Placing oceans between yourself and your loved ones inevitably means that you don’t get to talk to them nearly as much as you’d like. Phone calls from my mother are always welcome, and usually contain some new words of wisdom that I really needed to hear in that moment. I inherited the GO ON ALL THE ROAD TRIPS ALL THE TIME gene from her, so most of her phone calls come to me from interstate highways. I like to pretend that I am there with her, watching the corn fields roll by, thinking that I am never going to stop needing her to teach me how to live.
Last week she had a major mishap with a painting. She is closing down her gallery and she was delivering the behemoth of a painting that has sat behind the cash register area for years now.
My mom was all set to lay the painting flat and tie it down. She was also going to follow the woman whose truck and trailer were being offered up for this delivery. The other woman working that day, the one lending her trailer, suggested propping the painting up instead, and noted that the painting was so heavy that it was unlikely to go anywhere. My mom agreed, and decided to leave on her drive up to Chicago right away instead of following.
So the painting was upright — or at some sort of angle, I guess — not strapped in with bungee cords, and nobody was following behind the trailer.
Sure enough, wind got under the painting and blew it off the truck. As it turns out, the painting is perfectly fine, but the large, ornate frame was absolutely obliterated by the fall. There’s something symbolic, I suppose, in the decimation of the gorgeous frame that has sat in her gallery for so long, just as she is closing its doors permanently.
The good news is that it didn’t hit any other vehicles, and the only damage whatsoever was to the frame, and my mother’s overall state of mind upon hearing about it.
My mom was in the highly unfortunate position of knowing that she meant to do it differently and blatantly ignored her own instincts. She had been feeling absolutely sick over the whole thing for her entire morning as she drove up to Chicago.
But as we spoke, her tone shifted. It was almost as if saying it out loud helped a certain thought sink into her brain, because I could hear her becoming more persuaded by the idea the longer we spoke: she came to the conclusion that it was over and that there is nothing left for her to do about it but find a solution. There was absolutely no sense in continuing to beat herself up over a thing that she could not change.
This is obvious and not particularly revolutionary, but accepting this obvious thing is no small feat.
I am sure she probably let it fester a little bit longer after we hung up. I am equally sure, however, that she also began working toward a solution as soon as we hung up.
It was that resolve to simply accept it that so impressed me. This isn’t a new phenomenon or anything. This is how my mother has always been, but it doesn’t make me admire it any less.
How often do I do some variation on this? I do something ridiculously stupid, creating a huge problem, and then allow myself to waste far too much time obsessing over how fucking stupid I was, rather than finding the solution.
I know that it is chiefly my treacherous inner-critic at work. When someone else has done the stupid thing, when the problem at hand is not my fault, I am so much better at finding that solution.
The realization that I personally dropped the ball is its own special kind of road block for me.
My mother actually is this way too — I suspect I learned some of this from her as well. I just haven’t managed to develop her same skill for maneuvering my way around these road blocks.
Maybe it was saying it out loud that did the trick. Being able to acknowledge, “This is everything that went wrong here. This is how I fucked up,” was useful in bringing herself to terms with it. Then, in hearing herself speak, she was also forced to move to, “Now I am talking about a thing that can no longer be changed. Instead, let’s start where that story concludes.”
I’m filing this under “Essential Life Skills I Have Not Yet Acquired.” It’s a subfolder of, “Reasons To Call Your Mother More Often.”