Learning to Love, Alone

An Ordinary Disaster — chapter 28 — My Mother Was Not a Woman

This is part of my book-length memoir AN ORDINARY DISASTER, one man's proof that despite what may seem like our inability to hear it, we can all learn to listen to ourselves, and to act upon the inner voice of our self, our sanity and our soul.

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My mother was not a woman—that is, when I look back at how I remember her as a young person, I see mom, of course, but not a woman.

I’m sure this is common enough. Because of the psychosexual juxtaposition between mother and woman, I imagine it’s rare to be able see one’s mother as having much in common with the magical creatures that stoke the fires of men’s dreams—but still, all mothers are women, and, as I said to a young friend recently, it seems we’d all be better off if we could see that “she’s not just your mother, she is a woman—and the first one that you will ever know.”

My mother is many things. She’s highly intelligent, well traveled, and interested in the world. She’s caring, has a wide network of friends, enjoyed a series of careers, and has had her share of love in the world, having married twice and a few lovers in between. She wasn’t downbeat or cynical, and my mom enjoyed physical activity and the outdoors more than average.

She seemed to live in a neutral space, distant from the womanly realm. There was no musical laughter, sly wit or waggling finger. There was no music or ritual in the house, and no sense of the blood or fire that runs through the feminine world. I got no sense of who she was as a human animal. Despite her lifelong passion outdoor activities such as sailing and hiking, my mother seemed detached from her physical self—and I would say from her unconscious as well, because I could not sense who or where her soul had gone, or even if it ever was. The platitudes that I’ve complained about came mostly from her, and when she asked me “how are you?” I rarely felt that she expected, or would know what to do with, a truly honest answer.

I used to think that I was depressed because of a lack of fathering, and that is as true for me as it is for most men—but it was my mother that passed her anxiety—and her own version of depression—on to me. I’m not talking about so-called clinical, stuck-in-bed depression, and not even so much of the standard daily drag that so many Americans carry around. It wasn’t quite like “living in a cave of death,” as one friend suggested, although others have intuited from my stories that I grew up with a depressed mother, so something is clearly coming through.

Whatever it was that afflicted her, the result was that the field between us was lifeless.

No wonder I started out depressed. Now I know that it wasn’t just my relationship with my father that contributed to me being so angry and alone—and to my ambivalence about having children.

Really, I had no choice—I had to run, because I didn’t want to end up like my sister, or my father—or my mother. Alive, and highly functional, but cut off from the sensual world. I didn’t know many other adult women as a young person, but I do remember some whose colorful, womanly aliveness easily bridged the gap of generations—an art teacher at high school, the wife of one of my fathers’ friends—even young Princess Leia from Star Wars, with her knowing, sly and sexy smirk. I don’t know if it was within her, if she held it back, it was just naturally repressed in dealing with her teenage son—but my mother showed none of that. Of course, it’s not that I wanted or expected any sort of specifically sexual material to arise between my mother and I; nor did I ever consider asking her to show me her naked breasts, as Stephen Dunn imagines in his poem The Routine Things Around The House, and perhaps it was because, as it was for Alan Watts, that “I was disappointed in the fact that she did not seem to me as pretty as other women.” Whatever the cause, what seemed to me to be a total disconnection from her feminine self still echoes in my psyche.

My recurring dream of running and trying to get away—that was me, but in way, I think it was also her dream—and the message was the same for the both of us.

In depression, of course we wish to escape the pain of being depressed. She wanted to get away too. The thing is, there is no escape—or not simplistic escape, no running away. We can sometimes get away from the symptoms of depression temporarily, but there’s no running from the root causes—silence, lack of truth, lack of connection with other people and with the unconscious—without doing the work to shake hands with those shadows.

Now, that dream is gone, and I can see what it was trying to tell me all this time. There’s never just one single correct interpretation of a dream, but the characters in a dream usually can be seen to represent parts or versions of oneself. The dream was telling me that I was trying to get away from parts of me—and there was pain there, but those parts had some important things to tell me, and the pain was from not listening. I was trying to get away because I didn’t want to hear what they had to say.

