Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,161

she yelled back might come home and yell at her dog. Or a woman who felt angry at her mother after a phone conversation might displace that anger onto her son.

I tell Wendell that when I went to apologize to Zach after his shower, I discovered that he, too, was displacing his anger onto me—some kids at recess had kicked Zach and his friends off the basketball courts. When the yard teacher said that everyone could play, the boys wouldn’t pass the ball to Zach or his friends, and apparently some “mean” things were said. Zach was furious with those boys, but it was safer to be furious at his mom who wanted him to take a shower.

“The irony of the story,” I continue, “is that we both launched our anger at the wrong target.”

From time to time, Wendell and I have discussed the ways parental relationships evolve in midlife as people shift from blaming their parents to taking full responsibility for their lives. It’s what Wendell calls “the changing of the guard.” Whereas in their younger years, people often come to therapy to understand why their parents won’t act in ways they wish, later on, people come to figure out how to manage what is. And so my question about my mother has gone from “Why can’t she change?” to “Why can’t I?” How is it, I ask Wendell, that even in my forties, I can be affected so deeply by a phone call from my mother?

I’m not asking for an actual answer. Wendell doesn’t need to tell me that people regress; that you might astonish yourself with how far you’ve come, only to slip back into your old roles.

“It’s like the eggs,” I say, and he nods in recognition. I once told Wendell that Mike, my colleague, had said a while back that when we feel fragile, we’re like raw eggs—we crack open and splatter if dropped. But when we develop more resilience, we’re like hard-boiled eggs—we might get dinged up if dropped, but we won’t crack completely and spill all over the place. Over the years, I’ve gone from being a raw egg to a hard-boiled egg with my mother, but sometimes the raw egg in me emerges.

I tell Wendell that later that night my mom apologized and we worked it out. Before that, though, I’d gotten caught up in our old routine—her wanting me to do something the way she wanted it done, me wanting to do it the way I wanted. And perhaps Zach perceives me the same way, trying to control him by getting him to do things the way I want too—all in the name of love, of wanting the best for our children. As much as I claim to be dramatically different from my mother, there are times when I’m eerily similar.

Now, talking about my phone conversation, I don’t bother telling Wendell what my mom said or what I said because I know that’s not the point. He won’t position me as victim and my mom as aggressor. Years ago I might have deconstructed our pas de deux, trying to garner sympathy for my predicament: Can’t you see? Isn’t she difficult? But now I find his more clear-eyed approach comforting.

Today I tell Wendell that I’ve begun saving my mom’s phone messages to my computer, the warm and sweet ones that I’ll want to hear, that my son may want so that he can hear his grandmother’s voice when he’s my age—or, later, when we’re both gone. I tell him that I’m also noticing that the nagging I do as a parent isn’t for Zach as much as it is for me; it’s a distraction from my awareness that he’ll be leaving me one day, from my sadness, despite my wanting him to do the healthy work of what’s called “separation and individuation.”

I try to imagine Zach as a teenager. I remember my mom dealing with me as a teenager and finding me as alien as I might one day find Zach. It seems not that long ago that he was in preschool, and my parents were healthy, and I was healthy, and the neighborhood kids all ran outside to play every evening after dinner, and the only thought I had about the future at all was the sense of Things will be easier, I’ll have more flexibility, more sleep. I never thought about what would be lost.

Who knew that a phone call with my mother could bring all this to the surface—that