by Sally Field
I’m not sure why I pushed Baa to live with me, don’t know that I wanted her there any more than she wanted to be there. For months I had been telling her that it was time, that she would probably be living with me at one point so why not now? There had been little episodes, like the time she mistook superglue for eye drops, or when she showed up at my house hobbling on a swollen foot that was black and blue to the ankle, laughing it off with a shrug and a flimsy explanation. Times when Princess and I would roll our eyes at each other, wondering if she’d been under the influence of alcohol or only accumulated years. And though she’d had a bout with breast cancer in her early seventies, she had long since been cancer-free and was a strong, independently capable eighty-three-year-old.
Besides that, my mother loved the small home I’d purchased for her ten years before, a prefab metal house in a gated community nestled above Zuma Beach. But I would sometimes wonder why she even had the place, since it stood empty most of the time. All she needed was the hint of an invitation and there she’d be, in my driveway dragging the suitcase out of her car and into my house to stay with Sam, or eagerly standing at the back door waiting for Peter and his two little girls to arrive for a sleepover. And if she wasn’t at my house, then she was at Princess’s place in the Valley, looking after Maggie, my niece, who was a full-of-life teenager.
Maybe I thought Baa would put a dent in my loneliness. But that couldn’t have been my reason for pulling and prodding her to live with me, or at least not the obvious one. I’d long to see her, to talk to her about the kids or life’s little dramas, but eventually I’d feel that same ol’ tug. I’d sense her eyes searching my face for something and I’d turn away, annoyed and uncomfortable. She must have been aware of the raw edge between us, but we never talked about it, and over the years it had grown, festering into a gnawing wound that I couldn’t find or heal. Always I felt it was my fault, that I lacked patience, or was a control freak, or simply resented having to support her. Constantly juggling my fear of money with the cost of private schools and universities—undergrad and grad—and trying to be the safety net for my sons, while all the time looking after my mother’s needs, was an anxiety-filled circus act. And jabbing at me was my conviction that I was a rotten, selfish person for feeling anything but gratitude toward her.
Even so, a year after I moved into my snake-infested, coyote-friendly retreat, and shortly after I began filming that fourth series, my mother reluctantly left her tiny place near the ocean, giving it over to Eli and his newly pregnant wife. With a clenched jaw she moved in, jamming everything she owned into one room and spreading out into the rest of the house—as though she actually lived there—only when my granddaughters would arrive. As soon as they stepped inside, before I could give them a hug, Baa would re-create that infuriating walky-walky world, a world that I could never join, and our old tug-of-war was back.
I began to dodge her, to wait in my bedroom upstairs so I could sneak, robber-like, into the kitchen as soon as I heard the pop of her bedroom door closing. And there was always the pop of doors closing, a door-slamming opera that echoed through the house from early morning till late at night. I never knew if it was a loss of hearing on her part, or a conversation meant for me to interpret. And if it was, then what was she saying?
June 25, 2007
Tonight. I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when Baa’s report came in and after she hung up the phone we just stood there, staring at each other. It seems that Baa has several small growths?… tumors?… in various locations all over her body—remnants of the breast cancer she beat ten years ago, or so we thought. The doctor reassured her that there are countless drug options available, treatments that they’ve had some success with, and advised her to start immediately. “Well,” she said after a while, “it had to be something, sometime.” Then laughed, saying she was just happy she wouldn’t be slowly losing her mind. That was one disease she didn’t want. “Okay, there you go,” I said. “Thank God for small favors.” I put a big glass of red wine in front of her and when she went to call Rick and Jimmie, I called Peter, then Eli, and finally Sam.
She knocked on my door around 9:00, said she wanted to be with me and that she was a little bit drunk, maybe. She was a lot drunk maybe. I told her to get into bed and we could watch TV, but instead we ordered books for her online. Everyone has to face death sometime, she said to me with a slur. I told her it was a good thing she was drunk. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve always been uncomfortable when she’s messy drunk like that, but tonight I tried to let it go, to move past it, to let her be fragile. She’s scared I guess and wanted to be with me. I’ll remember that always. It’s going to be hard to understand all that I feel about her. I’m going to lose her.
Once, when I was about twelve, I asked my mother, “How do you get a boy to like you?” She thought for a moment, then answered, “You listen to everything he says and laugh at all his jokes.” Now I was sixty-three and she was eighty-seven, cancer-ridden and savaged by the unsuccessful chemo treatments, but whenever she’d hear me starting dinner, she’d mosey out of her room with a paperback mystery in hand, then patiently sit at the kitchen counter, listening to everything I said and laughing at all my jokes. We chatted sweetly, stiffly discussing the kids or their kids, or Princess and her daughter, anything to keep talking. But then we’d be struck with it. The quiet. If I looked at her, she’d look back down at her book, and when I turned to the sink, I could feel her eyes on my back. I’d clamp my mouth closed in a soundless scream, then turn back toward her, my face showing nothing as I pleasantly chopped and stirred and served—a do-si-do that went on and on. I felt helplessly locked into step, unable to shake it off and reach out to her.
