Between them

While I was sick last week, and a little sick of the books I was reading, I espied Richard Ford's Between Them at the bottom of the stack of books next to my bed. I hadn't finished reading it earlier in the year (according to the Grouse, I was reading it back in January). It is split into two reflections about his parents, one focused on his dad, who died while he was still a teenager, and one about his mom, who passed when he was already an adult. So I just read the one about his mom.

The most interesting thing about it is his sense that his relationship with her was, in the end, pretty quotidian. Throughout adulthood, he tells us, she would visit him and his wife wherever he was, in Princeton, in New Hampshire, what have you. They would hang out, road trip, eat, talk, etc. He never perceived a deepening he was kind of looking for. Their relationship was somewhat generic, or abstract.

I have to think that part of it has to do with the fact that he never had kids. I know that's a very breederly thing of me to say, but I think that so much of the deepening of relationships between me and my mom in adulthood and also Mary's parents, has been around the consultative/sharing relationship between me and them about observing the kids, using our own upbringing and behavior (and theirs) as a reference point. Trying to figure this whole parenting thing out, day by week by month by year by decade.

Since my dad didn't really interface much with us on that level, he was kind of left out of that dimension, which is its own sadness.

But, back to Ford, I have to say that part of what he was experiencing is the essential abstractness of all of our relations to everyone else, that as much as we would like it to be individual, we are all always playing roles -- albeit shifting and overlapping ones, never exactly the same -- (mom, dad, spouse, friend, child, teacher, advisor) and our ability to instantiate those roles is limited by the weight of expectations of the role, and by our own limitations. As I've said before, the best illustration and recognition of this is in the early films of Atom Egoyan, where the characters spend a lot of time saying exactly the same things to others. Watch Elias Koteas in The Adjuster.  This is probably most true for those of us who deal with more people. We are all of us all the time auditioning for and playing ever shifting roles, not entirely of our own making.