Throughout February - my birth month - will write about the amazing Katharine Reynolds Lockhart. I will even learn how to scan & post photos so y'all can see the lady of whom I speak!
No one drove me up a wall more than my mother. No one came even remotely close.
For all of my life, the woman was my #1 nemesis, a fact I openly admitted long before she was reunited with her O! Best Beloved.
My #1 nemesis AND the person who showed me how to survive her. It was just before she passed that I got a first flicker of understanding that what drove me nuts wasn't just part of her nature, but was rooted in what she believed was a spiritual ideal. The depth didn't hit home until a couple weeks ago, at church - 13+ years after her death.
BACKGROUND: Mom could not make people suffer a consequence, no matter what they did. My best example goes back to when I was in 4th grade & played hookey for several days. A stupid, spur-of-the-moment decision snowballed into a Major Incident. When I was returned home - by the police! - Mom pulled me onto her lap, wrapped her arms around me, and said the ordeal was punishment enough. I was never punished. Strange as it might seem, the lack of punishment bothered me, even then, although I had no idea why.
As the years ticked by, I realized Mom was pathologically incapable of holding others responsible for their action. Since Dad - typical of his generation - left the disciplining of the children up to Mom, that meant we were never held accountable, not as children, not as adults, no matter what we did. It took until Mom was in her 70s for me to realize that this inability went DEEP - it wasn't that she would not, but that she could not.
Over the years, I've discovered there are tremendous advantages to a parent living to a ripe old age. For me, what felt like grave transgressions in my younger years often took a different shape & tone as I inched toward fifty. It was never easy, but at least it was easier to understand.
It was at church two weeks back that it hit me - humans are not always best served by having a highly spiritual parent. One of the quotes used in the readings was from Arcana Coelestia 1079 - " Those who have faith that inheres in charity are different. They notice the good (in others), and if they do see evils and falsities they excuse them."
Mom, to a T.
As she understood things, noticing only the good & excusing the bad was an ideal to be sought, not shunned. (Alas, she missed the rest of the passage, "...and if possible endeavour with that person to correct them.")
While seeing only the good & excusing the bad is admirable in an ideal world, it caused a lot of... challenges on our flawed Earth, where parents often need to see when a child needs a firm hand & some course correction.
Here's what, looking back from my upper middle age perch, is what I see. Mom embodied what she believed was a spiritually ideal state, seeing only the good & excusing the bad. Two Sundays ago, there it was, in black & white in the church program - that is the state of those who have faith that makes itself one with charity,
A lesson for us all to learn from the errors of our parents - while they messed up, sometimes big time, how are we messing up in ways we don't begin to realize? Parents aren't perfect, nor are we. It's a sure bet that I've been am will be as off track as Mom was.
Several times, Mom jokingly claimed she wanted "She tried" inscribed on her tombstone. I'd protest, because that was just flat-out wrong. Mom never tried. She always always always did her best. Here's hoping that some one, some day can say close to the same for me.
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