TELL ME ABOUT IT

Hi Carolyn: I lost my dad in 2011, and my mom last month, after looking after her during a yearlong struggle with ALS. She lived near us for the last two years of her life because I thought it was important that my daughters (8-year-old twins) knew their grandma.

The strange thing is – I didn’t grieve for either of my parents. They died, and I felt nothing, except maybe relief that it was over. I could find reasons for that with my dad – he was a mostly absent, postwar father who never made time for me. But with my mom? She raised me as a homemaker and wasn’t a bad mother – she sat by my bed when I was sick as a kid (and I was sick a lot), she cooked my meals, washed my clothes and praised my school achievements. She also kicked me out at 18 when I burned a cigarette hole in the rug of my room.

But still, no abuse, no meanness, just an ambitious middle-class home where I was valued only for my academic achievements and my looks. Why don’t I feel anything? I feel monstrous.

Why is it “monstrous” of you to have cared for your mom exactly as she cared for you?

Health tended, food provided, clothes washed, achievement praised. Dutiful. That was your childhood. If you were nurtured emotionally as well, then you make no mention of it. Were you?

The absence of neglect – or of abuse or of meanness – does not take you by process of elimination to love. With the possible exception of the sickbed vigils, your description of your childhood is a loveless one. Achingly so.