A portrait in black-and-white

My mother was born Marguerite Thérèse Ayo in the little town of Schriever, Louisiana, on August 10, 1920, exactly a hundred years ago.  She was the middle of three children.  Her father was an insurance salesman, a kind, soft-spoken man who was absent from the home a good bit of the time.  Her mother -- typical of the time -- was a stay-at-home mom, and from what I've heard was an exacting, demanding woman who expected her children to be perfect.

Left to right: my aunt Florence, my grandmother (Flora (Meyer-Lévy) Ayo), my uncle Sidney, and my mom.  

The photograph above speaks volumes.  According to my mother, when the film was developed, Florence was the only one who met with approval.  Sidney's belt end had flopped down and my mom's stockings were wrinkled at the knees, something they heard about every time my grandmother looked at this photograph.  My mom had a bad case of middle-child syndrome -- her older sister was the picture of etiquette and academic success, and her younger brother got away with murder because he was the youngest and the only boy.  My mom never felt like she could measure up.

My mom at about 12

Historian Arnold Toynbee famously said "Life is just one damned thing after another," and that was certainly true in my mom's case.  When I think of what happened to her over her more than eight decades of life, what strikes me is that she got knocked down again and again by circumstances outside her control.  As I mentioned, she never got much approval from either parent.  When she was 17, her mother had a stroke at the young age of 44, and it changed her already difficult personality for the worse -- now she was largely housebound, had difficulty walking and talking, and found fault with everything and everyone.

My mom, age around 18

My mom escaped by marrying my dad, then a private in the Marine Corps.  It was the first years of World War II and my dad ended up stationed in Hawaii (in fact, they were in Honolulu and heard the bombs striking Pearl Harbor).  In 1945 my sister Margaret Mary was born -- but she was premature and had Rh-incompatibility syndrome, then a dire and life-threatening emergency, and only lived nine days.

My grandmother had a second stroke and died shortly after the war ended.  My parents had neither the resources nor the opportunity to return to Louisiana for the funeral, and in traditional Cajun culture, not going to a close relative's funeral is about as disrespectful as you can get.  Everyone said they understood, but my mom never forgave herself.

My mom shortly after the end of the war

Over the next decade, my dad was bounced around from military base to military base.  For three years, in the 1950s, he lived on a base in Japan.  Left alone at home, my mom did the best she could, and that was when she found her true passion -- art.  She learned painting, sculpture, and (especially) ceramics, and created some amazing works in porcelain.  Here's one of her bone china dolls:

The lace itself is made of bone china.  Don't ask me how she did it.

My parents wanted children, and after the loss of my sister, they tried.  No luck.  Doctors' visits showed nothing physically wrong with either one, but no success.  Fifteen years after my sister's death, my mom was forty years old and had resigned herself to being childless.  She was preparing to throw herself into becoming a full-time studio artist...

... when I came along.

Me and my mom, June of 1961

I won't say I wasn't wanted; but when my parents said I was their "mistake," it was only half kidding.  I busted up my mother's plans of being a full-time artist without even knowing I'd done it.  Then in late 1961, shortly after this photo was taken, my dad got transferred -- to Reykjavík, Iceland.  Back then enlisted men couldn't bring their families along to most overseas assignments, so for two years my mom and I only saw my dad when he was on furlough.  She and I moved in with her father, who had by then remarried.

Imagine it.  You're a forty-year-old with your only child, and you have to move back to your father's house and live with him and with a stepmother whom you frankly detest.  Once again, fate had given her a good gut punch.

This is where it gets complicated, because my mom honestly tried to jump into her new role as mother as well as she could.  But our relationship was fractious pretty much from the beginning.  I was about as opposite to her picture of "the perfect son" as it's possible to be.  She wanted a tough, independent, all-American boy, who was a solid-B student and played baseball and went fishing and hunting on the weekend.  She got me -- a bookish, nearsighted, sensitive dreamer who wanted to spend his time reading and making up stories, who hated team sports with a passion and whose idea of athletics was going on a solo five-mile run.  Despite my being reasonably smart, she couldn't even brag about my academic prowess -- my grades yo-yoed all over the place, depending on whether I liked the teacher and whether during that grading period I'd focused on learning about the Franco-Prussian War instead of inventing characters to send on adventures in time and space.

