Friendship and My Mother
My mother told me once, “Julie, if you pick at your friends, pretty soon you won’t have any.” I don’t recall my age. The memory is far away, as if I were 7 or 8, but my twisted, uncomfortable frame of mind, the fatigue I felt and the frustration with one of my friends makes me think I was older—perhaps 11 or 12. Maybe my friend and I had been together too long for the ages we were. I remember only what my mother told me and how her words abruptly shut off the spigot to whatever churning aggravation I was nurturing. They diffused the cloud of mental and emotional tension I had deployed around myself. Suddenly I was in a large, quiet room. Where negative thoughts had been pressing in to encumber me, was now neutral space. I had room to. make a choice. I stopped complaining.
This morning, decades later, it occurs to me that my mother might have said something like, “Julie, people aren’t perfect. You just have to accept them the way they are.” But she didn’t. Saying people are not perfect would not have had the same effect on me. A blanket statement about the imperfection of the human race would have implied an implicit agreement with my assessment of my friend’s imperfections. I would have remained in the negative, complaint-filled world I was constructing. What my mother chose to say drew my attention to my behavior and its consequences. From that day, I began learning to appreciate my friends and our differences became assets instead of aggravations.
My mother had dropped the first half of the equation that enables good friendships square in my lap, and my much younger self had enough wisdom to recognize its worth. Unfortunately, the second half of the equation has been the struggle of my adult life. For I cannot seem to appreciate myself the way I appreciate my friends. Because parents are such powerful beings in relation to their young children, other sets of my mother’s words have turned up frequently in this half of my quest for friendships. Sometimes her words fortify the walls that hold me back and sometimes they nudge me forward. Fortunately, as the years, the decades, have passed, the salience of my mother’s love for me has surpassed that of her criticism. Unless I decide to purposefully descend into darkness, which is a lot like treating my mother the way I was treating my friends when she so wisely guided me off that path, the memories of her that surface from day to day, and moment to moment, push me in the direction of grace.
After the death of her mother, my friend Cecelia, mourned to me, “I just want to pick up the phone and call her.” As she aged into her nineties, my own mother would shift in her chair to make herself more comfortable and say, “I wish Mother were here.“ When I asked my mother why she made her wistful statement, she told me, “Because I need her.”
Throughout my life, my mother told me all kinds of things about my grandmother. They ranged from my grandmother’s tendency to be smitten by her pets to the fact that she was highly “opinionated.” A brilliant and colorful picture of my grandmother is alive in my head. In turn, my grandmother told me stories about her mother, which my mother supplemented with her own experiences. I have a more sombre portrait of my great grandmother in my head, but it is full blown and I feel her strength. At my mother’s funeral I had a friend read, or maybe I read it, a short description I wrote about who my mother was — at her core. In the very last line I spoke to her directly and expressed the hope that I would miss her every bit as much as she had missed my grandmother.
And I do. I want to run around town with my mom doing errands, to accidentally catch a sunset while heading home, to chuckle over my dad saving things he will never use, to enjoy her exuding when he brings her blazing autumn leaves from the yard. I miss my mother .and because of her, I have dear friends who will listen to my stories about her and allow me to feel near to her over and over again.