My mother once owned 40 houses. You’d think she (and we, her descendants) would have lived and been as rich as royalty. We weren’t. Not by a long shot.
I came to see it this way. Humans being creatures of habits and all, we tend to get into behavioral grooves as adults. Call them what you will. Rituals. Routines. Habits. They can be a great comfort and source of strength in managing one’s life.
When the rest of the world appears batpoop gaga, those peculiar habits are things we can do for ourselves to assure us – fleetingly – that all is well in our world, if not in “the world.” I often struggle with this. There are things I do repeatedly that I am not convinced are the best use of my time and energy. But damn, they are a comfort.
It used to be said of “ladies” that to steady their nerves or comfort themselves, they might buy a new hat. The “lipstick economy” referred to the odd economic pattern of women buying more lipstick in economic downturns. It was a comfort and vanity they could still easily afford.
My mother epitomized these two phenomena. She had been a real estate broker when she was still married and miserable with my father. That world shattered and dissolved. But in her dotage she circled back around to “house buying” for comfort and distraction.
It had to be those reasons as there didn’t seem to be any major economic game plan, like securing her retirement or passing a substantial inheritance to her children and grandchildren.
I observed that her most frantic and frenetic house-buying activity was in the midst of a Herculean power struggle that she and I were engaged in. The house purchases angered me. For several reasons. The lack of a game plan to start. Who was going to manage and maintain all of these acquisitions, I wondered?
But if I’m honest, I was more angry because my mother’s relentless search and the process of buying houses deflected her energy from coming to any peace or resolution with me. It was like her old addictions to pills and booze which were always more important than I was.
She had a similar deflection strategy at night. I always appreciate the time before sleep as a time to review the day and put my thoughts and priorities in some kind of order. Badly and imperfectly but I at least allow myself that private, quiet time.
Mom slept with every major broadcaster in the industry for years. I should probably phrase that differently. Mom went to bed every night and slept with the radio on, listening to the likes of Larry King or Peter Gzowski and Stuart Maclean reruns or anyone else with the gift of gab.
What that said to me was that she was not comfortable in her own skin and at peace with her own thoughts. She had to cram the words of voices of others into her head so as not to listen to voices she didn’t want to hear. Like mine. It was her habit.
Deflection and distraction only hold up as coping strategies for awhile. If important things in your life are consistently deflected and ignored, there will be a day of reckoning. Hitting the proverbial brick wall as it is colloquially known.
And so that is exactly what happened to Mom and her empire. Low cost houses in poor shape attracted low rents and the renters that went with that scenario. Mom had a perpetual “soft spot” for birds with broken wings. The irony, of course, is that she never did accept and realize that she was a flightless bird herself so rendered by multiple losses and tragedies.
The “do-gooder” dynamic is pervasive and well-known. There are legions of folk out there who help others primarily to feel good and generous and to deflect any suggestion of neediness they might have themselves.
That sounds cynical I realize. I also believe there are genuinely generous and good people out there. There are also plenty of the others.
Mom lost all of the 40 houses. Short sales. Foreclosures. Tax disputes with the authorities which they inevitably won. She shrugged off the losses years later: “They served a purpose at the time.”
Healing her own emotional wounds or those between her and her eldest daughter went by the wayside. Healing between us was not to be. We were in an emotional stalemate at the time of her death. Civil and superficially affectionate. Each of us wary and cautious around the other, playing our assigned roles. We circled each other emotionally and psychologically like two lionesses each wounded by the other in previous battles.
I didn’t have a mother. She didn’t have a daughter. Not in any real way that might have mattered long term that left me awash in tender and loving memories. If we are lucky, even after a antagonist’s death, healing keeps happening. It has to if we are to make sense of what we lived through and why what happened, happened.
I am taking stock of my current habitual distractions and deflections. In that regard, for all my insight and bitching about my mother’s dysfunctional habits, I sometimes realize the apple hasn’t fallen all that far from the tree.
Expressive Compulsive 