Revelation

Two important things happened to me today.

First, as I was sitting across from a client in my office, it dawned on me that I had crossed the cavernous and dreaded divide: I was not only the psychologist guiding the mother of a child with a disability, I was, on a covert level, relating to her as a mom. What I mean is, I am one of them now. You know, the tired, haggard women that I feared I would become? My heart sank briefly when I came upon this thought. I wondered to myself, "Is it really so bad?" and brushed the idea aside.

Then, on my way home, I finished the wonderful book, Far From the Tree, by Andrew Solomon. The final words resonate with me so well:

Subjectivity may be truer than objectivity. Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have. We could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance. We love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die; even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them. 

Pictures of despair are widely admired. And perfect bleakness is generally thought to reflect the integrity of the author. But when I’ve tried to write about happiness, I’ve had an inverse revelation; which is that you cannot write about it without seeming shallow. Even when one emphasizes the sorrowful or the joyful, one is being honest. Just as one is honest when he says the sky above is blue without getting into the brownness of the earth below. The families I met with mostly emphasized the craning art of looking up. 

Early psychoanalytic models are about accepting life’s problems. Modern therapies focus on resolving them, eliminating them, or redefining them as something other than problems. Does some artiface creep into this brazen triumphalism? People often affect a happiness they do not feel. People whose neurosis have turned to misery are not only miserable but also believe that they have failed. But the vital piece of this inclination toward the light is the unshakable belief that catastrophes properly end in resolution. That tragedies are frequently a phase rather than an end game. This book seeks the nobility buried in Howell’s disparagement. It is predicated on an even more optimistic notion which is that the happy endings of tragedies have a dignity beyond the happy endings of comedies. That they not only transcend the mockishnish to which Howell alludes, but also produce a contentment more cherished than one untempered by suffering.

Sometimes people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy. But you can keep yourself open more to sorrows richness than unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe or they may be the true meaning of love. Insofar as I have written a self-help book, it is a how-to manual for receptivity; a description of how to tolerate what cannot be cured and an argument that cures are not always appropriate even when they are feasible. As the jagged Alps are to the romantic sublime, so this curious joy is to the character of these families. Nearly impossible, terrible, and terribly beautiful. 

Thank you, Mr. Solomon, for your years of research and life experience that have led you to these insights. What you have written depicts the model mother I have been looking for: Undoubtedly tired, warn, and sometimes discouraged, but overwhelmingingly blessed by the love that is all around. May I be unapologetic about the former and forever thankful for the latter.