Plus, there was the problem that she and I never honestly understood each other, not on any kind of deep level.  She was a devout Roman Catholic; I was a doubter pretty much the moment I was old enough to consider the question.  She had an innate respect for authority; my general attitude toward authority was "either earn my respect, or go to hell."  She was a staunch conservative; I was born leaning to the left.  She liked everything in black-and-white -- people were good or bad, a thing was true or not, an action was right or it was wrong.  Me, I saw (and still see) pretty much everything in shades of gray.

It was almost like she and I didn't speak the same language.

My dad was stationed for a time in Charleston, West Virginia, and we lived in the town of St. Albans, where my mom met a neighbor named Garnett Mudd, the woman my mom called "the only real friend I ever had."  They were kindred spirits, especially in their love of gardening, and I remember Garnett as being a wise and gentle person with wide-ranging knowledge and a brilliant sense of humor.  Then -- my parents got transferred again, and they had to leave West Virginia.  And as if this wasn't bad enough, six months after they moved away, Garnett was walking home from the school where she taught and died of a massive heart attack at the age of 57. 

And once again, my mom's world closed in on her a little more.

My dad retired in 1967 and we moved back to his home town of Lafayette, Louisiana.  For a year I lived with my paternal grandmother -- ostensibly because they were in the process of building a house and the little room they rented didn't have space for me, but I think honestly it was mostly because my mom was having trouble dealing with me.  This led to another fractious relationship -- between my mom and her mother-in-law.  In retrospect, I have to admit my paternal grandmother wasn't an easy person.  I idolized her, but she and my mom never got along -- as far as I've heard, right from the start.  The fact that I preferred being with my grandmother has to have rankled.  Whatever the cause, pretty much every time they were together, there was an argument, and no matter how petty the cause, neither one would ever give the other an inch.

It was during this time that my mom developed rheumatoid arthritis, a horrible disease that gradually robbed her of her mobility, and worse, of her ability to use her hands.  Her art became less a joy than a painful frustration.  I remember her during my teenage years as being in perpetual pain.  By then, we were at continual loggerheads over just about everything.  So on top of the usual teenage angst, stubbornness, and rebellion, there was a good dose of spite in my behavior -- of my doing things deliberately to set her off.

You'd think she'd have looked forward to my moving out, but when I was looking at colleges, my parents were adamant that I attend the University of Louisiana, in my home town, live at home rather than in the dorms, and commute.  Considering my attitude, to this day I don't know why they didn't hand me my suitcase and say "good riddance" to me.  I also don't know why I didn't push harder to move away.  Having space from each other would have done all of us a world of good, I think.  But she pressed, and I caved, and in what I think is one of the worst personal mistakes I've ever made, I stayed at home while going to college.  During a time when most people are dating, partying, and forming friendships, I had a nearly zero social life.  I had some friends I saw at school; but after class was over, I went home and stayed home.  And still my mom and I frayed each other on a daily basis.

I finally moved away after graduation in 1982, because I'd met the woman who would become my first wife.  It is not an exaggeration to say that my mom and Anne loathed each other.  My mom, who prided herself on following the rules of etiquette, could barely say a polite word to Anne about anything.  To be fair, Anne was far from blameless herself; my first marriage was, in a word, a mistake, which is another topic in and of itself.  But by that time I was desperate to get out, and Anne was my ticket -- to her home town of Seattle, Washington.

Visits home were few, tense, and as short as we could make them for propriety's sake.  From the outside, everything probably looked hunky-dory -- my mom told friends and neighbors about her pride when I got my teaching license and landed my first full-time teaching position, then when my two sons were born.  But the fact remained that we just didn't understand each other, and conversations were like walking in a minefield.  By this time we were usually able to avoid arguments, largely because we rarely talked about anything more meaningful than how the boys were doing and how my job was going.

