Family resemblances

This morning at work I had something in my left eye. It would not be budged. I went to the bathroom to see if I could dislodge it; on the way it left of its own accord. I went and peered closely into the mirror, and my first thought was

 

I look more and more like my mother every day.

 

*****

This is not a bad thing. My mother, mid-sixties, is aging very well. She has lovely soft skin and bright eyes and her hair is only mixed with grey even at her age. She looks after herself, which I am ever grateful for, because I very much enjoy having her around. A girl can never have enough mothering, even at 35.

 

The resemblance is merely curious, because for my entire life I have been told that I look like my father. Oh so much like my father, and like his mother, who he resembles (if only tangentally, given the mix of genders.) I see my father in my son, and it makes me smile. But my own resemblance to my father’s mother only makes me frown.

******

My paternal grandmother was a short, beautifully plump woman with a bright smile, big blue eyes, and white curly hair. She was funny, and energetic, and kind, and wonderful. I have only sense memories of her, but what I remember of her is all positive. Her skin was soft, her voice melodious and British, and when she took my young self into her arms for a hug, I remember only comfort. I remember she loved Vicks lemon cough drops that I coveted and she would share with me; I remember she used to fill the little wooden nut pot in her living room just for me. I remember she used Oil of Olay face cream on her face; I still do today. I remember having tea with sugar in, as much as I wanted. (How she managed to cope with a four year old high on caffeine and sugar, I don’t know; perhaps at that point she went and had a nap and left me to my mother.)

I remember loving and adoring her so much that as a very small child I used to wish she was my mother.

That woman died when I was only seven years old.

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Every single day I drive within a short block of the apartment block where she lived; sometimes if I have to run an errand, I walk right by it. Today I went into the pharmacy where she used to buy those Vicks lemon cough drops, where she used to go hand in hand with me, and would occasionally buy me chocolate. The place still smells the same. I see the park we used to play in and the little forest outside the door.

And as much as I adored her and my grandfather, and as much as the sight of that place at one time in my life filled me with raging excitement, the place now only fills me with sadness and ambivalence, with a strange kind of melancholy that tugs my heart but doesn’t bring tears. A passive sad acceptance of the past, if you will.

That woman that I loved so much died when I was seven, but physically she lived eight more painful years.

My grandfather was diagnosed with a terminal – albeit slow – disease the Christmas I was seven. He was 74. My grandparents met “late” in life – in their late twenties, I believe. My father wasn’t born until four years after they married, when they were both 32. And fifty years later, in his personal memoirs that he left to his three sons, he still wrote about her with a reverence and a love that brought me to tears when I first read it. They were everything to each other, and when it was known that my grandfather would die, my grandmother gave up.

She had suffered from post-partum depression following the birth of her third son, when she was 37 or 38. She had had a breakdown in her fifties, and had bounced back to lead such a full life that she used to regularly cross country ski in the Rockies in her seventies. But the news of my grandfather’s illness and death shocked her so badly that she fell into a depression – and perhaps a dementia – from which she never recovered.

When he died three years later, she was so far gone from herself, she didn’t cry. She never really mourned the man she shared her life with for fifty years. And for the next five years, my father, the closest (and oldest, dutiful) son would take the ferries every second weekend to visit her in a nursing home, as he knew his father would have wished. I cannot even imagine now how hard it must have been for him to go there, and see her, his beloved mother, broken down. She knew who she was, who he was, and what they all had lost. The woman he had known all his life, the woman who had tended him as a child, raised him, held him, was gone and in her place was a woman who looked like her, but was devoid of emotion, detached, sad … thin, sick, distracted. Unable to care for herself or for (or even about) anyone else.

As for me – well, my father did his best to explain to me the depression and the loss of a woman I had so adored, but how do you explain something like that to a seven year old? It would have been easier to explain dementia, but the woman I knew was still there, she still knew me and remember when my birthday was, she was just … stripped of everything vital. He ended up telling me that she was sad, because she had realized she was nearing the end of her life, and hadn’t managed to accomplish everything she wanted to.

You can imagine what effect this had on me. A teenager who drank heavily in university, who had sex far too early, who counted down the days until she could leave her hometown and finally get something done with her life. Because there was no way I was going to end up, 75, and be like that because I had missed something important to me.

It’s something I still struggle with, albeit to a lesser extent that I did as a late teenager / early twenty-something. Post-divorce in particular, when it occurred to me that I might never have children, the spectre of depression over this loss was particularly horrifying.

Perhaps it had such an effect on me because I had always felt such an affinity for this woman, my most adored grandmother. Because I recognized myself in her, and she, I think, in me. And it occurred to me, at some point, I don’t even remember when, that we shared the same genes and that clinical depression could some day be my lot in life.

It’s a terrifying thought. Depression took her away from me, robbed me of eight years of her life, when we could have been together. I don’t want to be like her.

And now that I have my own son, a son in whom I can see my father, it’s too easy to picture his own face with the haggard look my father’s often carried home from those bimonthly visits. Watching me lose myself late in life, robbing him of his mother and aging him before it should.

 

 

But it ain’t all necessarily so.

 

Following the birth of my son, I watched myself carefully for signs of depression. I went for walks regularly and forced myself to go out and socialize, even though I am a homebody, because I knew it would help. I ensured that my partner and my midwife and my doctor and some close friends knew I was worried, and they were careful and watching. And … nothing. It never materialized. At least not as anything more serious than occasional post-baby blues.

 

Even post divorce, depression never really surfaced. Oh, I was sad, don’t get me wrong. But I think our culture these days focuses too much on the pursuit of happiness and doesn’t allow people to feel sadness when something sad happens. I was sad. I was sad and angry, and I was sad and angry for a long time, much longer than I think I should have been, might have been had I felt culturally sanctioned to express those emotions more clearly and openly. But not once did I lose the ability to get up in the morning, lose my ability to laugh on occasion, lose myself – the things I associate with depression. And sure, I have to work on my anxiety and stress levels, it’s true. It’s also true that those two things can be associated with depression, a lack of ability to fully cope with the stresses that accompany modern life.

 

But so far, none of these problems has morphed into anything that can’t be cured with some hot tea, some yoga, and some time alone. (Sometimes lots of time alone, I admit.) And it’s possible that it never will. Her fate won’t necessarily be mine.

 

Seeing my mother’s face looking back at me from the mirror this morning I am reminded that I also have her genes, and her own mother’s. Two women who have navigated life’s trials with nary a waver. In my mother’s case this hasn’t meant anything more tragic than life’s usual losses -- treasured aunts and uncles, and both her parents. Tragic enough, but not unusual. But in my grandmother’s life tragedy includes the birth and subsequent loss of a child who was born disabled, the loss of her husband at an early age, and single parenthood of two young boys (my mother being a mother herself by the time her father died). Nothing to sneeze at, and yet she maintained her own equilibrium throughout.

 

I think it’s also clear that I don’t have that kind of equilibrium. I don’t face life’s tragedies with my shoulders squared and my face into the wind. I admit I cower.

 

But neither do I give up. And genetically I suppose that makes sense. I might not be the strongest woman I can imagine. But neither am I likely to end up as my father’s mother did.

 

I can tell, just by looking in the mirror.