!” Suddenly, I realized that the whole time my mom had been learning to swim, she had kept one leg touching the ground and hadn’t really learned to swim at all. She knew how to make the motions of swimming, but she had spent that whole time bouncing along with her foot pressing on the bottom of the pool. She never swam again, and we never spoke of it any time that holiday was mentioned.
My mother is now ravaged by dementia. She is losing words and comprehension, tormented by a form of the disease that comes with voices and visions. She has not known who I am for over a year now, which is strange, as this is the person who birthed me into the world. At the same time it is apropos, because I feel like we never really knew each other. Sometimes she looks right through me, knowing that she ought to recognize me, or at least doing so only vaguely. But again, this feels familiar—when I was a child, she always looked right through me, as if she did not know what to do or say to me.
The reasons for this are complex and unclear. It may have to do with her illness at my birth and the strange way we both began our life journey together. She contracted spinal meningitis and was in the hospital and very ill for the first eight months or so of my life. We were connected by blood but separated by sickness in those formative months of my life. I tried therapy for a while to see if I could bridge the chasm between us, but it takes two to tango and she never seemed game to try. Every time I suggested we needed to address these issues between us, she quickly lowered a wall of indignation and defiance. Perhaps the discomfort of facing the reality of our lack of connection made her push it, and me, away. In the thirty years I’ve lived in America, she’s called me less than a handful of times.
I think at one point I was trying to replace my mother in other relationships, to find elsewhere what I missed in her. But I don’t want to be mothered by anyone else and I’ve long since stopped looking. That sounds insensitive and uncaring, but I can only say it is how I feel. I have affection and warmth for my mother and father for who they are, but I am deeply conflicted about where to put all the things I feel about my upbringing. There was a time when I was angry about it all, wracked by insecurity and questioning why they bothered having kids if they were so disinclined to care.
My biggest challenge growing up was lacking a model for love, not only how to love but how to be loved. Love has been difficult for me. I have been loved much and I have loved in return, but I have a deep restlessness that goes way, way back. When it rises to the surface, things can go wrong rapidly.
I am still haunted by the many ghosts I inherited from my family. I still battle the same things: insecurity, self-loathing, self-hatred, self-destruction, being the invisible man, and a very loud and critical voice inside me that is seldom drowned out by other voices or opinions. I got out as quickly as I could by any means necessary. Music was my first refuge, but then came drugs. I used them to escape, altering my consciousness to deal with what I had no capacity to handle any other way. And then I escaped with geography—I moved to Europe with friends, then went on the road with bands. Finally, I moved to America. Anywhere was better than home.
