Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,160

as I sit with Rita and hear her story, I have the urge to cry—not for my pain, but for my mother’s. As much as I’ve thought about my relationship with my mother over the years, I’ve never considered her experience in exactly the way I am now. I have the fantasy that all adults should be given the opportunity to hear parents—not their own—rip themselves open, become completely vulnerable, and give their versions of events, because in seeing this, you can’t help but come to a newfound understanding of your own parents’ lives, whatever the situation.

While Rita read her letter, I wasn’t just listening to her words; I was also observing her body, seeing how at times, it would crumple in on itself, how sometimes her hands would tremble and her lips would become pinched and her leg would shake and her voice would quaver, how she’d shift her weight when she paused. I’m watching her body now too, and sad as she seems, her body appears, if not at peace, the most relaxed I’ve seen it. She leans back on the couch, recovering from the exertion of the reading.

And then something astounding happens.

She reaches over to the tissue box on my side table and pulls one out. A clean, fresh tissue! She opens it up, blows her nose, then takes another from the box and blows her nose again. It’s all I can do not to break into applause.

“So,” she asks, “do you think I should send this?”

I picture Myron reading Rita’s letter. I wonder how he’ll respond as a father and grandfather, as somebody who was married to Myrna, likely a very different kind of mother to their now happily grown children. Will he accept who Rita is, all of her? Or will this information be too much, something he can’t get past?

“Rita,” I say, “that’s a decision only you can make. But I’m curious—is this a letter for Myron or for your children?”

Rita pauses for a second, looks at the ceiling. Then she looks back at me, nods, but says nothing, because we each know the answer is Both.

52

Mothers

“So,” I’m telling Wendell, “we get back from a late dinner with friends and I ask Zach to take his shower, but he wants to play, and I tell him we can’t because it’s a school night. And then he has this complete overreaction and whines, ‘You’re so mean! You’re the meanest!’—which isn’t like him at all—but also this anger just boils up inside me.

“So I say something petty like, ‘Oh, really? Well, maybe next time I shouldn’t take you and your friends out to dinner, if I’m so mean.’ Like I’m five years old! And he says, ‘Fine!’ and slams his door—he’s never slammed his door before—and gets in the shower and I go to my computer planning to answer emails but instead I’m having a conversation in my head about whether I really am mean. How could I have responded that way? I’m the adult, after all.

“And then all of a sudden I remember a frustrating phone conversation I’d had with my mother that morning and it clicks. I’m not angry with Zach. I’m angry with my mom. It was classic displacement.”

Wendell smiles as if to say, Displacement’s a bitch, isn’t it? We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren’t aware of them in the moment. A familiar example is denial—a smoker might cling to the belief that his shortness of breath is due to the hot weather and not his cigarettes. Another person might use rationalization (justifying something shameful)—saying after he’s rejected for a job that he never really wanted the job in the first place. In reaction formation, unacceptable feelings or impulses are expressed as their opposite, as when a person who dislikes her neighbor goes out of her way to befriend her or when an evangelical Christian man who’s attracted to men makes homophobic slurs.

Some defense mechanisms are considered primitive and others mature. In the latter group is sublimation, when a person turns a potentially harmful impulse into something less harmful (a man with aggressive impulses takes up boxing) or even constructive (a person with the urge to cut people becomes a surgeon who saves lives).

Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature. A person who was yelled at by her boss but could get fired if