On the rare mornings when I didn’t have to get up before the sun, when I didn’t face the hour-long, traffic-filled drive to and from Burbank, where the Brothers and Sisters sets were located, I’d wake to the slam of a door, followed by the nonstop barking of Baa’s look-alike dog, the dog that peed every time I tried to be nice to it, the dog that went insane, running up and down beside the steamy, overheated pool while Baa swam her few laps. On those mornings, I’d sit in my bed, or on the floor of my room, unable to breathe. Baa, in the ongoing battle for her life, was downstairs swimming in the pool, while I was upstairs drowning in nothing, feeling panicked and futureless, as if I were the one who was dying. And when I felt like I was going down for the count, I finally reached out for help.
Dr. Dan Siegel quietly led me into his glass-filled office, then sat in a straight-backed chair, while I sat on the sofa across from him with my heart pounding. After a moment of stillness, he gently asked what had brought me there. Slowly, I started telling him about my life, dribbling it out until it became an emotional flood, as if I’d been storing everything up, waiting for this one moment. I relived memories, episodes, and events that had happened long ago, but which now felt fresh and scab-less.
One day, after we’d met a handful of times, Dan asked me in a casual tone if I could name all the different parts of myself. “Parts or fragments or aspects or personalities, whatever feels right to you,” he continued.
“I call them pieces” was my reply. No one had seen me like that before, as being a divided person, and at the time I hadn’t yet begun to see it clearly myself. But, as if it were a question I’d answered before, I immediately, without hesitation, named all the pieces of who I am. From incident to incident in my life, I could name the parts of me that had been most present, and if any others were involved. Little by little, memory by memory, I could see it, could feel the system of behavior, the cooperation and alienation between the members of my interior family. It was something that I had known instinctually but had never pulled into the front of my awareness and certainly never articulated. The powerful, elusive Madwoman who had always frightened me and the deeply sad Ragamuffin who had fueled much of my work but whom I despised and would banish from my mind, except when acting. Then there were the easy ones, the red rage of Fire, reliable Rock, a
nd Airy, the entertainer. Dan urged me to talk to each of them, to visualize them in my brain like they were separate people and, as if I were playing a game of “Red Rover,” to finally call each one over, to allow them to join the group, and me. It was a version of the very scene I had played in Sybil.
But this couldn’t be the reason I felt so frantic, so panicked and frightened. I’d been like this all my life.
I tried not to think about the Lincoln project as the years passed. I didn’t want to know how it was progressing because for every month it dragged on, for every year it was delayed, my loss of it was also delayed. With all my might I tried to not want it, as though the film were a hungry animal, and if it could smell my desire, it would eat me. Several scripts came and went, as did the writers, and the possibility of the film ever happening seemed to dwindle. Then it was announced that Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Angels in America, had been hired to take a stab at it, and a year later, he delivered what I consider to be one of the finest screenplays ever written. Instantly, an elaborate table reading was assembled in the East Village’s historic Cooper Union and I was invited to participate, along with an extraordinary group of New York actors, including Liam Neeson—who was to play Abraham Lincoln. The producers kept insisting that my attendance wasn’t required, that the reading was “only” to give Steven and Tony a chance to hear the script out loud, and maybe that was true. But part of me, quieted for so long, refused to listen. That part knew very well that the reading would be more than that, no matter what they thought or said—as every reading is. Fortunately, during that week’s schedule of Brothers and Sisters—then in its fourth season—I happened to have a few days off, meaning I didn’t have to sell my soul to the devil to get to New York.
I could feel the battle going on inside me, one part repeating that this reading was dangerous, exposing me to an inevitable loss that I might not have the strength to get up from. While all the time another voice softly persisted, arguing that if this was truly my only moment as Mary then by God, grab it fully. And so I did. I worked to own as much of the text as I could in the forty-eight hours I had it, put on a blousy black dress, pulled my hair into a knot at the base of my neck, and without hedging my bet, launched myself toward Mary Lincoln. For two and some-odd hours all the voices in me came together, and I was lifted by the eloquence of the words, the skill of a huge tableful of actors, and the craft that had always been my lifeline. When I walked away on that glorious day, I knew that my work had been well regarded. But the further I got from the afternoon, the louder that frigging voice became, telling me that I’d better protect myself because the whole scenario had already been played out and I had failed.
When Liam dropped out of the film a few days later for personal reasons, I silently hoped that the whole project would fall apart and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Then several months later, when it was announced that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to take on the role, I felt sure that this was it: my death knell. I was back to being a television actor, whereas Daniel was considered to be the finest actor in the world. I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself, to beat my mother to the grave so I didn’t have to feel any of it. Including my mother’s death.
