Natalie: Dare to be You
Story Seven
During the war, my mother would hop on her bicycle and peddle over the back roads to get to the lookout tower on top of a hill. Once she reached the tower, she would climb the steps and take her turn, looking for enemy planes that the residents feared might come to attack the town.
This was the same girl who years before, was so determined not to be left behind that she swam out to the raft in the lake to get to her older sisters. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if she had known how to swim. But she had never swum a stroke in her life before this day. Her sisters, looking up from the raft, called out in amazement saying, “Look, Natalie is swimming! Natalie, you don’t know how to swim!”
However, her greatest show of courage may have been the day that she flagrantly disobeyed her mother. In my grandmother’s house, bicycle riding was strictly forbidden on Sundays. My mother might have gotten away with it, had she been able to slip her bike back into the barn while her mother was busy cooking Sunday dinner. Unfortunately, before she could do this, she fell off of her bike and broke her collarbone.
I smile seeing my mother as a fearless young girl, jumping headfirst into the lake to swim, climbing the tower to look for enemy planes, and risking her mother’s wrath to feel the wind blow through her hair as she peddled down the road on that Sunday afternoon.
Why is this version of my mother as a young girl so out of sync with the woman that I knew? What happened to this plucky, feisty girl, and how did she become so disconnected from her true nature?
The reason may have been that she was trying to fill a hole in her heart. A hole, created at least in part, by a mother who took little pleasure in the raising of children. It is nearly impossible for a person to stay true to themselves, to follow their passions, when they are seeking love from someone else. We all need to find that love for ourselves first. It breaks my heart to think of my mother struggling so hard to fill that hole with the love of the person who helped to create it in the first place.
I remember a big change in my mother after she quit a job that she loved to take care of her ailing mother. She moved my grandmother into her house and began what turned out to be several years of around-the-clock care. This new job of taking care of her mother didn’t bring the rewards that she had, perhaps, hoped it would. Her relationship with her mother never changed; it didn’t evolve into the mother/daughter connection that she craved.
As the years went on, my grandmother continued to slip away down the Alzheimer’s path, as my mother grew more and more tired. In desperate need of a break, I took care of my grandmother while she went away on a trip. Returning home a week later, my mother looked as exhausted as when she had left.
After settling in, she went to her mother’s room. My grandmother’s eyes lit up and said, “My angel, you are home. How I have missed you!” It was the first words of kindness that my grandmother had ever spoken to her. Finally, she said the words that my mother had so longed to hear.
The following morning, my mother and I met for breakfast. She walked through the restaurant door looking weary and depleted of energy. As we sat eating, she told me that she just couldn’t do it anymore and she needed to move my grandmother to a nursing home. The joy that she had felt upon first hearing her mother’s words of love had dissipated overnight. She sat there, looked utterly bereft and defeated.
After we finished eating, my mother left the restaurant to go home to relieve the respite worker that was caring for her mom. At noon, she prepared my grandmother’s lunch tray and carried it into her room. Reaching over to place the tray in front of her, she found that her mother had died sitting there in her pink upholstered chair.
The words my mother had spent her whole life longing to hear weren’t enough to heal her heart. We can only find the love we seek by first finding it within ourselves. The words of the poet Rumi spoke to this when he wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
It saddens me that the light of my mother’s true self was dimmed and that the barriers she constructed around her heart didn’t allow her to see, or to remember, that she was a brilliant star.
With Love & Energy by the Pond,
Laurel
laurel@energybythepond.com
