Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power; they have a claim on you; you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.  (M. Atwood)

While stuck in an airport on a recent trip with my husband, we had a long discussion about my affinity for self-indulgence, and the repercussions for such behavior.  I was immediately reminded of the above mentioned quote in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, and wondered why it is so tempting to create a humanity and rationalize conduct, when most often people’s motives are complex and rarely can be explained in understandable ways. 

I reminded my husband that a good number of bad deeds end in good results.  The point is to move on and not seek to interpret every word and gesture. This struggle to find explanations is just an everlasting torment.  I do not understand myself the vast majority of the time. Perhaps it is because I do not know myself as well as I like to think I do. How else to explain when looking through my rearview mirror, all the obvious clues I’ve missed?  

Many of my friends and family say that they do not know me.  I play everyone, myself included, speaking in conundrums, leaving the pivotal matters out.  And they are right. It isn’t that I’m giving up my real personality.  Or maybe it is.  Maybe I’ve given it up so long ago that I don’t even recognize it’s absence.  Maybe that’s the reason why I often feel so compromised and with such insufficient control over my life; altering it’s degrees to the left and the right, creating so many contingencies.  

Mastering one’s own story is consuming.  Always weighing.  One word against another, one idea, one thought. But every action has a consequence, and usually it is a measurable one.  And it is dismal when it affects the innocents.  

Why do we do the things we do?  Who can answer that in honesty?  We all have our moral certainties, our areas of black and white, but beneath the surface of things, it isn’t always so clear. That age-old duet of will makes it all the more difficult.

12th century church

When older people get together there is something unflappable about them; you can see they’ve tasted all the heavy, bitter, spicy food of life, extracted it’s poisons, and will now spend 10 or 15 years in a state of perfect equilibrium and enviable morality.  Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood

I have a few friends who are well into their eighties; women who have lived their lives thoroughly and enjoyed the amassed daily moments to their fullest extent.  I love these women for what they are.  There is wisdom in their advice, a sense of humor in their actions.  They’ve come to terms with the destruction life has in store. Physical health and beauty deteriorating, husbands and friends lost to death or alzheimers, children and dear ones far away, their bodies betraying them daily.  But their kindness, their compassion, their love survived every treachery and evolved into a beauty transcending the physical.

I know they have fears.  Whenever I see them upset at their lack of control over their bodies, they fear for their dignity. For their self-respect and the respect, or lack of, others have for them. I like to remind them that their self-esteem need not suffer because their bodies fail. They are more than that. More than fragile bones and decrepit muscles. They are the light in the eyes, the smile on the lips, the love they exude.   

Some have come to terms with death encroaching, others have not. But, I don’t believe it is death they fear, or maybe not as much; what they fear is their disappearance; the disappearance of their voices, their laughter, their memory.  The fear of becoming a dusty one-dimensional photo. The cessation of their story.

And then the fear of eternity. Who is immune to that?  All around, so vast and unfathomable. Like grains of sand or stars in the night sky. And all that had been left undone and unsaid. All the mundane and not so mundane choices made daily that may or may not have purified the soul. Or whether their faith will pay off and they will be in the presence of God and their loved departed ones, or rotting away, first their flesh and then their bones. 

And yes, for some the fear of death as well. Of what happens at that moment when this earthly life ends and the other begins. That transition from the mortal to the immortal. The termination of one and the beginning of another. How will it be? What will they feel? Where will their soul go and how will it get there?

Yet, despite all these thoughts in their minds and in mine, I marvel at their depth, at the lives they’ve created, at their multi-dimensional facets, the little glimpses into the girls they were and the women they’ve become. So graceful, caring, resilient.  And I look forward to my old age, not in despair but in hope; the hope that I’ll become like one of them, enduring and persevering.

A friend sent me a link to a disturbing article in today’s New York Times about Romania and the extent of corruption still present, twenty years almost, after the fall of communism.  I was not surprised to read it, however, I began to wonder about what is our inherent blueprint when it comes to our ethical behaviors since we are still governed by corruption, nepotism, and dishonesty.  Why is it that we lack courage?  Why do we fail to see that we deserve better?

We embrace capitalism, free-thinking, and democracy, yet judge those who live the freedom that we want as naive and ignorant.  We hated censorship and nepotism during communism and yet we censor against those with differing viewpoints and favor our relations, rather than merit.  Even in our day to day business dealings in the U.S. we are characterized by the bribery we practice.  We smirk our way through meetings and believe that greasing someone’s palm will get us out of predicaments or send clients our way.

There’s a poverty to our expectations.  We believe our survival is based on cheating and lying. Why?  It isn’t as simple as money, or this vigorous, persistent quest of acquiring one thing after another.  It isn’t that we are immigrants and the natives are envious because we know how to get what we want.  We are not admirable; we are destructive. And we are not envied.  Not when we play dirty.

I believe that our way out of this is only by being truthful about the past.  Our words have to have true meaning.  Our deeds need to be judged at face value.  It isn’t us versus the system.  We are not powerless.  We need to rethink our certainties and our disguises. We need to be proactive and take our accurate place in time.

I start trembling at the very thought of the unplanned and the unknown, but inevitable and unstoppable force with which parents leave traces in their children that, like traces of branding, can never be erased.  Pascal Mercier

It seems like my little baby boy was just born, we had just been discharged from the hospital and were on our way home, the car packed with all types of necessities, our heads crammed with all kinds of practical advice we were already forgetting. Yet, in less than a week he’s turning nine. And in some ways, despite all our reading and all our prayers and all the advice we even now receive, we’re still just as clueless as we were then. I look at my parents who had raised five children and at my in-laws who had raised seven, and wonder.  They deserve to be congratulated and respected for this accomplishment, for it wasn’t easy.  

My mother’s idealism and desire to fill our lives with goodness and love shaped us into the adults we are.  I reflect upon those carefree childhood days when the only worries we had were which playground we were going to visit, and which friends we were going to play with. She was conscientiously indulgent with her time, with her patience, and with her possessions; nothing was too good for us.

Her gentle rebukes and reminders rarely humiliated our fragile selves. She was fair and consistent in her expectations and her discipline. I try to remember that whenever I lose it and scream my head off for some tiny, inconsequential offense I believe is aimed at me; aimed at showing me what a failure I am as a parent. And I am afraid that the parental will within me, added on to all my ignorant fears, renders my son helpless and angry during the years of his life when he should be untroubled.  

Because I don’t want my son disappointed in me as a parent (and to be honest, sometimes I’m too tired, too busy, etc.), I often resort to a dirty little trick: I turn to my husband for his opinion, thus making him the definitive factor in whatever issue is at hand. I resorted to this last night.  For one, I was too exhausted to really go into detail about why a certain behavior is not allowed, and two, it didn’t really seem like such a big deal anyway, so I couldn’t come up with a good enough argument to convince my boy (and my boy is not easily redirected).

My husband did a wonderful job explaining, as he usually does. I cuddled my son next to me on the couch and smiled across the ottoman to my husband, congratulating him for his words of logic.  Yet all the while relieved that I wasn’t the one put on the spot, my words were not the ones objected to.  Not long after, it dawned on me that unless I grow a backbone and stand firm on my own opinions and decisions, my son would still be disappointed.  My role as a mother is not an invisible role, nor a diminished one.  I need to own its existence.  I need to embrace it.  I need to grow in wisdom.  I need to nurture and comfort and love and admonish.  And I need to figure out how.