During one of my sessions with Dr. Dan, he asked if he could show me the “Still Face Experiment,” a short video made by Dr. Edward Tronick and his developmental psychology team. The film shows a nine-or ten-month-old baby sitting in a high chair, open-faced and gleefully fixed onto the eyes of her mother, seated before her. The baby is preverbal but clearly communicating back and forth, in a joyous conversation of love with her responsive, playful parent. The mother is then told to turn her head away for a moment, and when she turns back, it is with a blank, lifeless expression, no longer responding in any way. The baby is immediately affected, confused as to why her mother is not reacting, becoming anxious as she tries to reestablish the attachment, at first babbling, then reaching out, then screeching with alarm, until finally the baby turns away, trying to escape from the discomfort, and starts to cry. If no one comes, if the mother still does not hear her distress, she begins to chew on her own hand, hoping to soothe herself. Then, after a few minutes—which seems like an hour for both the viewer and, no doubt, the baby—the mother comes back to life and the connection is reestablished. The bad is gone and the good returns, and if done with loving support this process can help the baby build inner resilience. It is a powerful and moving study of a child’s need to have an attentive parental connection and the hardwired reaction of that baby when the attachment is lost, even for a short time.
“But,” I protested, “parents and caretakers have to look away periodically—they’re human beings. And my mother was there, always caring for me, or making sure I was with someone who would, my grandmother and my brother. Baa was wonderful and loving,” I kept declaring. “I’m here because I don’t know how I’ll live without her. Not to tear her down. She has been my life!” Dan listened while I repeatedly told him he had it all wrong, nodding his head with acceptance, until he sat quiet for a moment. Thinking.
“A child instinctually knows that it cannot survive alone,” he told me a few days later, and I wanted to say, No shit. He continued, with a “be patient” look on his face, “But if their survival is dependent on someone who might be dangerous or deeply flawed, then the knowledge of that is too terrifying to accept, so the child creates a better scenario.” Even though I was tapping one foot against the other, giving off the appearance of being bored to death, he began speaking now for the imaginary child. “ ‘The problem can’t be my mother’s fault because I can’t live without her, so it must be mine. My mother is already perfect, she has to be, and I am not. I can fix me. I can make myself better.’”
I stopped moving. And something popped out of my mouth before my brain had formed the words. Stunned by what I’d revealed, I sat with my mouth wide open, astounded and horrified. Had this never registered before, never penetrated my brain until that moment? When I got home, I pulled out my many journal-filled containers, and sitting on the floor, I went through the books until I found it—a day only five years earlier, one of the many days I’d spent packing to move out of the Brentwood house. I glanced at the journal to verify that it had indeed happened. I had written it down, for God’s sake, but I had never let the thought register in my mind. Even then, I hadn’t wanted to know.
May 15, 2004
Mother told me the most amazing thing yesterday. I was packing, talking about… I don’t know… feeling remote, slightly perturbed, the way I often do with my mother. Sometimes I can break through, can be with her, but mostly I stay remote, in a place where she can’t reach me and she keeps trying. She finally caught my attention when she said something about always fighting with Jocko. I looked in her face and asked if she ever really fought with him. “Yes,” she said. “If alcohol was involved.” I laughed. She said she would let out all of her anger then, and it was mostly about me. I felt jabbed with a long hatpin. When I was a teenager and no longer speaking to him, he once accused me of being the reason his marriage was such a mess, but Baa had never told me that I was the cause for any of their fights. Had she? I wanted to be quiet, didn’t want to talk at all, but as we sat in silence, without thinking I asked, “Why were you fighting about me?” “For what he did to you,” she said simply. The world slammed to a stop. I stuttered something like, “But I didn’t tell you, not really.” And when she said, “He told me,” I kept packing but felt dizzy. Calmly she continued, “He told me how he had suffered for what he’d done. He wanted my sympathy, for me to know how hard it had been on him. Of course, I was appalled and knew it was the end of us.” I couldn’t look at her. My hands were shaking. “If he admitted it, then why did you and Princess treat me like I’d made it up? I tried to tell you both once. Remember? When I was doing the Nun?” “I know,” she said. “I told Princess the truth and I tried to talk to you, I think… I tried. I don’t know.” At first, I felt a wave of
relief and gratitude, that she had tried to help me… but… but. Something’s wrong. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.
My cherished mother had known… something. What exactly that was, I didn’t want to hear, because even at that time, when I was middle-aged, I couldn’t bear the idea that she hadn’t run to my side, that she hadn’t come to get me. Even now as I write this, I remember the wave of fear that rolled through me. I had spent my life hanging on to the vision of her being a glowing treasure who loved me, that I was worth loving and protecting, and if I lost her, what would I have? Even as she was dying, I fought to keep that vision safe, but in doing so, I was losing myself. I was the one who had kept me safe. All of me, including the parts I found unlovable: They had protected me, had steered me outside of my fears, pushing me toward things I didn’t feel capable of doing.
Suddenly something lit up. It was as if I’d been standing in a dark room, panicked and sightless, until I realized I was holding a lantern and all I needed to do was turn it on. Light filled my head and I saw the childhood illusion I’d fought so hard to live in. I had accepted the idea that I was broken in an effort to keep my mother whole, always battling with a part of myself that expected to be knocked out, the buzzing voice that had come out of nowhere and grown over the last years, telling me to duck even before life took a swing. Lincoln wasn’t lost, not yet, not until it was actually taken away from me. I couldn’t give up the battle before there was a battle to fight. And I couldn’t let my mother leave her life without knowing what had so powerfully affected mine, without asking her the questions whose answers I’d never wanted to hear. I couldn’t bury her while she was still alive, getting into the grave right with her.