Mother, courage...

Though as the years passed Mama did indeed stay the same (...).
She had seen Mama at the time the way a child sees an adult, but now
the roles were reversed: Marketa was the adult and (...) Mama appeared to her
small and defenseless as a child. (...) Mama had relinquished the marshall's
baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world. 

in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

My first day of work in Lisbon was memorable. After all, memories with a negative stamp to them seem to linger crispier than others in our brains, surely as one of our evolved survival tools. 

I got late to work after missing an earlier train. The alarm clock had rung at the right time. I did get up and got ready also on time. What delayed me was crashing an old Renault 4L against a tree at low speed while fetching for a lighter. And then, minutes later, halfway to the train station, the clutch cable of an old Mini Morris snapped by itself---I know! It does seem I was in an old car competition of sorts. 

The two cars belonged to my mother’s new companion, and he wasn’t happy about it. Not even after I paid for the mechanic. 

At the time, my mother was pressing me to leave the childhood nest, after her new companion moved in. And that was all understandable and fine. I also wanted to move out. I just hadn’t b€€n abl€ to back th€n. Then Sofia came into my life, and I went to live with her and Bernardo, her four-year-old.

Going back to the farm a few days later to pick up my scant possessions, I was received with such hostility that I stopped talking to my mother gradually, and then not at all for almost a decade.

Then I met my wife, with whom I married just to satisfy her world-view. Indeed, my dears, marriage is an outdated institution, although I still think monogamy to be as good as democracy: Imperfect, but we haven’t figured out a better system yet.  And Ruxandra insisted for me to re-establish communication with my mother, which I did. We met in Lisbon, we cried a little, we hugged, and we kept in contact sporadically. I mean, I did. Ruxandra talked to her frequently. 

Two decades after that, I find myself living with my mother again as a temporary arrangement until I find a new home. And with this new daily contact I came to the realisation that my mother was stuck in time. She didn’t evolve as a person. Sometimes I can’t even avoid being paternalistic towards her as I’m forced to be grandpaternalistic instead. Not only that, but she is already receding “into a different world,” as Kundera puts it. 

However, I didn’t see that happening to José Saramago, a person devoted to the intellectual life. And my mother was married to someone also devoted to the life of the intellect. What happened was that she has devoted herself exclusively to the material aspects of life: Feeding, and clothing her children; cleaning after them; feeding the farm animals; keeping the farm wild vegetation in check. And her emotional landscape is more ridden with rancour, unsolved issues with people she met, than with happy memories. At various times, she’s proven to be mean, vindictive, jealous, and envious. Other times, her ignorance of the world around her is painful to witness. To top it all, and as a consequence of having lived with a buffoon for decades, she makes up stories about other people she has no clue about. Yet she suffers when she cannot participate in a conversation as she lacks the codes to decipher it: Ignorance is only bliss when we’re surrounded by ignorance alone. “A different world,” is where she’s living already. 

Perhaps some of us will also get to experience first-hand that slow transformation from parent into frail child who progressively begins to inhabit a world of his own creation. And in those cases it’s probably better to subtract the negation from those famous lines of Dylan Thomas’ poem to come up with this instead: (...) go gentle into that good night.