Ultimately Anne and I divorced, and a few years later, I remarried to Carol, two of the only things I've ever done that met with my mom's 100% unequivocal approval.  (I still recall that when Carol and I were dating, in 2001, she had a business trip that would take her through Lafayette, and she bravely arranged to visit my parents.  I was a nervous wreck until the visit was over -- but to Carol's credit and my complete shock, it was a resounding success.)  My dad died of a stroke on July 4, 2004, and my mom followed eight months later, on February 19, 2005.

My mom with her two grandsons in the Blue Dog Café, Lafayette, Louisiana, in December 2004, three months before her death at age 84

Thinking about my mother on what would be her hundredth birthday, I'm experiencing mixed emotions.  I feel sorry for all the adversity she faced during her life -- it seemed like fate dealt her blow after blow, and as soon as she stood up from one knockdown, she was hit again from a different direction.  I have a lot of regret for not working harder to get along with her, for not realizing at the time how much of our rough relationship was because of the emotional pain she'd endured.  I don't know that even in the best of circumstances, we'd ever have been close -- it's hard to imagine two people so different ever really understanding each other -- but I know I could have done much better, and if I could sit down now and talk with her about it, I think she'd have to admit she could have, too.

Still, we were both doing the best we knew how at the time.  Suffice it to say that in our own fashion, and to the extent we could, we loved each other.

Happy birthday, Mom.  As hard as it was on both of us sometimes, I wish I could say it to you in person.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Anatomy of a personal u-turn

Two years ago, a paper appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called, "How Personal Transformation Occurs Following a Single Peak Experience in Nature: A Phenomenological Account."  The authors, Lia Naor and Ofra Mayseless of the University of Haifa, describe the experiences of fifteen individuals who reported a sudden positive transformation in their lives -- a personal quantum leap, as it were -- that resulted in long-lasting changes to their outlook, self-awareness, mood, and well-being.

It's been known for years that a single traumatic negative experience can cause devastating damage to a person's psyche, the authors said; why, then, has so little attention been given to the potential for equivalent positive changes from single peak experiences?  The entire article is well worth reading, but one paragraph stood out to me:

The results of this study shed light on the nature of profound meaning and real knowledge, in which unconscious or contradictory aspects of self (regarding inner strength and personal potential) were discovered.  The actual moment of insight was cognitive, perceptual, and emotional, and although not lengthy, substantial knowledge became conscious that involved embracing and repossessing those aspects of the self through which new self and world perceptions were created...  [T]he concrete and personal experience seemed to validate those aspects hence perceived as authentic inner truth, enabling the participant to internalize them as integral and empowering aspects of self.  From this perspective, the experience is a step in the process of personal growth and when perceived and treated as such, may contribute significant personal knowledge to the process.

Had I read this two weeks ago, I would have been largely disinclined to believe it.  Unquantifiable, unmeasurable phenomena like "personal potential" and "inner truth" have always seemed so subjective to me as to be nearly meaningless.

Also, I've blogged before about my struggles with anxiety and depression, troubles that have been with me as long as I can recall and which probably owe their origin equally to genetics and to a home environment when I was a child that was, even putting the best face on it I can, not easy.  The idea that all that could turn around in a veritable instant would have seemed ridiculous.

But it's not.  Because it happened to me.

Ilya Repin, What Freedom! (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A week ago I attended a men's retreat called "Break Your Chains" at a local retreat center.  The weekend was led by John Aigner, a German life coach and mentor, and the informational website described it as a way of shucking old, self-destructive patterns and learning strategies for revitalizing your life.  All of this sounded good to me.  Just what I needed, actually.  I'd come across the upcoming retreat more or less by accident, and before I could decide otherwise I signed up.

