“Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Yes. Tell me what you feel, everything—about me, about your mother. You never told me much about how your mother was with you.”
I sighed deeply to myself. Where to start? I was struggling with it. I couldn’t really get her clear. She wasn’t clear to herself—how could she be clear to me? And what bothered me more than anything was that in her twilight years, the perceptions I had of my mother were fading. I tried to untangle some of the webs we had spun around each other. And as time progressed and our conversations became more honest, I found my mother talking more and more about her mother and their webs. Her deepest guilts centered on how she may have hurt or troubled her mother. It was almost more than she could bear. And her memories of those guilts centered around her teenage years, her college experience, and her feelings of responsibility relating to the death of her father. Somehow she felt that the burden of raising her brothers and sisters, as well as herself, was hers. Her need to share her mother’s responsibilities was profound. I wondered why. What was the agreement between the two of them? Did we all dovetail somehow? And, as Sachi had said, were we really reflections of each other in order to learn about ourselves?
I remembered how depressed and unsettled I was becoming over my mother’s attitude about life in her old age. She seemed so negative and judgmental. I knew that fear of dying became amplified as the years dwindled, and that personal anger would then be inevitable. But I was having difficulty being around her. During lunch with a friend of mine in Washington, D.C., I unburdened myself about Mother’s “dark-sided feelings.” My friend was a psychiatrist and, wanting to help, he said something that astonished me, coming from a man of traditional training.
“Have you considered,” he said, “that your mother’s attitudes these days might be a reflection of your fears and anxieties?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Perhaps,” he went on, “you expect her to be this way and, therefore, commission her with the task of emulating those emotions you expect to feel with age in your own life.”
“You mean I am creating her to behave this way out of my own negativity?”
“Yep,” he said, “and I think you’ll find that if you release those feelings in yourself, they will disappear in her also.”
I pictured Mother sitting across the Potomac River in her living room in Virginia. I could see her sitting alone, upright in her chair, upset with me that I wasn’t with her. With hurt dignity, she would lay a guilt trip on me when I walked in, sighing with righteous indignation that I took so little time to come to Virginia. Anyway, how could I rob her of what time I did give her by having lunch with someone else? The picture in my mind was accurate in my opinion. So what had that to do with me?
I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. On the way back, I called Mother. The hurt silences were there in between sentences on the phone. “Oh dear. How can I change this,” I thought.
“You’ve missed your lunch with me,” said Mother. “I know,” I answered. “But I’ll be home soon.” “All right, darling,” she answered, with that loving understanding use of the endearment that was meant to provoke guilt on the deepest level possible. I returned to the table with my friend and, for another hour, discussed the objective reality that I could create another attitude in my mother by first changing it in myself.
I practiced seeing her happy and full of interest in whatever I had been doing, devoid of her own feelings of isolation, her sense that she had been left out. I saw her face crinkled with smiles, her eyes lit with positive curiosity that I might have a tale or two to share with her. With wry humor she offered me some leftover food, instead of presenting it as a silent reproach for the cold-hearted sadness of abandonment. The vision I was creating at the lunch table warmed my heart and, in fact, propelled me to go back to Mother much earlier than I had planned. She had turned into someone I wanted to be with, in my mind.
I thanked my doctor friend, got in the car, and went back to Mother in Virginia.
When I walked in the door Mother was sitting upright in her rattan chair. She had finished her own lunch without me. But when she looked up at me as I walked over to her, she smiled. She was old and full of her own wise opinions, but her face was open and childlike. Her first gesture was to put her arms up and reach for me.
“Oh, darling,” she said, “it’s so wonderful to see you. Let me get you some lunch, and let’s sit and talk. Tell me everything you’ve been doing, and I’ll do the same. You look wonderful. You’ve changed.”
I was so caught off guard I couldn’t laugh or even respond with the same love she was showing me. I sat down and tested her a little more. We talked of movies, the world, how she was coming along, and the inevitable rambling that always accompanies old age. Finally, after about an hour I said, “Mother, what’s happened? You seem so much happier than you’ve been in years.”
“Yes,” she said, “you’re right. I was getting sick of my negative attitude. So I decided to give it up. I like myself a lot better this way.”
“When did this happen?” I asked, unable to comprehend the swiftness of her change. Or had I been wrong on the telephone?
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Recently.”
We sat long into the night talking woman to woman with no rancor, no pressure points, no manipulative buttons to push. It was a joy. She seemed to have found a new and serene place within herself.
“There’s nothing much I can do about anything at my age,” she said later, “so I might just as well be happy and accept it.”
“You see?” said Sachi. “Why don’t you take a lesson from yourself and your mom … relax, be yourself. You are you because of her, and she is she because of her mom, and so on. We women need to understand each other.”
I heard a knock on my motor home door. I opened my eyes.
“We’re ready on the set,” said a new A.D. I hadn’t met yet.
“Oh, okay. Thanks,” I said, trying to bring myself back to reality. Reality? What was real? I closed my eyes again. Sachi was gone.
