I do want to critique the nuclear family, actually.
I do want to destroy its primacy as the organizing principle of U.S. society. If there is a wound to be identified in my son’s birth chart, it is the signature of the nuclear family. Here is Saturn conjunct his Capricorn Sun in the First House. Here is his Virgo Moon, dissolved in its opposition to Neptune. Here is Chiron in the Fourth, squaring the Nodes of Fate.
Here is me on a Friday morning, weeping over my mother. I want to critique the nuclear family. And, also, closer to death than I’ve ever been, I still miss my mom more than anyone else.
I have a hard time explaining to people why, exactly, my parents aren’t here for me, Kiernan, Theo, and the baby right now. I can say “fundamentalist Christians,” but that’s only part of the truth. It’s true that my mom and dad called me up this spring to tell me that I was the devil’s spawn for working with the tarot and astrology. It’s also true that, a month before that estranging phone call, my mother was sitting on a beach next to me in Tulum reading Hanya Yanagihara’s My Little Life. She loves to read; she’s part of the reason I love books more than people most days.1
The sky in Mexico was purple with an eventual sunset, the ocean that February day was too rough for swimming. It was the kind of angry water that, if it showed up in a dream, a Jungian psychologist might call it one of those rare subconscious signs of events that are truly “fixed, unalterable, or destined … [ones] that will inevitably occur unless there are previous expositional factors that put them into a particular mitigating context.” My mom twisted closer to me on her fancy cabana lounge chair, cracking Yanagihara’s spine. (I never enjoyed that book; I enjoyed to hear it crack). She wanted to read me aloud a passage from My Little Life from the point of view of the character Harold. In the passage, he’s describing the unexpected relief that accompanied the death of his young child. After death, the character is intimating, there’s nothing left to fear.
“The worse has happened, so he doesn’t have to be anxious any more,” my mom said to me. I sipped a grapefruit mocktail, thinking and feeling too much.
My mother was moved by this passage. She knows I’m an anxious mother. She remembers my terrified phone calls to her when it was unclear whether or how Theo would survive his own infancy. She was using the book to reach out to me, to try to connect. Part of me wanted to wince. I knew it wasn’t the time to get on my high-horse and lecture about “what trauma narratives are for” on a vacation that she’d paid for me to go on in a bid for reconnection. Part of me wanted to hug her. She was reaching out to me! I didn’t hug her, but I did say something kind, what I hoped came across as encouraging and grateful to her for sharing the quoted text with me. For trying to speak in my language, even if she made some incorrect assumptions about its contours.
I was more than happy to reach part of the way back to her in a nearly perfect aesthetic moment, the waves crashing way beyond us, the mechanics of how my parents have money to spring for mid-winter vacations tucked in somewhere deep beneath the sand, my own discomfort over being a tourist shoved aside in an attempt to be a good girl, for once. To set aside a more rigid ethical stance on foreign travel for an individual desire to heal the relationship rifts that have kept me on the one side of the family as scapegoat2 and my sisters and my parents on the other, living for my bleating.
Back in the family folds, though, even briefly, even out of physical contact with American soil and its entrenched norms, the bleating was too much. My sisters were talking about their professional lives as artist and nurse practitioner. I loosened up, too. I spoke happily and at length with them about my dissertation on the tarot, my work with my clients, the new community initiative I was starting up with friends at The Elderberry Apothecary, our hope to create a third space in Charlottesville for people who wanted to gather around the topics of spirituality, magic, literature, and wellbeing.
I didn’t mention that finding new work was financially necessary because the university had fired me as I finished chemotherapy last year. There’s no empathy in my family about losing jobs; there’s no sense of lost unemployment as an unfair shakedown in a sick, capitalist world. Not having a job, for any reason, is a sign of sin, laziness, having brought trouble on oneself that one deserves and must make amends for. I threw no pity parties in Mexico, though, I just talked to my sisters about my enthusiasm for the life I had unexpectedly found myself living, and the ability to help others through illness and tragedy in any small way.
A month or so went by, and I heard nothing from my parents. Then they called me, together, one day in March, to yell at me about my demonic leanings. Maybe they were bored and annoyed at being bored while workers were in their house refinishing their hardwood floors. They needed a distraction! They needed a mission! They needed their scapegoat! I wrote about that phone call within the context of the Three of Wands and Jeannette Winterson’s work here, an essay from which I’ll quote briefly:
When they called one bright Saturday afternoon—the first warm day of early March—I answered, fine to talk to both of them. My relationship with my parents over the past year or so has been relatively easy, slight, centered around a mutual love for our kid, their only grandchild. I thought they were calling to arrange for Theo to visit them [in South Dakota] this summer, when the calves were bigger than brand-new, when the baby lambs needed petting. Instead, there was hissing from the first "hell" in "hello," talk of my sacrilege and grossness, what a bad mother I've been to teach my child to look up at the sky and see the Moon, to express love for the Earth and joy over every wandering star. My Dad's remonstrations are nothing these days, the language so basic we can turn it around into a joke faster than anything matters. It was my mother who did the hurting. It was my mother who said:
"So you're only teaching Theo that God is love? What about the fact that God punishes us when we stray? We need God's punishment to keep us in line.”
I spent the rest of the spring and early summer trying to navigate how to keep my parents in Theo’s life, because he loves them, while also protecting myself. I allowed FaceTime calls, I was kind on the phone, I tried to accept whatever love they knew how to give me.
I was on the way back from an emergency veterinary visit for our dog Fitz in August when I got the news that my cancer had not only returned, but had changed pathologies and would eventually be terminal. I was 22-weeks pregnant, and I was spinning out over the thought of not seeing my daughter grow up, of having to betray my four-year-old son by leaving him while he is young and confused and still thinks that “only old people die, right?”