However, the closer it got, the more dubious I became.  I'd been sliding into a full-blown depressive episode for some weeks, and in the week before the retreat, I came damn close to talking myself out of attending.  It was just going to be more happy-talk about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, I was sure of it, and besides, one of my issues is calling attention to myself.  It sounded like the activities during the retreat were going to be largely participatory -- little to no sitting and listening passively -- and the thought that I'd be baring my soul to a bunch of strangers, all of whom were looking at me, was somewhere between distasteful and terrifying.

But Friday came, and I couldn't think of a good excuse.  Oh, well, it was just forty-eight hours.  I'd survive.

So I got in my car and drove to the retreat center.

Out of respect for the privacy of the fourteen other men who participated, and also because John requested that we not reveal the exact activities during the retreat -- not out of any Secrecy from Non-Intitiates, but because future participants shouldn't be cheated of the surprise and delight of where the process takes them -- I'm not going to give a lot of details.  Suffice it to say it was largely about reconnecting body to mind, something I've struggled with forever; the way I've put it is that I feel like I have two brains, a cognitive one and an emotional one, and they are not on speaking terms.  The other part was about creating connections to other people, which is something else I've never found easy.

It became apparent within the first hour that if I didn't throw myself into the process, I was going to gain nothing from it.  So Friday evening, I sort of said, "Fuck it, what do I have to lose?" and pitched myself in headfirst.

And it feels like the person who walked into the retreat center on Friday afternoon is not the same person who walked out Sunday evening.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this one event solved all my problems, nor that my difficulties with depression and anxiety are vanquished.  John warned us about how easy it is to sink back into your previous patterns as soon as you're back in the old context of work, family demands, and the various distractions and difficulties that the world inevitably brings.  But something fundamental in me got knocked loose during that weekend, something that's been stuck for a very long time.  And I think -- I hope -- I'll never be quite the same again.

I'm still processing a lot of what I learned and experienced during that forty-eight hours.  I know that continuing to integrate that into my life -- not to slip backward to where I was -- will take effort.  But one of the deepest realizations I had was that whatever headway I made, I was not going to get dragged back without putting up a hell of a fight.  The constant fear and anxiety, the habit of caution and guardedness toward everything and everyone, was nowhere I'd choose to be, and if there was a way out, I'd take it even if it required a lot of work.

I'd made a u-turn, and I couldn't afford to waste the opportunity it afforded me.

I'll end with a quote from another piece of research, this one by CaSondra Devine and William Sparks of Queens University.  In their 2014 paper "Defining Moments: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Personal Transformation," from the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, they write, regarding patients who described positive transformative experiences:

The quick fixes to mask reality did not work anymore.  A way out did not seem possible, and then realization set in.  A choice had to be made between living or dying.  To choose life meant to pick up the pieces and access resources that could assist.  To choose death was to allow thoughts, guilt, shame, remorse, anger, rage, hurt, and past to consume their identity...  [The] participants... chose to live.  When [they] were asked where they would be had they chosen a different direction, they unanimously had responses that limited their quality of life.  It is my belief that the very instant that the individuals chose to live was their defining moment towards personal transformation.

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Long-time readers of Skeptophilia have probably read enough of my rants about creationism and the other flavors of evolution-denial that they're sick unto death of the subject, but if you're up for one more excursion into this, I have a book that is a must-read.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself both as an outspoken atheist and as a champion for the evolutionary model, and it is in this latter capacity that he wrote the brilliant The Greatest Show on Earth.  Here, he presents the evidence for evolution in lucid prose easily accessible to the layperson, and one by one demolishes the "arguments" (if you can dignify them by that name) that you find in places like the infamous Answers in Genesis.

If you're someone who wants more ammunition for your own defense of the topic, or you want to find out why the scientists believe all that stuff about natural selection, or you're a creationist yourself and (to your credit) want to find out what the other side is saying, this book is about the best introduction to the logic of the evolutionary model I've ever read.  My focus in biology was evolution and population genetics, so you'd think all this stuff would be old hat to me, but I found something new to savor on virtually every page.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]