Had I been dreaming? It felt more like a “real” illusion that I had created. To me, once an illusion was created in my mind it became a reality. I saw it; I experienced it.
We actors played with this notion all the time. We were masters at allowing the subconscious reality, in all its abstraction, to permeate our conscious logical minds until we churned the mix into quite another third objective reality we used in our work.
We were magicians of the alchemy of balance. We perpetuated emotional illusions until, by consensus, the reality became real to an audience of individuals who allowed themselves to be moved by whatever triggered their own dormant, unexpressed feelings. Illusion and reality became one and the same, depending upon one’s perspective. They coexisted in order to create life. There was indeed more to life than conscious reality. In fact, perhaps most of what we loved the best about life was born in the subconscious illusion.
I loved leaving the door open to alternative realities. There was a logic to the confusion it created. Out of confusion came a broader-scoped clarity. But most of all, I loved the notion that this life I was living might possibly just be a dream that I was dreaming from another reality I was living somewhere else. Making a movie was a subtext to that dream.
I happily got into my size 10 slacks and walked out into the California sunlight, blinked, crossed the street, and headed for Soundstage 17.
I was about to play yet another mother in a film about the sticky complication of a mother-daughter relationship. The theme was big and personal. And in my need to understand its intricacies, I was clearly drawn by the subject, apparently using my work to help myself. If I could understand the characters in my films, perhaps I could understand the characters in my life—myself included.
My character in Terms of Endearment had been a mother who demanded that her daughter live life according to her expectations. Her constant, negative, nagging f
ears, along with projections of disaster, finally manifested in the daughter’s death by cancer.
As I was making it, I was reminded often of my mother’s fears for me. She had fears that weren’t the slightest bit realistic. It was as though she needed to worry in order to have an identity. If she could talk about what might go wrong instead of focusing on the joy of things going right, she knew where she was. The positive perspective would call into play her reluctance to trust it.
“Oh, Shirl,” she’d say. “That will be difficult, won’t it? Be careful, darling. You never know what could go wrong.” Aurora, in Terms, was much more incisively destructive than Mother. But they both worried a lot.
When my mother got sick with her own cancer, I wondered if the disease was hereditary, or was the psychology of negativity a much more potent killer? When I sat by the hospital bed waiting for my screen daughter to die, I never allowed myself to contemplate the same potential event in my own life. I didn’t want to give it any energy. I was learning more and more that thoughts carried power capable of manifesting into reality.
Until the making of Postcards I had never acted my roles by believing they were true for me. It wasn’t my style. I found it self-indulgent. I acted the character in whose life these events occurred, and used only part of myself to react. Sachi’s potential death was not something I was willing to contemplate or exploit just for the sake of a movie. That could have been part of the problem that Debra Winger and I had working together. She really believed she was dying of cancer, and I was acting as though she were. I came from the discipline of the stage. If I really believed that what I was doing was real, eight times a week and twice on Wednesday and Saturday matinee days, I would be taken away in a white coat.
I had learned, through the discipline of dancing, I think, how to orchestrate and conserve and manipulate my emotional tapestry to serve the character without damaging myself.
I could see that Aurora Greenway was projecting her daughter’s death through her negative ramblings, but Aurora couldn’t.
So as Aurora admonished her daughter for not taking care of herself, and essentially, for living a life unpleasing to her mother, I was able to examine those same aspects in myself. Aurora taught me a lot. When I finally leave this world, I hope it’s because I’m ready to, rather than succumbing to any negative conditioning visited on me by anyone else, and I hope the same will be true for Sachi.
As I was contemplating aging and death in my films, the constant realistic reminder, of course, was my own mother. “I’m afraid to die,” she said to me often. “But I think I’m more afraid to live.”
“Do you regret much?” I’d ask.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she’d say. “I have you and Warren regardless of what else I didn’t do.”
“So you poured your creative energies into us, didn’t you?” I’d say. “You made us what we are.”
“Oh, yes. And I’m so proud. What more could a mother want?”
I laughed whenever she wore her big floppy sweatshirt during her walks. The front read “Don’t bother me. Both my children have Oscars.” My agent gave it to her.
She’d sit with her toes pointed in, hunched over a bowl of soup with an almost manic twinkle in her eye. Then she’d dispel the pixie in herself by crossing one long lean leg over the other and, with dignified bearing, become a character out of some long-forgotten royal family. My mother had bearing, all right. And she never let you forget that she had gone through a lot to bear it.
I wondered if Sachi had the same thoughts about me. Here we were, a triad of women springing from completely different backgrounds, yet born into each other’s lives and each sparring both with life itself and with the intricate impacts we had on one another.
I came from a middle-class American Mason-Dixon line background, with a Canadian mother and a small-town Virginia father. My daughter had come out of an American mother and a father who was American but thought and lived like a Japanese. She had been educated in America initially with one parent (me); but then in her crucial formative years (six to twelve), she had gone to live in Japan with her father and been conditioned accordingly. The impact of the Eastern culture had been stronger than that of the Western, because it had been served up by her father when she was old enough to register it consciously.
