Sons Remembering Mothers

A friend and I were having lunch across from Grand Central Station in NYC. We have known each other for thirty years and this was something like a homecoming.

We hadn’t seen each other for over a year, so we first do the male thing — size each other up. He tells me I look fit. He adds that his life had kept him out of the gym for a while. I nod because I know he had cared for his mother for years. She died a few months ago.

I think about all the times I have heard the mother mentioned at the nearby New York Jung Center and heard psychologists talk about the mother’s psychological pull. I can’t seem to remember who said: “The mother defines and confines.” But I can repeat in my sleep the idea that all men reside uncomfortably in a mother complex, whether they like it or not.

My friend talked about the mother he wanted to remember, the one full of life, and the other, battling early stage dementia. He mentioned the nursing home, the cost, family strains and what to do with the furniture. He said he doesn’t have the same drive he had before her death. His mornings seem less bright. I say the energy will come back. He is still in mourning. And mothers cast a long shadow.

I mentioned that my mother died thirty year ago and I still wrestle with her memory. I told my friend I dreamed incessantly of her for years, often of her spirit trying to leave the earth but it was held back by something or someone. This pain sent me into therapy. Healing came in time.

We talked about how common it is for people in our age groups to care for or know those who care for ailing parents. This seems to be the task of Baby Boomers. I was lucky. I recalled my mother traveling to Dublin on her own and returning in time to see me finish the New York Marathon. She died a month later of a heart attack.

On reflection, there was love and tenderness in our voices as we chatted about our mothers. The psychologist Carl Jung suggested that this can broadly represent the emotional development in man in the second life of life when he has ceased slaying dragons and tilting at windmills. He might give up some of his focused, rational consciousness in favor of a more diffuse, spiritual awareness. He might feel closer to nature and to God. This is the anima stage of his life during which he is capable of accessing feminine elements from the unconscious. Anima refers to soul in the classic sense or, as Jung put it, to the archetype of life itself. It is man’s inner feminine which helps deepen his sense of compassion, intuition and ability to love.

It is not unusual for men in the second half of his life to experience a mid-life crisis which is a symptom rather than a cause of a problem. He is likely to feel down-in-the-dumps, depressed and out of sorts. And death of a mother can make matters worse. After all, she is a son’s first anima connection and retains a hold on men throughout their lives, even when she is replaced psychologically by other anima figures such as Madonna, Mary and Sophia. These figures represent symbolic stages of psychological and spiritual growth.

My friend and I chatted about how we remember our mothers after their death. As mentioned earlier, he was caught between early memories of her and the fact of her decline. I told him I had once taken my mother to our old apartment building in North London and waited for truth to pour out about what I considered our checkered and repressed family history. Later I realized that this was my vanity and fantasy talking. The repetitious dream I had of my mother after her death showing her spirit trying to leave the confines of earth told me in retrospect how much I was “stuck” in old memories and fantasies about the past.

I am still a long way from the Sophia or wisdom phase of masculine development.