An Unwinnable War

 In 1989, I had been fighting a long war with my mother. I was nearly 32 years old. I realized the war was unwinnable and made the decision to withdraw my troops.

It’s now early 2022. I approach 33 years since I withdrew from the war. I’ve been out of contact with her almost longer than my lifetime of being in contact with her. 

How is that possible?  We are both still alive on this planet. Yet other than two brief events lasting only seconds, I have not seen nor spoken to my mother longer than since I was born knowing her. How can this be?

Ronnie often comments how she’s lived in Olympia longer than in her life growing up in Queens. A friend of mine recently noted how her experience in this country is far longer than that of her childhood in Germany. These things seem right and proper. They make cultural and mathematical sense. 

But living apart from relationship with my mother longer than being in relationship with her feels wrong to me. It seems far fetched, outrageous, and inconceivable. Not because she lives in China, Australia, or Africa. She lives only 55 miles away. It’s because she is unreachable through the veils of mental illness. She’s not institutionalized or under a doctor’s care. She’s simply in a part of the mind disturbed by illness in the form of a lifetime of grievances espoused in constant vitriol. 

I miss my mother. I always will. I miss her playful side, her volumes of family history, her knowledge of my childhood, at least, in the nonviolent aspects. She can’t be safely in these parts in my presence, or I’m told in any other’s. 

I have a desire to see her one more time before she passes. I have a recurrent fantasy where we meet on a park bench with a nice view. Through an intermediary, we both agree to speak no words. We communicate only through our eyes and with our smiles. As we look from each other to the view and back again, we reach out our hands to tentatively touch and then grasp. We sit there quietly holding hands, exchanging smiles, and watching the view in each other’s presence. 

My therapist would say I can create this moment in my mind’s eye and visit it whenever I like. I will most assuredly do that. Still, I would like so much to do it in person while we both continue to have physical form and breathe the same air on the planet of our birth. 

I love you, mom. 

Joceile 

2.1.22

[Picture of my back in a plaid jacket and jeans facing my mother wearing a jeans jacket and red turtleneck standing behind a restaurant counter in 1973.]