Anonymous
I’m losing faith in the possibility of ever having a mutually meaningful relationship with my MOTHER, help!!!!
GN
Dear Anon,
I like how your SOS is worded—reaching for a mutually meaningful relationship. Since the relationship will always be meaningful, and that’s part of the issue: it’s overburdened, it would seem, as meaning’s very ground. But your sting is in the parallax: that yours and your mother’s meanings don’t look the same, and the very depth of one seems annihilating to the other if your meanings can’t find a common object, a shared view or shared construction. If your meaning robs me of mine. You were the X and I was the Y, not the other way around, etc.
I’m thinking about what mutually meaningful can mean when it comes to your plea for rescue.
A dyad that falls sick with recursion and reflection: staring straight into the other like your mirror, it reproduces fainter images. Because the other is not a mirror! But we can understand the confusion when it comes to our mothers—mirroring did, in some part, make us. Was your mother frustrated, then, to not find her reflection in you, to find the patina where it doesn’t reflect? Or was it all she saw in you, and thus you couldn’t find yourself in yourself, searching for the end of the reflection?
I saw an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s learning play The Mother by The Wooster Group in New York City a few years ago. The play is based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel. Mother and son have a tense relationship in the midst of communist organizing around a factory in the leadup to the 1905 revolution in Russia. At first, the mother despairs when her son goes further into revolutionary activity. Her life is hard enough! But eventually she realizes that the only way to attend to the crisis is not through limiting personal suffering but collective action. And at one point the son, or the mother, intones that it was so hard to relate mother-to-son, son-to-mother, but with the introduction of a third thing (which in this case is communism, pray it could be with our mothers but I know how it goes), things opened up between them, relation flowed. They could move in the same direction, without needing to be mirrors of each other.
I thought of this performance when listening to the guitarist and singer Ibrahima Sow at a concert a couple weeks ago. He sang a song about mothers, and his mother, and while he sang in French, someone spoke the translated lyrics in between verses. He sang something like—love is not staring into the eyes of the beloved, but looking in the same direction.
I encourage mutual meaning in orientation towards a third thing. Can you heed those same directions and third things which animate the fraught field of relation between you and your mom? Even if they’re relatively small. Something which channels your mutual attention, even if meaning diverges. A place to converge despite meaning’s divergence, I think that is a kind of mutually meaningful contact.
Circulate the relationship through objects and atmospheres less burdened with the tautness of your dyad and see if it can hit on another feeling, or affect, for a time. And if that third thing feels paltry or small, you can also check out Brecht’s The Mother if you want to fantasize (or actualize) the actuality (or fantasy) of communist revolution healing mother and child, by healing something else in the process.
Yours,
Grace
