Are You Happy, Ma?
A line from Ocean Vuong’s book, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” is sticking to me this morning. It reads, “I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.”
Those words landed with a thud deep in my belly, poking their fingers directly in the same themes I have been journaling about these last few mornings, when the house is quiet and I’m working hard to make the most of that silent time. To settle back into myself and rediscover what’s actually important to me, how I might really be feeling beneath the weight of every day living.
I get preoccupied on a busy level with how I think I feel, but when I get quiet and probe a little deeper, I’m sometimes unsure that those busy feelings are trustworthy as they are often rooted in fear and fear is most often about what may happen, not what actually is happening. Fear is a projection of future feeling and is not, in fact, present day feeling. Sometimes it’s hard to get at real-time feeling, excepting those that are obvious because of their immediacy – you know, our primal feelings like hunger, fatigue, lust, loneliness, boredom, quick knee-jerk flight and fright. But beneath all those survival feelings lie the feelings that ultimately direct who we are and who we are becoming. The same feelings that mold our clay into a perceptible shape that tells the world whether we are a person who is dormant or determined, invisible or seen, soundless or soundful. The feelings that inform our subconscious, the same subconscious that is probably the invisible conductor who ultimately creates the sound and shape of our lives.
As for mothers and the Vuong quote that’s so sticky for me right now. We all have them – mothers. As a child turned teenager turned young adult, I rarely considered how my mother felt, at least not on a fundamental level. I was raised to be polite, so I was considerate of decorum. I was careful to say please and thank you so as not to offend. So as to get what I wanted. But my consideration of her feelings didn’t go much deeper than that. They couldn’t have. I was too busy developing into an independent adult to consider her deeper feelings.
Yet, somehow, I was concerned for my father’s feelings. Or I was afraid and careful of what might become explosive feelings. Those same feelings that would leap like sudden wildfire into a quick reddening of the face, a frothy collection of spittle at the corner of the mouth, a pounding of the fist on the table so as to underscore a passionate point or an ethical principle that one of us had somehow challenged or offended. But, if I really think on it, this careful consideration of my father’s feelings wasn’t truly concern for how he actually felt. It wasn’t veritable concern for whether he was, in fact, a happy man. Instead, my side-stepping in consideration of his feelings was born from an interest in self-preservation. I didn’t want to be the recipient of the gripped face or the fist-gavel. I wanted security so I tried my best to be polite and subservient. He was directing the ship and the ship needed to be steady. I didn’t want to cut through the water with him at hard angles. I never liked a boat that pitched.
But my mother, at least while I was still a small child…she would direct her feelings inward. Not outward. She bore the weight of her feeling in silence, until finally it erupted into alcoholism and, ultimately, self-destruction. As a child, she rarely, if ever, burdened me with her feelings (though she did share of herself, her sharing came in the form of storytelling and wasn’t the same as turning her feelings outward as a burst of emotion). And, as a result, I never really gave her feelings a second thought. That is, I never gave her feelings deeper consideration until she succumbed to her alcoholism and died, when I was thirty years old and suddenly motherless. Then I started to think hard about how she might have been feeling during all those years when I would blow right past her, so busy becoming my own little person.
Now that I am a mother, I understand that parenting can be a lonely wilderness, much like adolescence can be a lonely wilderness. I took my mother for granted because she mostly kept herself contained. I didn’t really appreciate how much she was churning on the inside. I didn’t stop to think.
Is that the correct way of things? Perhaps. Perhaps children and young adults should not consider their parents feelings. Instead, it might be true that a child’s psychology is just forming and so, by right, should remain self-absorbed. It might be critical to their development.
But I do know – now that my mother has been dead for almost twenty years and my father’s death is still so fresh – that I wish I had stopped to consider how they felt when we still had the time to bandy about. When I still had the chance to learn about them. It’s true that I was given that opportunity with my father as he lived long enough for me to come to my senses, so there is some retribution there. But the time we had was so quick and compressed. An entire continent separated us by three thousand miles for the last twenty-five years of his life and, by then, I was a very busy adult parenting children of my own.
So, with my elders who are still here….with all the people who are part of my inner circle…can I stop to listen? Can I listen to understand rather than to have a ready response? Sometimes no response means that the listener is ruminating, is considering, is busy leaning into what they have heard and I know there is so much that is worth a good listen.