Commusings: My Mother, the Phoenix by Adra Benjamin

Dear Commune Community,

In a sense, we’re all authors of fiction. We tell ourselves old stories about ourselves — over and again. These tales become the scaffolding of our identity.

But memory is awfully mangy. I stared at Dr. Bruce Lipton for eight consecutive hours in a small room three days ago. Was his sweater vest red or brown? Well, I don’t have the foggiest notion, but ask me about my parents’ divorce 40 years ago and I claim to recollect every tawdry detail.

Sometimes I believe memories are utter bullshit – that they are past experiences reiterated and remolded in the present moment to prop up a certain version of ourselves. We then leverage this personal folklore to justify our vices and deficiencies and the manner with which we treat others (and ourselves).

Of course, I know first-hand that acutely painful things happen. Acts of neglect and abuse are all too common. And we carry the tyranny of our respective pasts into the now.

The event was the event. It’s a fossil. But we, as writers, have agency over the stories we tell. And, sometimes, the narrative can change.

It’s not just an honor to work with Adra, today’s essayist, but also incredibly gratifying to witness her personal and professional growth within the context of our work here at Commune. She writes fiction and she’s flipped her script.

Here and there on the IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

My Mother, the Phoenix
by Adra Benjamin

When I was in grade school, I had a pair of heart-shaped pink sunglasses I wore all the time. I’d slip them on and – voila! – be instantly transformed into someone special: a little girl who was easy to love.

Yesterday a young boy walked down my sidewalk fully decked out as Batman. His strides said I am strong, I am brave. I watched him and thought of my pink, heart-shaped glasses. How I wanted to be someone else, someone who wasn’t me. Someone with a mother who loved them.

It can be freeing to pretend. Especially when you get to be someone cool and strong like a superhero. Or a stronger version of a scared little girl who grew up in Wichita, Kansas, in a single-wide trailer house.

• • •

As a child, I loved viewfinders. Those plastic binoculars-looking toys you’d press up to your eyes and flip-flip-flip through with the flick of your finger, moving the story forward like you were the one telling it. I got to be in control but surprised at the same time. Win-win.

Kaleidoscopes were like that for me, too. Colors and shapes sliding together, forming different pictures as I rotated the wheel. Just one small turn was all it took for new possibilities to emerge.

As a child, I’d often escape into my imagination. A place where I could be anyone, anything – free from harm. My clunky tape recorder and a cast of Barbie characters, living out story after story with me in the director’s chair. I’d spend hours in my bedroom making up the peril they had to overcome.

It’s no wonder the one aspect I love about myself isn’t survivor – it’s storyteller. A fiction writer, a wielder of words and worlds. I’m always proud to tell people I write young adult novels. I aspire to have them on bookshelves one day. Stories of brave, strong girls doing brave, strong things. Until then, I find immense triumph in the imagining. In the making up of things.

But at some point in all the pretend and make-believe of growing up, I made up the story that there was something wrong with me – and everywhere I looked, I saw the evidence. I found the proof. That’s because I couldn’t actually face the real and hard truth – my parents were not equipped to really love me. They were barely twenty-years-old when they had me, just children themselves.

• • •

Nowadays, if you asked me how my relationship is with my parents, I’d say it’s good. Not close, not always connected – but no longer filled with unmet needs. I can look at them now as human beings and not my parents. I can let them live their lives without requiring them to backfill what they couldn’t provide me as a child.

But I had to take the glasses off.

I’ve since learned that we listen to people through a filter. We see them through an invisible lens we don’t even know is there, and it colors our view of who they really are. For years, I had it that my truth – who I fundamentally am: a creative, progressive, ambitious woman – hurts my mother. I used to believe she wished I were different. Or worse: she wished she never had me.

That belief shaded who I saw when I looked at her.
It altered how I heard her. And what I heard, too.

It’s like when my dad used to sing that Garth Brooks’ Shameless song to me when I’d visit him in Arizona, but he’d switch out the words, belting “I’m shaving!” as he ran a razor down his cheek. I would giggle as a little girl, thrilled by him. Thrilled to learn you could distort the truth. That you could take something and tilt the wheel of it, watching different shapes click into place.

Dr. Gabor and Daniel Maté call this distortion a working theory, which we all have – and it plays out loudest in our most troubled, challenging relationships.

Working theories are limited lenses of a person. You get a partial, obstructed view – all murky and cloudy and smudged –but you don’t see it there because you think you’re looking through the truth, even though the distortion is costing you genuine connection and authenticity.

Working theories change the lyrics of the song without us knowing their changing, or changed. And we sing along as if we’re getting every line right – when we’re not.

• • •

For years, I listened to my mom through a filter. A distorted view. I saw her a certain way, the way my working theory demanded I see her as – this emotionally immature and stunted victim-gripped woman who couldn’t possibly ever understand me: a young girl trying to survive the pain of not feeling wanted or good enough.

My working theory of my mother controlled how I acted around her – and how, mostly, I avoided her. (And, honestly, still sometimes do.) Because I didn’t (and don't) want to feel ill-measured around her, because growing up I would look at her and fear the worst: turning out just like her, especially the version of her I cast into my story of who she is:

Weak instead of strong.
Scared instead of brave.
Closed instead of open.

A lot of the drive I have in my life is to prove I’m not her. Not weak, not scared, not closed. Just look at where I live (Boulder, Colorad0), where I work (Commune), and how I worship (meditation and spirituality over God and church). I will not be a woman who is limited by the pain of her past, because clearly my mother is – or so my working theory says.

And while working theories are rooted in validity, they’re almost always wrong.

