5 – Walls

Dad,

For years after I graduated from college, you and I talked about walls.

I kept saying that Mom had built a wall between herself and me, and since she was the one who had built it, she was the one who would have to take it down. You kept saying that, if there was a wall, the illness had built it, not Mom. I didn’t understand what that meant back then. I didn’t see that Mom’s illness had overtaken her to such an extent that she was no longer choosing her own behavior. I didn’t see that the increasingly strong medications she was on were making her less and less herself. I just knew that every time she wouldn’t talk to me, every time she turned away from me, every time she shut me out, it felt like she was adding another brick to a wall, in order to keep me firmly on the outside, away from her. 

You also kept saying that if anyone was building a wall, it was me, not Mom. I didn’t disagree – but I felt that I was building mine in response to Mom building hers. I didn’t know how to make you understand that I’d lost faith in Mom. I’d always been so sure of her love. But now I doubted her. I couldn’t bear to be around her if she didn’t want to be close to me anymore. I had to get away from her. Believing she had abandoned me, I felt that I had to abandon her. Believing she had built a wall to keep me out, I had to build a wall of my own, to keep myself safe. From behind my wall, I blamed her for my isolation and loneliness.

You and I also had walls. We built them to protect ourselves from the pain we caused each other by failing to take care of each other. As the years went by, we tried so hard to understand what had gone wrong between us and to somehow fix it. But in the end, we failed. We tore down our walls over and over again, but they always grew back.

Once, in a letter, you talked about yet another wall, the wall you built when you were a young man:

“When I was a kid, I was very open. When Ma and I got married, I was hurt so bad by our parents and other relatives, particularly my mother, that I put up a wall that I vowed would never be broken. Except for Ma and a very few other people, that wall has stayed up.”

“For 20 years I kept myself aloof from my mother. Now that she’s gone, I keep wanting to call her. She’s the one, despite myself, that I’ve always shared my little triumphs and failures [with]. It’s funny that I never recognized it until she was gone.”

I grieve to see how much I’m like you – how I put up a wall when you hurt me, then kept myself aloof from you for decades, even though I knew you felt a terrible loss because we were not close. Now I find myself writing letters to you even though you can no longer read them. I wish I had taken down my wall sooner.

Karen