Elul Didn’t Go As Planned
Well… There went Elul! It started out great. I was studying my little heart out, reading and writing notes for essays that I planned to put up on Medium, and then… Life.
My mom went into assisted living this past month, and I found myself in the unenviable position of having to clear out her apartment before the end of August. That would be a major task under any circumstance, but it was complicated by the fact that my mother is very upset with me, convinced that I am the reason that she is in assisted living rather than that she had become unable to reliably feed herself or manage her own medications and had landed in the hospital because of it.
As I was trying to figure out what to do next, she was telling visitors that I had kidnapped her, stollen all her money, sold off all her things, and left her destitute. The situation from my perspective was that I had found her a comfortable place to live that didn’t feel institutional and was close to her great-grandchildren so that she would have many family visits, where had I not done so, she would have been far from any family in a locked down memory care facility. Of course, I did need to clear out her previous apartment, and only a small percentage of her things would fit in her new living space.
I contacted relatives and tried to get as many things as possible into the hands of family members who would treasure them. Unfortunately, that was mostly pictures, bits of family history, and a few pieces of jewelry that my mother had inherited from her mother and her sister. No one wanted any of the furniture or books or the mountains of quilting fabric or the holiday decorations or or or… so many things collected in a lifetime! A lot went to charities. Some things got sold to help pay for the U-Haul we rented to move everything out of her apartment. Even now, the lawn on the side of the house where I live is covered with furniture and boxes of things that have yet to find a new home, all covered over with tarps to keep them safe for a moment until I find appropriate homes for it all. Paying for more storage isn’t an option at this point for an assortment of reasons.
All of that is stressful, but on top of that, the whole process of going through my mother’s stuff was like an archeology of familial trauma. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that I was in foster care for a number of years and you can imagine that there are some layers of conflict and generational trauma going on.
As I drove back and forth the 2 hours each way to my mother’s old apartment, I found that I couldn’t bare to listen to audiobooks about conflict resolution, restorative justice, repentance, or repair. Everything felt too sensitive, too sore. I kept going to the Elul zman (school term) classes I’d signed up for online, but other than that, I switched to fiction for the rest of the month. After struggling to get things done with the noise of my own thoughts for company, Elizabeth Bear’s White Space series kept me company during the hours I sorted and packed the apartment. I am grateful for the days in which I got help from my cousin Charity, my friend Lee, and my son Noé.
Once the hardest part was done, and I had handed the keys back to the landlord, I was able to return my thoughts to Transformative Justice and the Jewish practice of Teshuva.
I felt bad for having abandoned the task that I set for myself of writing essays here on Medium, but my son told me that I shouldn’t. He said that I’d been doing the work of Elul with my full body and mind up there at the apartment. At first that didn’t feel right, but today as I attended the siyum (final wrap up class) of Svara’s Elul zman I had a new insight about the Elul work that I had been doing and the work that could not be done.
On the one side, my mother feels that I have harmed her, but I know that I have done the best that I possibly could with this situation. At some point in the future there may be something that I realize I could have done better, and in that case it will be time for me to do the work of teshuva. For now, though, I can’t apologize for doing things for her that she needed to have done, especially since there was no one else who could or would do those things and her situation would have been much worse if I hadn’t done them. So here we are at the very gates of the Days of Awe, and I can’t repent for these things or make my mother feel better about what has happened.
On the other side, this month I have been hit straight between the eyes with material reminders and evidence of things that my mother did that harmed me that she never acknowledged at all. Today as we reviewed the Rambam’s statement that a person needs to acknowledge their misdeeds and try to make amends for them before there is any kind of forgiveness, I realized for the first time in my life that I am not actually required to forgive my mother for those harms. I always felt like fulfilling the commandment to “honor father and mother” required me to forgive. It’s strange to write this, but I feel a sense of relief that forgiveness for the harms she never even acknowledged isn’t part of that honor. I refuse to dwell on the harms that she caused because holding on to the grudge hurts me more than it hurts her. That’s good enough. At least for now.
But all this talk of taking responsibility and of forgiving doesn’t change one thing: We are still family. She is still my mother. Despite her very public declaration in front of doctors and nurses that I am not her “daughter or son” (screamed at me while miming giant air quotes with both hands), I am still her kid. I may never speak to her again, but I will keep writing the checks from her checking account to pay her monthly co-pays for healthcare because I’m the one with the authorization and responsibility to do it. And if not me, then who?
This is a lesson for prison abolition and transformative justice, too. Sometimes there is no justice for things that happened in the past, no possible way to repair something that is broken, and yet people still need to survive. Those who have caused harm and those who have been harmed keep breathing and continue to have needs that must be met one way or another. All of us need to remain safe from additional harm. How we manage that is going to be different in each situation, but it is something that needs to be navigated.
I’m glad that my mother is in a family care setting with women who seem to be quite competent and to truly care about the people in their home. I’m glad that she has people to talk to again after having progressively isolated herself as her cognitive abilities declined. I’m glad that I was able to make sure she has all her own clothes from home and all the quilts that she handmade herself that had been in her bedroom before.
All that, and I am also glad that I do not have to be the one to take care of her myself. I’m glad that I do not have to listen to her lie about the past or pretend that she didn’t do the things that she did. It’s ok. She can be safe and so can I. She doesn’t need to be punished, and neither do I.
I will remember this as I continue to study forms of transformative justice and the work of abolition in 5784 and beyond.