I wanted a mother to talk to. I wanted my mother to talk to. I called her. I cried so hard I almost ran off the road, into the granite side of a Appalachian mountain.
“I need you to apologize to me for calling me the way you did this spring,” I sobbed to her, righting the car, petting the dog briefly to soothe him. “If you can’t participate in my life when I’m thriving—if you actively try to sabotage or attack that thriving—how am I supposed to let you participate in my death?”
Her words, among insignificant others:
“Were your father and I just supposed to keep our fears and concerns to ourselves?”
“Your father and I had to go to counseling over you.”
“We are choosing to love you, everyday.”
It was the “choosing to love you” language that did me in, that forced me off the phone and later to send a written message to my mom detailing how I was hurt and what I needed from them—a sincere apology and a radical compassion, never mind tolerance, for the ways in which my life looks different than theirs—for them to be present in the remaining years of my life, my son’s life. The kind of compassion I have extended to them throughout the years, the kind of compassion that I’ve worried has brought me up against my own inadequate politics for extending to them.
Since I last spoke with my mom, I’ve struggled to imagine ever having to choose to love my kid. I can’t imagine the circumstance that would qualify my love, put it on the backfoot. I hurt myself for weeks trying to envision a future where Theo is the worst kind of monster a human could be. I thought about Hitler. I forced myself to think about the movie We Need To Talk About Kevin3, so you know I’m really coming up against self-harm here. I thought about Theo as an agent of genocide.
It’s uncomfortable what I know that I know: Theo could be evil, and I know in my heart I’d still go to him, hold him, wash his body, when he faced his death. There’s my line, my participation in evil, a love that never even has to choose, born for and from my own child, my own propagation of nuclearity.
So, yeah, down with the nuclear family. But it’s fucking me up in the head figuring out how to approach my parents on the edge of giving birth, being sick, dying. I could pull out my Sarah Schulman and quote very many important passages from Conflict Is Not Abuse about how to be in the face of the bad family, the bad state. I could show you the Google calendar my friend Meg has set up so that Theo has one-on-one weekend time with friends and community members beyond his own nuclear family, every weekend, extending out indefinitely into the future. I could get on my high horse and pontificate about how “one good thing about mortal illness is that it has revealed to me what exactly Kiernan and I and need to do to ensure that Theo loves and is loved by more than just the bodies inside a single-family home.” I could critique the Kate Middleton post-chemo video, better than these cruel assholes did earlier this week.
But what I really want to do right now is pick up the phone. My mom is calling for the fourth time in a row. I let it go to voicemail to type this sentence instead. She and my dad have been calling every day for four days now. They went on a beach vacation last week in North Carolina with my sisters. Maybe I was a conspicuous absence. Maybe they missed Theo. Now they’re calling, their tones alternatively anxious or stilted or angry as they leave messages to tell me they love me, that they want to help me.
I want to accept those messages. I want to accept that love. I want to accept what they can give. But I’m not sure I can trust them. I’m not sure I can trust my own desire.
What do I do? Can I create a mitigating context, an exposition that will alter what appears fixed, forever, in past, present, and future, this nuclear family of America, this bad, beloved family of mine?
This is still something I’m struggling to find language for. My family of origin is evangelical Christian, but they are also upper-middle-class people who value education, but only in this very specific, cognitive-dissonance-inducing way. They believe in science—they’re a family of doctors and nurse practitioners—and they refuse to allow tolerance for any kind of faith or intellectual pursuit outside of the bounds of conservative Christian ideology. Somehow, I can have a mother who is an accomplished academic in her own right, a former pharmacist, and someone who loves to read Man-Booker shortlisted novels, who also cannot find it in her heart or brain to understand what it is I’m doing with the tarot, or, in the past, with my PhD, or whatever.
Always thankful to Caren Beilin’s novel Revenge of the Scapegoat for elucidating these themes for me. I wrote about her book in conjunction with the monthly tarot reading here.
What always bothered me, among many other things, about that movie, though, is that the whole thing is just a big setup for the mother to only be able to love the son once he’s committed the evil act. She never loves him before. The sickness of the family is just offloaded on this infant’s shoulders from the moment he’s born. She creates the monster, and so this moment of love between them in the end is so sick, because this is what she’s been secretly (or even not-so-secretly) waiting for the whole time! Anyways.
Cameron, thank you for sharing this. I think people are scared of the unknown, and they can’t fathom that relentlessly difficult things can happen to someone again and again and again. So instead of acceptance, kindness, open-mindedness, community — all of which is part of your third space idea, and your spiritual practice — they fall back on the ideas that fit easily into capitalist society; the nuclear family, the idea that to lose a job is not something to sympathize with, that punishment MUST be a part of faith. It makes people feel more in control, I guess. (Please know that I say this without any judgment of your family, just observations about my own that you might have in common.) When those capitalist ideas are questioned and challenged, I’ve noticed that people tend to resort to cruelty, violence, saying things they hopefully don’t mean (that they should be held accountable for nonetheless), and punishing others as a way to right some wrong, as if “right and wrong” isn’t the most inaccurate and imprecise way of looking at the world. Anyway, I am rambling, but I just want you to know that I am so moved by the love that’s here throughout this piece, and I hope that it will prevail somehow, even if the trust has shattered.
I wish so many people in the world weren't so shitty--as if life isn't hard enough. But if it's any help, I found once I really gave up hope that my parents would change, things got easier. That sounds like it would be particularly hard with your mom, because she does show that will to connect, but the oscillation between kindness and cruelty can be harder to deal with than steady meanness. You're always longing for the good interaction and extra hurt when they fail you. Maybe if you could practice some strategic cynicism, you could accept gifts you can use and better ignore the cruelty?