Plain White Socks
“Here on the table
is the mixing bowl.
Brown and ordinary,
turned on the potters wheel,
it has an umber rim
and glazed, cinnamon-speckled sides.
Its task is to be open,
a simple space. The bowl is
clay, earth, matter. Particular.
We are like it. Clay,
earth, matter. Particular
and vast when we are empty…
when life can fill us
to the rim, brimming.
We are the mixing place
where terror and hate,
where love and hope,
the way we move,
our smiles and uncertainties,
our courage and stupidities
are all embraced.
We are the body bowl…
the forming space,
the home of possibility.”
Gunilla Norris (“The Mixing Bowl”)
I was packing up Mother's necessities for a day-long outing from her nursing home. Oxygen tanks, diapers, change of clothes, mid-day medications. She sat in her wheelchair fussing because the laundry hadn't brought back her red blanket, and she bet they'd given it to somebody else. “When did they take it, Mother?” “Oh, just yesterday, but it should be back by now.” I realized that this is where my own impatience comes from—nobody ever does things to my exacting standards either. Taking care of your mother will show you what you're made of and just how flawed you are. It's not for sissies, believe me.
This day-out included a trip to the Marion library, and then shopping at Wal-Mart and Belk—difficult for me because it meant hauling the wheelchair, oxygen tanks and Mother into and out of the car multiple times. After the outing, we would go to her house in town where I'd make her lunch and then return her to the nursing home in time for dinner. By the end of the day, she'd be exhausted and I'd be exhausted and we would be sniping at one another. But for the moment, we were in civil mode.
“I need socks bad,” she told me. “All the patients and all the staff here wear white socks—just plain white socks—so I need to get some. I don't have a single pair!” Mother said this with agitation, as though explaining a life or death scenario. Again, a demonstration for me of my own character flaws. I would rather die than conform to fashion trends—just the opposite of my mother—she wanted to fit in, right down to her white socks (or lack there of). I remembered my therapist telling me that whether you identify yourself as being exactly like your parents or exactly opposite, you're still caught up in the family system. You're still modeling yourself after them instead of discovering who you truly are. That's what sucks about therapy—being confronted with the truth almost always stings.
Mother died the next year, and eleven years later I am still pulling threads of her out of myself. I am like her in so many ways—which is sometimes staggering to me. Now, thankfully, there is a sweet symmetry about it. I have compassion for the parts of her that were insecure and undeveloped. I am grateful for all the simple-life lessons learned but never directly taught—how to sew, how to cook. I find myself repeating her patterns—wanting to hang laundry out on a clothesline to dry, ironing pillowcases. We humans are like that open bowl made from earth, clay with a mixture of all who have come before us stirred up in it. Our body-bowl is brimming with all the things that go into making us who we are—full of possibilities as yet unformed. As I pulled a pair of plain white socks out of the drawer this morning, I thought of this and thanked my mother for the lessons I've learned.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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