• • •

Even this essay is fictionalized. Maybe by 2%. That’s because a child who survives domestic violence learns to lie well. And my mother has always been someone my nervous system fears. Someone to make sure was okay, so I could be okay, too. I feel the need to protect her, even now.

The body keeps its score, after all, and the mothering moments I remember from childhood are small and few, but I remember them like they are pieces of gold: a box of deluxe crayons for school, Michael Jackson on the radio, a sheet pan of nachos shared for dinner, the card ride home with two new kittens.

These moments allow me to look back on my childhood and see that she isn’t the villain in my story – generational trauma is – and hard as life was for her, and it was hard, she tried her best. Survival had to come first.

Have you realized, too, that surviving teaches us only how to survive more?
My mother is one of many survivors.
She needed more from her own mother, too.

• • •

In my twenties, I decided to be a phoenix.

To rise above the trauma, the abuse, the hardship. To finally forgive.
I even got a tattoo on my left inner wrist to remind me: I am the strong one.
At any time, I can start again – because my mother can’t. Or so I told myself.

Fast forward to 2019, the last year of my 30s, and I found myself in the center of a very intense personal growth and leadership program that kept pushing me to examine my view of my mother. I hated the rigorous coaching at the time. Believe you me, I do not like being told what to do. I rebelled and resisted the homework to call her.

The instructions were simple: Listen to her without my filter.

What filter? I thought. My mother is just that way.

But alas, I was determined to show myself I was the brave one, too.
Braver than her.

So on the day they told me to call her and confess that I had a filter of her, I knew it meant telling her the truth of how I saw her. Except I was supposed to notice how my view of her wasn’t even true – it was just a part of the song I changed. I’d been pressing that viewfinder to my eyes for so many years, seeing the same story of my mother click on by, that I hadn’t realized I’d made it all up.

I was pretending I knew her, when I didn’t know her at all.

Reluctantly I walked into a bathroom stall and sat down on the toilet seat, staring at the gray divider between me and the sinks. My pulse was drum-drum-drumming in my head as I pulled her number up on my phone and hit dial.

She answered.
She always answers when I call.

At first, I told her what my coaches wanted me to tell her. It went something like this: Mom, I’ve started to realize I’ve been listening to you through a filter all my life. Seeing you in a certain, limited way that justifies my behavior. And I’ve treated you something awful. And made you small. I really had it that you’re emotionally stunted and aren’t able to talk about real, hard, or honest things with me. And I’m sorry. I don’t want to know you only through my view of you anymore. I want to know you for you.

She took it in stride, probably because she thought she had to – our relationship was newly reconnected after a five-year radio silence. My doing, not hers. And she was extra accommodating out of fear I’d cut her out of my life again (I asked her weeks later, and she admitted to this).

Besides my embarrassment, something pretty special happened on that call, too. I was able to set my filter of her to the side (which was the whole point of the homework assignment) and really listen to her as a human being – and not as this character I’d cast in my story. Turns out as a child my mother wanted to be a brain surgeon. She loved science and wanted to help people. But then she got pregnant with my older sister and things had to change for her, and fast. She had to switch into survival mode and exist there for a very long time. Especially as a single mom of two really young girls.

Eventually when I was in high school, she went back to school and became an RN. A cardiac nurse. For a very full career, she specialized in taking care of other people’s hearts.

• • •

That’s the thing about working theories. They cause you to survive the other person. To survive the relationship. They limit the space that’s available for love. There’s judgment and criticism and coping – but there’s not connecting.

Turns out I was the emotionally immature one. The resentful one. The ruthless daughter. I put my mother in purgatory and punished her, because my working theory told me that’s what I should do in order to survive her. Serves her right, you know?

Now my mother is taking care of her mother, my grandmother who is in rapid decline due to dementia. We lost my grandfather a couple months back, and my mother was the only one at his bedside when he passed. She has since cleaned out and sold the house she grew up in, along with the fifth-wheeler he took fishing. She’s placed her own mother in a care facility, too, because it’s the right thing to do – for my grandmother and my mother both. If that’s not brave and strong and open, then tell me what is.

My mother is experiencing the strange, sad gift of watching her parents die. And she’s doing it without the support of her siblings. She’s doing it because she made a promise years ago to herself that she would. That she would love her parents, no matter what. All the way until the end.

That’s my mother. A woman who endures.
I can (still) learn a lot from her.

When I look at my mother now, I see a woman who loves. It may not match the exact way I would love, but it’s still love – and it absolutely counts. I also see resolve and strength. I see a survivor. Resiliency. When she speaks about the rose bushes and pear trees she’s planted in her yard, I hear a woman who has found her way into peace. At least, she’s trying.

She texted me recently: I have something to share. In catching up with your sister this evening, I made a comment that resonated with me (funny how that happens). I said, “You don’t have to be a victim of your circumstances.” This is so true. The hardest part is learning how not to be.

My mother is a phoenix.
I learned to rise from her.

• • •

P.S. If you’re curious to discover your working theory about your own mother or father – or, if you’re a parent, your working theory of your adult child – tune in to this free one-hour excerpt from Dr. Gabor and Daniel Maté’s Commune course, Starting Fresh. You can’t change what you can’t see – and this workshop guides you to look for incredible, relationship-shifting discoveries.

Adra is a member of Commune’s marketing team, our resident in-house wordsmith, and a cheerleader for lovingkindness. She is on a mission to normalize transparency around trauma, grief, and healing. Adra studied poetry and creative writing at Oklahoma State and is currently working on a young adult novel about grief and second chances in the hopes of publishing it one day soon. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two cats, Cora and Penny. You can follow her on Instagram at @adrabenjamin.

This isn’t Adra’s first Commusings.
She wrote her debut piece, Newly (Un)broken, in 2021.