“Mommy, what’s wrong?” That was the question that caused Cat’s mother to dart for the bathroom and slam the door.
Stop there. Freeze the frame. What just happened?
The year was 1965. Cat had not yet started kindergarten when her aunt, her Aunt Puss, her mother’s sister, had just died. Aunt Puss had been sick and under hospital supervision for some time. On that sad day back in 1965, at the sight of her mother’s teary distress, in a reversal of roles where the child initiated care giving, Cat wanted to comfort her anguished mother. The little one had come to expect that any boo-boo, any hurt that caused tears, would be met with care and those concern-filled words: “What’s wrong?” That phrase had been better than the biggest teddy bear for bringing palliative relief. Her mother’s tender affection could soften pains both big and small. So rather than the usual dynamic, which was to receive nurture, Cat endeavored to offer it. Without giving it a moment’s thought, to her grief stricken mother, Cat spoke those gently sympathetic words: “Mommy, what’s wrong?”
But at that, her mother had bolted. Rather than bringing them close, Cat had been pushed away. What had been meant to console, actually antagonized. Her mother’s departure was so abrupt, that Cat became frightened. The emotional tether that the two shared was suddenly called into question, their bond strained beyond recognition. It was instantaneous and dramatic; Cat’s mother was un-reachable. Surely, Cat concluded, as children always do, she had done something wrong. And there, a feeling of isolation and shame stuck, a child’s moment frozen in time, sealed and delivered to the darkest snow cave of her little girl heart.
What happened next prevented mother and daughter from ever revisiting that unpleasant incident again. Not long after it had occurred, Cat and her mother were in a hideous car accident. Cat survived, but her mother hadn’t.
“I have a shut out story for you,” Cat said to me recently, almost fifty-five years later. It was then that she proceeded to tell about the day her Aunt Puss had died. “I’ve never talked about this before. I haven’t ever even thought about it. It just came back to me now. It was the first thing that popped into my head when you mentioned shut out stories. Wow. Just wow.” Cat seemed to survey the details of that long-ago day as if a light had been switched on a three-dimensional diorama. “I remember just starring at the doorknob. I was still so little that I looked up at it from where I was standing. I remember that doorknob was smaller than normal and more ornate. ”
I asked Cat what she thought would happen if life had turned out differently. Did she think she and her mother ever would have talked about that sad day? She responded emphatically that she thought they would. I then asked her what she imagined her mother might have said about it.
“Maybe she would have said that she was so upset and didn’t want her tears to scare me.” Cat told me that whenever people would talk to her about her mother, they would say, “Your mother was always happy. She always had a smile on her face.” We then talked about how her mother could possibly have been afraid of her own despondency. “Maybe she didn’t want to show her daughter how ugly she felt, how deeply sad she was. She had to close herself up, close herself off behind that door. I’m sure she didn’t mean to hurt me. She meant to protect me. Plus, it was all probably too much for her, living up to people’s expectation that she always be happy.”