Rejection and the harrowing path to relation

I've just finished reading a beautiful story -- Jamesland, by Michelle Huneven. William James, the philosopher and one of the fathers of modern psychology, is an overarching presence in the life of his fictional great-great granddaughter, Alice, and her small tribe of friends and family ... all of whom grapple with the universal question, How do people live in this world?

One character in the story, Pete Ross, is a broken man who once commanded a magnificent restaurant in Los Angeles. His entire life has shattered -- his marriage, culinary and social skills, and ability to relate in harmonious tandem with other people.

His character resonates deeply with my own ... especially in his mother's dispossession of him. My own mother conceived me only about eight months after my elder sibling was born; she didn't want another child, and had suffered several miscarriages. I 'stuck' ... and was born six weeks premature. Several factors conjoined to make it impossible for my mother and I to bond; this existential rupture has hounded me my whole life.

Bonded relation is a sense of home within a person ... a sense that I have scrabbled to cultivate and mature. Michelle Huneven writes Pete's character with a depth of empathy that had me weeping and diving for my pen; I've inscribed several passages into my journal. Pete's experience of self has so often mirrored my own in his

... oldest, deepest personal hell, the wastes of his mother's indifference and his attendant self-loathing. "It feels like I have to die," he said, meaning exactly that: the discarded infant starves to death.

I have noticed, in the wake of my former husband's desertion of me, that my body's basic regulatory rhythms and powers have threatened to shut down several times. Sleep, temperature regulation, vital energy, appetite -- all have been thrown so far out of balance that these basics require constant tending before I can accomplish anything else. I know that I was a 'failure to thrive' baby; that I had no instinct to suckle; that my heart stopped three times in my first three days of life. My mother, given the times (late 1950s), was not allowed to hold or nurse me. Through my childhood, her own anguish and escalating addiction to alcohol made it impossible for us to ever bond. I was a discarded infant ... and struggle mightily to believe that I am a worthy person now. I am adept at discarding myself and unconsciously provoking others to discard me; it's what I learned to do before I knew what I was learning.

Pete sometimes grokked, of course, that his own devout self-loathing was born in her disappointment and rage at having had him, at his very being -- deadly emotions that he'd assimilated and internalized, possibly even prenatally ... Pete had not been welcomed warmly into this world. And the result? As Freeman, his psychiatrist, scrawled so succinctly on his chart: personality incompatible with life.

... personality incompatible with life. That's the line that brought on my tears. Is my personality incompatible with life? I really don't know. I would love to ask some people I've known and loved -- some former mentors and therapists, a few relatives, several friends. One aunt, about 15 years ago after I'd re-engaged with my family after a sanity-saving six-year separation, chided me as I was leaving her home at the end of a gathering:  "We're not poison, you know!" I felt slapped, said nothing, and beat it out of her house, realizing what I'd have said back if I'd been able to speak: "No, you're not -- I am."

This is my confession: I've always believed that I was poisonous, toxic ... filth. It's a belief that is inscribed so acidly into my core that I can't seem to extract and discard it. Love tends to bounce off me as if I'm made of repellent. The man who was my husband loved me, cherished me -- until he couldn't any more. When I could love him, I gave everything I had, which was more than I thought myself ever capable of. When my health broke nearly to a killing point three years ago, it was all I could do to merely breathe. It's been a long and harrowing road back from the brink.

Pete Ross returns from the brink, from the "slow churning of a black, tarry plasm with the occasional nauseating freefall." By the end of the story, he recognizes a "first hint of pity" for his mother's ravaged soul ... and he begins to apprehend that the insistent thrum of love is, indeed, pulsing within him. The story closes before we can know if Pete comes to feel affection for his mother; my story still unfolds, and I did come to love my mother, as much as I could. It ended up being not a willed love so much as an inevitable love -- the imperative, I suppose, of being her child; the helpless (?) familial thrusting of my heart towards hers as I came to understand who she was and what rubble she had emerged from. In the end, she did what we all do: the best she could with what she had. It became enough for me.

I hold to that loving thrum in myself, even when it doesn't seem real. It is, and that's one belief that I will never relinquish, even if the existential shrapnel in my being continues to pierce. Some wounds don't heal completely, but the person around them can ...