This
post which discusses optimism as a cognitive bias continues from PART
I which can be read HERE. It references examples of ideas
that I drew from the musical Gypsy to explain how optimism helped me
to cope with less than optimistic circumstances.
It is a part of a broader discussion of how those in recovery from trauma can make safer choices in their relationships. (I'm clearly learning as I go.)
It is a part of a broader discussion of how those in recovery from trauma can make safer choices in their relationships. (I'm clearly learning as I go.)
Little
did I realize until last week that I'd lifted my “Mama's little
circus freak” moniker directly out a scene from Gyspy.
Mama Rose Hovick who becomes jealous of the public attention
garnered by her daughter whom she viewed as the least talented tells
her that she is little more than a circus freak. Gypsy
Rose Lee, the new stage name of her daughter [Rose] Louise, found
great success in the Burlesque venue as their family's Vaudeville
career evaporated along with Vaudeville itself. To tame the sting
that she feels as she transitions out of stage mother mode and as her
other loved ones leave her behind, she wields her iron will to force
those left in her world to give her that to which she feels entitled.
She tries to seize her own worth from the ostrich feathers of her
daughter's new, successful career.
Though
the musical closes in what seems like a pleasant mother-daughter
truce, I know too well that most stories of that intensity don't
comfortably end that way. I think that in many ways, Louise (Gypsy
Rose) was a better, kinder woman than me. That's not something that
I'm proud to declare in my honesty, and the archetypes depicted in
Gypsy and different perspectives of what all of that means continue
to work on and in me. I hope that I don't need another twenty-five
years to reap those benefits.
Everything's
Coming up Roses
I
never called my mother “Mama,” yet my jaw remained on the floor
as I watched the scene where Louise first stands up to her mother. I
was “Mama's” circus freak because Louise only calls Rose "Mama." I watched that scene over and over last week in utter
awe. This time through, I had done enough healing work to see myself
as the daughter instead of the young mother, fighting for her
children as she sang about achieving her dreams. How painfully deep
did I identify with that hapless daughter who could never make the
mark! That wise part of myself that really does know the truth saw
myself in that mirror that Louise gave to me. How I longed for the
strength to do the same half of my life ago! How could I go on
playing a role that caused me so much pain, but how could I stop
without losing my mother?
The
next scene and song echoed statements that I'd heard from my mother
throughout my whole life. She claimed in many ways that I owed
everything to her, even my own ideas and my own talents – though
she seemed to fear and hate them. And I would have destroyed them
for her had I been able, just to win her love. Yet at the same time,
she owned them and she felt like she owned me because I owed her for
everything. I didn't understand that she just didn't have enough of
her own strength of self to view me as separate from her. That's why
no matter what I did, I caused her shame. Half of the time, it
likely wasn't my shame anyway, and I suspect that a good chunk of
what my mother felt and expressed had little to do with me.
Lines
right out of the song Rose's Turn
could have been lifted right from my mother's very life, just as
Sondheim had lifted them from Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir. I do remember
well that by what I suspect is no mistake, though daughter “Dainty
June” and boyfriend Herbie get honorable mention, Louise is not
named in that final (fantastic) song. I felt this same kind of
creaturely sense of awe when I read a particular book about
dysfunctional parenting, as though my mother had memorized phrases of
entitlement from a textbook that she repeated over and over. It
seems from this evidence that the language of shame, survival, and
rivalry between parents and children transcends circumstances and
experience in Twentieth Century culture. At least it did for me.
And the saddest thing about it was that I am sure that her intentions
were pure. She just couldn't see beyond her own pain.
Rose's Turn
Understanding
and compassion for Mama Rose and for my mom came slowly for me over
decades of hard, heartbreaking work. Some of it has come just
because of the passing of time as I enter my own new seasons of
living an older life – which seems so strange because of how
precocious I had to be for so long. I spent ages feeling like a
neophyte, and I didn't have the broader perspective that I needed to
understand things from another vantage. Along with that, I also had
to accept that “life wasn't fair” and no amount of optimism that
I hurled at my relationship with my parents could change it. (My
parents believe that life is fair and that optimism can overcome
all.)
I
did find some wisdom in the words of Bernadette Peters who speaks of
some of the very same feelings that I've had myself about the music
and the play. She performed in it as a child with a show mother
behind her and then again, later in life, as Mama Rose. Today, she
is but a few years younger than my own mother, and I took heed to her
words when she spoke about her
insight into Rose after performing in Gypsy's
Broadway Revival. I must admit that her words of compassion rubbed
me in an uncomfortable way when I discovered them last week, but out
of love for my mom, I am willing to stretch to understand.
Peters
explains how Rose had to build a life for her two young daughters as
best she could with basically nothing as she “makes
a way in the world for her children.”
As her children grow past her and weary of mama drama as they found
their own lives, Peters finds Rose asking, “All
I did was give them my love, and this is the thanks that I get in
return?” During the
song itself, we hear Mama Rose consider for a moment that she lived
for her children, but along the way, she fell into the trap of living
through her children.
It
seems that we all end up living our own lives anyway, even if we try
to hide under the skirts or the coattails of someone else. Peters
describes this moment that she sees in the musical as Rose's
realization that she might have had her own rewards if she had found
some way to honor her own needs while still caring for her daughters.
What might her life been like if she had? She would not have needed
to seize from her daughters what honor and rewards – and
independence – rightfully belonged to them apart from Rose.
Rose's
Struggle
Yet
the choices that we take for granted for women today were a mighty
luxuries for most people of that day. Rose Hovick was born in 1890,
about the time that my mother's family came to the US to escape the
abject poverty that they faced in London. My grandfather who was
born just a few years after Louise had to hitchhike 20 miles one way
to attend high school, and though he earned straight A's and favored
chemistry and physics, he barely survived the fate of “owing his
soul to the company store.” He mined coal and sulfur and clay and
worked on farms in exchange for food until labor laws and work
programs provided a job for him as a welder for the Harbison-Walker
Refractory Company.
How
much harder would it have been for Mama Rose to provide for her girls
when my great grandfather who raised his family in the middle of
nowhere in the country could barely make a life for my grandfather and his many siblings?
I heard similar statements from my mother who would declare over and
over that her own parents treated her unjustly, and she did the best
that she could. While I resented that this was often offered as an
excuse, I did understand that she did all that she could with what
she had to give me. (She couldn't see past her own disappointment to
understand that I only asked to be treated fairly, hoping that she
could see the differences between us as a part of my growing up and
not as a rejection of her.)
For these reasons, I believe that an element of this divide rests in the luxuries that each generation enjoys, but as we humans do, we end up taking them for granted. My grandfather who would have loved nothing more than to go to college built his own bubble so that he could create a life that he could both attain and enjoy. Yet as a result of his own fears and struggles, he didn't make the most of the advantages that he could have offered to my mother. I question whether it's possible to overcome these perspectives that divide us so that we might find it easier to love one another through conflict and tension.
For these reasons, I believe that an element of this divide rests in the luxuries that each generation enjoys, but as we humans do, we end up taking them for granted. My grandfather who would have loved nothing more than to go to college built his own bubble so that he could create a life that he could both attain and enjoy. Yet as a result of his own fears and struggles, he didn't make the most of the advantages that he could have offered to my mother. I question whether it's possible to overcome these perspectives that divide us so that we might find it easier to love one another through conflict and tension.
Until
I finish Part III of Optimism as a Coping Bubble,
please
consider these for further reading:
- Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
- One of the $3 Kindle books about Cognitive Bias at Amazon.com
- Francine Shapiro's Getting Past Your Past
- Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
