Seeing Clearly Again

I talked to my mom on Sunday night over Skype, as usual. She had just had a cataract removed from her eye the previous Wednesday and was on the mend. For weeks ahead of time she was very apprehensive about the procedure, mostly because (as someone born in 1940) she couldn't believe that having your eye sliced into while you're awake isn't always a painful, traumatizing experience.

But on Sunday night, she was actually chipper. In her usual way, it was a simple reaction, with her thick old-New-York accent:

"Who knew?", she said repeatedly. And she added, with a giggle: "And suddenly, I can see myself clearly in the mirror again!"

Granted, she was referring to how much easier it would be each day to put her eyebrows on. But it was a moment of realization for me. She'd been out of focus for years now, and despite her age and experience was still afraid of things she didn't understand, even if they were simple methods of bringing her back to zero from some other, "off" place. Maybe things she not only didn't understand, but didn't know how to trust as well.

And once again, I was there saying "uh-huh" with my words to my mother, when in my head I was relating to her more than I dared elaborate on.

See, my mother and I have a close, affectionate relationship. But it's also quite complex. There is only so much she can understand and digest all at once, so I spent much of my adult life keeping a great deal of things to myself. I came out of the closet at 18, and my parents were always introduced to my serious boyfriends. But I didn't share everything that I could have, including the things that maybe in hindsight she could have helped me with. As I got older, I came to appreciate my mother's real comprehension of the bigger things in life, especially regarding close relationships; and I turned to her a lot more. But also, as I creep closer to 40, I also realized that she is from a very distant generation which simply went about its priorities differently, staying in unhappy, even abusive, marriages for some ridiculous sense of honor that never, ever made sense to me.

Anyway, she is well aware in a general way of what has been going on in my life over the past couple of months. She tends to get protective and defensive of me when there is trouble, and I've often found that stressful and unhelpful because it always came across as if I couldn't be trusted to take care of myself, or I should stop taking risks in life. Both sentiments, in my mind, lead one to lowering your standards, "settling" instead of striving, and ending up more unhappy yet.

But she's my mother. Of course she's going to want to stand up for me in her own way. And as I get older, I get much less apprehensive about her ways.

And I realized this morning as I was shaving that she's not the only one who can see herself more clearly these days. I was thinking about what I've been afraid of over the past few months, and what has been leading me to cower in a corner rather than face life. I realized it was my old-fashioned anxieties from experiences I had in relationships dating back to the early 1990s, with men who have absolutely nothing to do with today, with Vini, with my life or with the me that I am to my core.

And that "me" is not the person I was in 1995, or in 2000, or even in 2002 when I moved to Logan Circle. I'm extraordinarily different, inside and out. And looking closely into the mirror, for the first time -- I finally saw it.