Sensitive to Emotions

I think we all want to believe we are armchair psychologists. We all want to think we can read people and know what’s going on in their heads. I think we all want to be sensitive and caring individuals. But even the most caring and compassionate people sometimes forget what’s most important and they don’t realize what the people they love are going through at the moment.

My mom is an amazing human being. Thinking back over my life I have loads of memories about here – some specific, but mostly general feelings and impressions of her love for me. She was an amazing mother. I know even now that I was one of the lucky ones. She looked out after me. She cared for me. She read to me, protected me, taught me and loved me. I have maybe three or four negative memories of my mom. One of them I caused. Two of them were when I was a little kid, small. These memories are so choppy and even impossible to put into context that I can’t say how old I was. I must have been pretty small, but they are so wrapped in emotion that they have been sealed into my memory.

The first one is when my mom took me swimming. My sister was born when I was three, so unless someone came to the pool with us I had to be around that age. I remember the day was bright, and I remember that the pool was outdoors. I remember the water was cool and I remember it was that unbelievable blue, created by a combination of the tiles in the pool, the brightness of the sun and the sheen of memory. The thing I remember most of all is the sheer panic of drowning and my mothers smiling face.

I remember my mom was trying to teach me to swim. We were getting used to the pool, the water and swimming around. I’m sure it wasn’t my first time in the pool; I must have had some familiarity with water. We must have been practicing how to stay afloat, how to bring your arms out and in, out and in. because I remember my mom letting go of me. I remember feeling that sinking feeling in my chest that she wasn’t there to hold me up any more. But worse yet, I remember the actual sinking feeling of dropping several inches in the water. And where the water had been a comfortable distance from my mouth moments earlier, it was now dangerously close to my mouth, the place where air had to go into and out of, in order for me to live.

I remember my moms smiling face. I remember the sun on the water, crystal sparkles dancing across it’s surface. I remember my mom’s outreaching arms, just inches from me. And remember sucking in chlorinated water. I remember dipping lower and lower as my legs kicked furiously for the surface. I remember waving my arms like something trapped. Not in broad, easy movements like she had taught me, but like an animal who knows no better. I remember thinking, or rather intuiting, that I was going to die. There was no rational thought, only an understanding, or perhaps something at that animal level, that my life was about to end. And I remember her smiling.

I remember getting a haircut. I remember my mom and the barber talking and laughing. I remember the barber reaching through the cape and tickling me. I remember gasping for air and I remember sucking in a mouth full of hair. I remember my mom smiling.

I am sure that I was never in any real danger of drowning or of suffocating. At best a teaspoon of water went into my mouth, and even less hair. My mom was nothing if she wasn’t diligent. She would have never allowed anything to happen to me. And while I thought something entirely different was happening I was, in the greater view of things, wrong.

Neither of these incidents prove my mom was a bad mother. In fact they prove the opposite. If these are the worst things I can remember, and they really, truly are, then this woman was a saint. I tell them because I use them in my own life to remember that my perception of what is going on, may not be the perception others are having. While I am laughing and enjoying myself, others may actually think they’re about to die. I have to remember and be aware of the fact that, my view of the world, both immediate and long range, may not be shared by everyone.