Those dreams had all sorts of kind and useful messages for me—that it’s OK to stick around a bit and be the Frisco Kid; that I need to be outside more; that it would be good for me to drink less; that I should remember that I wanted to become an artist—but also, something more, and something deeper. I spent many years wishing for relief from what I felt while also feeling certain that I not only wouldn’t but couldn’t do whatever might be required by myself. In those dreams, I was afraid that what was chasing me was depression, and that if I let them in close enough to hear, that that would make it worse. I was afraid of the monster, so to speak, when I should have been speaking with the monster.

That’s the indirect nature of dreams. Instead of stopping to listen, I ran, and so those demons could not help me—and I was left to do ‘it’—life, that is, by ‘myself’—that is, without them, without my whole self. Not surprisingly, I found over and over again that I could not.

Only once I stopped running from those friendly little monsters, and allowed myself to listen to their messages could I integrate them into who I am. I had to stop and let them catch up, so that I could get the message—which was that to make progress out of depression, I would have to change how I was living—and I would actually have to do it myself. I mean, of course, who else—but I’d already been alone so much that, for a long time, the prospect of doing even on my own more just made me feel even more sad and alone.

Jung also often uses this concept of compensation to explain what dreams are trying to transmit. It’s no surprise then, that the solution to my recurring dreams of running was, in a way, to actually start running, which is what eventually led to me getting sober, and to rediscovering my creative self. The dreams of running, in the dark, chased by robots were compensating for a lack of real running, out in the sun with my feet on the ground.

Feeling more whole now, I feel more able to do things by myself—or otherwise—and, having gotten their message across, my pursuers have, for the most part, given up their chase. Those unconscious energies are available for other things now—for creativity, and for other messages.

From as early as I can first remember being interested in girls, my heart began to ache for love—and for touch. Of course, there’s no reason why feeling so deeply affected by the heart might mean that I’d be any less pulled by the body. In part because I was running from my mother, who did not seem to be much of a woman, I had no idea what I wanted or needed in a woman—or how to love one. I didn't have that first example of what a woman was, and so, even though I’ve gone in for love again and again, I did so not quite knowing what that was actually made of.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just had to risk it—and to their great credit, I have an army of loving, and mostly forgiving sisters from the many chapters of my life. I feel them all around me, but there were so, so many endings. There was a cost. Some pieces of my heart, and, certainly, some of theirs. So much sadness came with all that joy.

I knew before Kate and I split up that I had a pattern with women that was rooted in an emptiness that I felt whenever I was asked about love. I couldn’t really say clearly what love meant to me—and I was still looking for a woman to teach me. Many tried, but they could only do so much.

I was stuck, and it took another man to suggest to me that I couldn’t learn how to love while I was in love, trying to do the thing that I didn’t know well enough from the start. This teacher gave me an assignment which I agreed to a readiness that came from a deeper knowing that this was part of the work that I had to do, alone. I adhered to a fast of sorts for a year entirely apart from women. That meant no sex, no dating, and only minimal contact with women at all—something that might seem absurd or undoable at first, but soon enough becomes second nature.

Not only did I turn off the dating sites and apps during that year, but whenever I found myself coming into regular contact with a woman, I’d change it up. I switched to a different yoga class taught by a guy. If I was out somewhere getting coffee, I’d avoid anything but cursory interaction with women. Most of all, I sought male friends to replace the women—mostly exes—that had surrounded me.

I had to leave them all to break the cycle. Alone at last, I found love welling up from within me. I felt love in a new way, not coming from anyone else, but as an energy of my own, and, eventually, something that I began to understand how to transmit. For whatever reason, that was what I hadn’t absorbed from the first woman in my life—my mother—and so I had to learn it later on.

⭐️⭐️ THANK YOU FOR READING ⭐️⭐️

References and Further Reading

• The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung, C. G. Jung

• Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner

• The Routine Things Around the House, Stephen Dunn

• My complete “for men” reading list.

I’ve got some questions for you

1. How do you see your mother, as a woman?

2. Do you have any recurring dreams?

3. What have you been trying to escape?

4. What message might whatever it is that pursues you have for you?

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