Mother’s Day

“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
-Honore de Balzac

I spent more than 30 years being angry at my mother. I didn’t know why and I never questioned my feelings. My anger just was.

In November of 2015 we hadn’t talked in years. The last time we had seen each other was in 2009 before I left the country. I had called to let her know I was leaving, offering to meet her and say goodbye in person out of a sense of propriety, perhaps even duty, but not love.

I remember sitting across the table from her at the restaurant she had chosen and feeling impatient. I’ve done what I was supposed to- let’s get this over with. I was feeling magnanimous for allowing her this audience.

Since I was a teenager, our relationship had been extremely difficult. I rejected everything she said to me and refused to treat her in any substantive way as my mother. She tried to reach me but I was unreachable. I ignored her words of advice and regret it: I’d have spared my self a lot of trouble if I’d taken her guidance to heart.

I was surly and oppositional through my teens, not entirely atypical for a high schooler; but underneath the clichéd exterior boiled a seething maelstrom of trauma and directionless rage. In my 20s I became a parent, struggling with a terribly unhappy marriage and trying to raise 3 children. Mom often stepped in to help with the kids but received little thanks from me, only demands for more. I lost custody of my children when I was 37; my anger and trauma had boiled over into my parenting and the court made the only choice it could. When I was 39, I disappeared: I left the state, then the country, and cut ties with my entire family.

My mother never understood, could never understand, what I had endured; I never told her, not that I would have had the words for it then. My father’s abuse had closed me off from normal human feelings. The only emotion I ever truly felt was rage. My ability to hide my pain, something I would get very good at, was first learned by keeping the truth from her.

She never understood why I was so angry at her and the world in general.

As the years went on I told myself I was fine, that I didn’t need family, but on certain days such as holidays I felt a deep, lonely longing that I did my best to ignore. I convinced myself I was an island that needed no connection to the rest of the world.

In 2015 I was a little over a year into my healing journey. My therapist and I had done some incredible work to root out the sources of my trauma and begin processing them. Yet when the topic of my mother came up in session, I brushed it off as insignificant. I didn’t particularly blame my mother for anything regarding my woundedness but still rejected any idea of connecting with her.

I was still in what I now call my discovery phase; approximately the first 18 months after beginning psychedelic-assisted therapy. I made regular and profound discoveries and connections concerning my traumatic past and recategorised nearly every past experience into a new paradigm.

That November I was in my apartment having a solo experience with MDMA. During this intellectual, ego-based stage of my journey the medicine was integral to my accumulation of knowledge and understanding. I’ve often compared MDMA to being like a bloodhound; unlike other substances you can focus its attention on particular things and it will help you seek out specific information with great alacrity.

Yet when it came, my revelation about my mother was a great surprise. It quite literally just happened without warning or preamble.

I forget the specifics of most of the experience, they have been catalogued with others into the wealth of information I gathered during that time, but I remember the moment I finally understood and released my anger towards my mother like it happened yesterday.

Until then, I had been focusing on my abusive father and the many ways in which he damaged me. Toward the end of the session, however, something new happened. A friend calls it a ‘download’; a sudden, unexpected yet complete and profoundly impactful new bundle of understanding and truth. In less than a second my entire relationship with my mother, all four and a half decades of it, was transformed.

I was immediately able to see the source of the anger that I had never questioned and deeply felt her innocence in my suffering. I saw her with compassion and love for the first time in my adult life. As I reeled with the implications, my anger towards her dissipated as swiftly as a wisp of smoke in a typhoon.

She never knew what a monster my father was but some part of me was angry at her for not coming to save me. Some deep and wounded part of childhood wanted his Mom to come protect him. She did not because she did not know that I needed saving. My unmet needs created a subconscious knot of anger that would grow and focus its energy on my mother.

In that moment I also saw so much of the pain I had caused her. She had lived half her life thinking her only child hated her for reasons she could not fathom. She went years without a call or card on her birthday and never any answers as to why. This would be devastating for any caring parent.

As I lay in bed, reeling with the revelation, I felt an immediate need to call her. I try to avoid using the phone during a psychedelic experience but even in hindsight this was a valid exception.

I rang and, not surprisingly, she didn’t answer. I left her a message that said I was sorry, that I’d figured some things out, that I missed her, and that I wanted my Mom.

I hung up, still spinning from the impact of the download. I walked through my past and saw everything with a new set of eyes. Everything was changed.

After almost exactly the length of time it would have taken for her to listen to my voicemail my mother called back; we had our first real conversation in my adult life.

Over the next few weeks we would speak many times. I told her about what had happened with my father, I cried and apologised for the pain I had caused her, and I never once did she blame or shame me for my anger.

I would go back to upstate NY a few months later, near my 46th birthday. She met me at the Syracuse airport and we hugged for the first time in seemingly forever.

Of course there has been awkwardness at times, 30 years of difficult past doesn’t disappear overnight. When it’s awkward we work through it honestly and openly like a mother and son are supposed to. Though we joke about her expert level skill with Catholic guilt, she’s never once made me feel guilty for my wound-born anger and has only expressed happiness and relief for my transformation.

I’ve been back home several times since then. The last was the previous Christmas: my three children, my daughter-in-law and grandson, my mother’s husband and adopted grandfather to my children were all together for the first time in over a decade. At several points that day I looked around the small room as we opened presents and laughed and I was struck by the utter, beautiful, traditional normality of it all. Norman Rockwell could not have painted a more perfect Christmas.

Today is Mother’s Day, a day I used to ignore or disdain as the whim struck. No longer. I’ll call my mother today, she’ll thank me for calling and tell me how she wishes I were there and how I should move back home even though the winters are terrible and there are no jobs in my field available, and I’ll be smiling the whole time because it’s Mother’s Day and I have a Mom to call again.

If you ever doubt a mother’s love, look at mine. She waited thirty years for me to get over my rage and rejection. When I finally did she didn’t treat me like someone who had been angry and hurtful to her for so long, she treated me like a son who had finally come home after a long, difficult journey.

Thank you, Mom. I love you.