M’dears, you have a reading assignment: Deborah Tannen’s You’re Wearing That? (Random House, 2006)about mother-child miscommunication. Dr.Tannen, Georgetown linguistics professor, is best known for You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.
Two weeks ago, during the first of four days of graduation celebrations at Georgetown U, I lost it, crying about my mom. Senior Convo was first event, a bookend to the gowning ceremony, where, the Sunday before they began their Georgetown lives, new students processioned through campus, and in a happy ceremony in the old gym, donned their academic robes, officially becoming scholars in the Georgetown community. Senior Convo summarized their time at GU, since they were gowned. Sitting in the bleachers in the old gym again, I caught a whiff of the perfume my mom used to wear--White Shoulders--and started crying for her.
When my mom died, unexpectedly, during child’s first month at Georgetown, she and I were not exactly on speaking terms but we were trying for rapprochement. I had written her a long letter a month before, and was working up to calling her. Although my mom lived 2,000 miles away, she might as well have lived next door. My mom had a way of criticizing me, from the trivial, like me wearing too much eye liner, or hair too long, and how she thought I didn’t look good in black (favorite color) or the serious, as when I divorced my ex—she did not believe in divorce—that I would ever meet anyone else, and I would die alone, and look how she and my father endured the bad and the good. Whenever I would call her, or when she called me, mom lectured me about something that made me feel not good enough about myself, or my parenting skills. I knew she said these things because she loved me, and wanted the best for me. Still...So I seldom called her, and felt bad about that too.
My sibs and extended family will still not forgive me for not attending my mom’s funeral. The day my mom died, child had, suddenly, been admitted to Georgetown Hospital, seriously ill, facing surgery, ultimately requiring child to take medical leave for the rest of semester to recover. The ex was traveling with his future wife; whether or not he received my frantic messages on his cell phone or not was irrelevant. I raced back and forth between work and hospital, and home, once in a while to feed the dog, worried, exhausted. Never mind my mom's death and funeral.
Senior Convo provided, in a weird way, an occasion to mourn my mom. During the time between my mom's death and child's graduation, I never made time to grieve about my mom. Had been caught up in post-divorce survival, and pushed my mom's death to the back of the closet, until I could deal with missing her. As the president, deans, various students and professors gave their takes on the class of 2009, I boo-hood, kind of about child moving on, but really about my mom....
The woman sitting next to me, who was crying harder than I was, offered me tissue, and I told her I wished my mom could be here, and she said she wished her mom could have been here too. We started talking about our moms, and their unique way they had to hurt us. Did any of us ever measure up to our mom's expectations? She told me about Deborah Tannen’s book, "You're wearing that?" It helped her make peace with her mom's constant criticisms. Miscommunication between moms and their children can be even more challenging than between women and men.
Tannen wrote in her book, “Women are healed by, or ache for, satisfying conversations with their mothers and grown daughters [or sons], in some cases…to break out of cycles of misunderstanding that can turn more amiable conversations into painful or angry ones in the blink of an eye.” For the past two weeks, been reading and thinking about Tannen’s book…finally understanding my mom…her criticisms that hurt to the bone, and forgiving her (kind of; am still working on this). You’re Wearing That? was a revelation. If only the book came out, before my mom died, she and I would have had a better time with each other. If you and your mom have these communication pratfalls, and I bet you do, get Tannen. You'll feel better, honestly.
The kid in the photo of this entry is the May 2009 Georgetown grad, who grew up in the blink of an eye.