How do two such women ever really understand each other?
My familial experience had been traditional. My mother and father lived together upholding American values and ethics recognized by the surrounding community. Sachi’s familial experience had been a separated father and mother, and her social input had been Oriental. The twain would have difficulty in meeting.
Sometimes we seemed so close and yet we were actually worlds away from each other. Our problems together were not like the problems I had with my mother. I knew Mother well. She knew me well. The stickiness came out of long-schooled knowledge of each other. I often saw her in myself, which I alternately accepted and rejected. “My mother myself” was a theme familiar and often disturbing to me. I had seen my father through my mother’s eyes, because she had always been the parent in attendance.
Sachi and I didn’t really know each other that well—not the way a day-to-day existence would dictate. She had not seen her father through my eyes, nor the culture that surrounded her when she began to be capable of integrating it. I had been more of a friend and an absent mother, which had its good and bad points. We were not competitively involved with each other, as is usually the case; instead, we sometimes suffered from lack of knowledge about who the other was.
So our relationship was not one of undoing and resolving the knots we had tied ourselves into over the years. Ours, at the moment, was one of accepting that those ties existed as golden threads of loving communication that we each needed to learn how to understand.
Mother and I were almost staunch with each other in terms of our emotional territory. We were often competitive and insensitive to each other, because we were so familiar. We knew each other’s buttons and pressure points. That produced a combustion that was intolerable at times.
Sachi and I were only just establishing our territory with each other, subtly discovering particular sensitivities and pressure points and never really feeling the temptation to exploit them to serve a power struggle; rather, were trying to find them so we’d each know who the other was. In fact, we were each afraid of the other in terms of trigger points because we didn’t want to jeopardize the love we knew was so deep, yet so unexpressed.
I thought of my mother in terms of how to get along with her. We never discussed how much we meant to each other and how deep our love went. Whereas Sachi and I were always talking about what we felt and continually looked for ways to feel comfortable in expressing our feelings. We hadn’t been together enough to know how, but we also hadn’t been together enough to know how to sabotage connection.
I remembered the time she called me to announce she was going into surgery for endometriosis.
I was at my house in the Pacific Northwest, and, with her demanding schedule, she could only work the surgery into the following morning.
I was apoplectic. I was writing and had a deadline on my book, but I would be there regardless. She said it wasn’t necessary. But then she gave me the gift of asking me to be there.
I sat in the front seat of my car the next morning, while Mike (who ran my house) drove me toward Sea-Tac Airport. There was a traffic jam. If I missed the plane, I’d miss Sachi’s surgery. People in the Northwest talk slowly, they walk slowly, and maybe they even think slowly. They are, however, more thorough and they never forget to stop and smell the roses. What I couldn’t tolerate was how Mike seemed to be smelling every rose along the way, even when there was an opening for him to pass a car and make time on the road.
“Patience,” I thought. That’s certainly one of my big issues in this lifetime. What would we pick up by passing anyway? A few seconds?
Well, a few seconds is what my catching the flight ulti
mately came down to. We pulled up in front of United Airlines at 6:55. I ran to the United desk to buy a ticket (I had made a reservation). The supervisor told me it was no use. I said I was getting on that plane no matter what.
I kicked into my acting overachieving success gear and, not knowing what to expect, I visualized myself on that plane. I raced through the security check. For the first time ever the uniformed authority flaunters made me dump out all the contents of my tote bag. They were troubled that I would hijack the plane with my cuticle scissors. Someone looked up at my face and recognized me. She ordered the others to let me go. I wondered how many faceless, unfamous individuals traveling with manicure sets would miss their planes that day.
I ran to the underground train that would speed me to Gate 17. I bounded out of it and raced up the escalator stairs, as people stepped aside, sensing a woman in an emergency. The door to Gate 17 was closed.
I looked out the window. The jetway was being pulled away. No one was in attendance. I made a decision. I pulled open the door and bounded down the jetway. The flight person in charge of pushing the jetway button gasped when he saw me. Apparently afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop my momentum and would therefore run right off the end of it, he pushed a reverse button and the jetway stopped in mid-motion.
As if on cue, I saw the pilot in the cockpit turn around and look at me. He was literally pulling the 747 away from the gate when I waved my arms at him. “Stop! Come back!” I shouted, knowing he couldn’t hear me, but in order for him to get the full effect of my emotion I needed voice-sound effects. He looked startled.
By that time an airline official had been told there was a maniac on the jetway and for some reason the pilot was holding up his departure. The official was a woman who recognized me. “What are you doing, dear?” she asked. “You know we can’t stop the departure now.”
“But you must,” I pleaded. “I have got to be in Los Angeles in two hours. I can’t not be there. I have to get on that plane.”
“Let me see your ticket then,” said the official.
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