Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,162
underneath the old mother-daughter frustration was not a wish for her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever?
I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles. The day before he said this, I had been told by my eye doctor that I had developed presbyopia, which happens to most people in their forties. As people age, they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they’re reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.
“And my mother!” Julie exclaims in my office later that day, recalling her own morning conversation with her mom. “This is so hard on her. She said her job as a parent was to make sure that her children were safe when she left the planet, but now she’s making sure I’m leaving the planet safely.”
Julie tells me that when she was in college, she got in a fight with her mom about Julie’s boyfriend. Her mother thought that Julie had lost her natural buoyancy and that the boyfriend’s behaviors—canceling plans at the last minute, pressuring Julie to edit his papers, demanding that Julie spend the holidays with him instead of with her own family—were the reason. Julie’s mom suggested that she check out the campus counseling center to talk this over with a neutral party, and Julie exploded.
“There’s nothing wrong with our relationship!” Julie shouted. “If I go to a counselor, it will be to talk about you, not him!” She didn’t go to a counselor, though now she wishes she had. A few months later, the boyfriend dumped her. And her mom loved her enough not to say I told you so. Instead, when Julie called crying, her mom sat on the phone and simply listened.
“Now,” Julie says, “my mom will have to go to a therapist to talk about me.”
Recently, one of my lab tests came back positive for a marker for Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease most common in women over forty, but even so, my doctors aren’t sure I have this because I don’t have its chief symptoms. “It could be an unusual presentation,” one doctor explained, then went on to say that I may have Sjögren’s and something else or just something else that hasn’t—still—been determined. Sjögren’s, it turns out, is difficult to diagnose, and nobody knows what causes it—it could be genetic, environmental, triggered by a virus or bacteria, or some combination of those factors.
“We don’t have all the answers,” this doctor said, and while the prospect of still not knowing scared me, another doctor’s comment frightened me even more: “Whatever it is will present itself eventually.” That week, I’d told Wendell again that my greatest fear is leaving Zach without a mother, and Wendell said that I had two choices: I could give Zach a mother who’s constantly worried about leaving him motherless, or I could give him a mother whose uncertain health makes her more acutely aware of the preciousness of their time together.
“Which scares you less?” he’d asked rhetorically.
His question made me think of Julie and how initially I’d hesitated when she asked if I would see her through her death. It wasn’t just my inexperience that gave me pause, I realized later—it was that Julie would force me to face my own mortality, something I wasn’t ready to do. Even after agreeing to her request, I’d been keeping myself safe in that relationship by never comparing my mortality to hers. After all, nobody has put a time limit on my lifespan in the same way. But Julie had learned to live with who she was and what she had—which was, in essence, what I’d helped her to do and what we all need to do. There’s so much about our lives that remains unknown. I would have to cope with not knowing what my future held, manage my worry, and focus on living now. This couldn’t be just a piece of advice I’d given Julie. It was time for me to take my own medicine.