Mother of the Year

Carolyn B Healy

Elizabeth Edwards slogs forward on her book tour, pundits lob shame-bombs at her, and I cultivate a growing resentment about the whole scenario. My friend Kathy and I even had a spat about her the other night. Kathy thinks she should just stop talking and toss her husband to the curb. Kathy thinks she’s pathetic. I think she’s anything but.

I’d like to talk about Elizabeth without wasting too much time on husband John. Kathy and I agree on him. Let’s just stipulate that he’s the guy you hope your daughter won’t meet. Too good-looking to have been required to develop character, although well-trained in creating and cultivating appearances. An overgrown adolescent. If you don’t agree on the last point, watch clips of his coy flirtation with the videographer he took up with. A middle-schooler lusting after the new social studies teacher wouldn’t display such leering desire. Narcissistic, arrogant. The good-guy imposter genus of the liar-cheater species of the human male. Yeah, yeah. He’s also done good works. He should have stuck with those.

Elizabeth is everywhere these days, promoting her book Resilience, and risking media saturation . So are her critics, who dump truckloads of directives at her feet about how she should feel, talk, and act. I’d like a word with those critics.

I’m a therapist, so listening to people in tough spots is nothing new to me. When I hear Elizabeth refuse to use the other woman’s name or decline to contemplate the paternity of her child, or express more vitriol for the other woman than for her husband, I don’t hear what the critics do – that she is willfully hiding from the truth, deluding herself, letting him off the hook so that she can stay in the spotlight.

Instead, I hear her stating emphatically: I’m at capacity. One more thing and I’ll crack.

Of course she’s in denial. Any healthy person would be. In fact, I believe fervently in denial. It gets a bad rap in the pop culture rush to erase all negative emotion and usher sufferers into closure, whatever that is. It’s portrayed as a thing to get out of. But not so fast. Denial gets us through what is unbearable, as well it should, and it lasts as long as it lasts, until we don’t need it anymore.

To me, the popular bromide that God never gives you more than you can handle is a dangerous lie. Tell it to the many clients I have seen swamped by tragedy yet criticized by onlookers for not responding as they would like. We are only human. We need a temporary trauma regulator, a valve that protects us from overload. Denial is that fail-safe device, part of the hard-wired security system that automatically kicks in when we are overrun by life’s torments. Take that away from Elizabeth and where is she?

Think of what she has lost. Her son Wade many years ago, and all she hoped his life would include. Her health. The loving marriage she thought she had. Her children’s security. Her future. This is about grief and only about grief.

Here’s how it works. Each new loss reactivates the ones before, and we drag all of them along with us for a time, until we can begin to reassemble a life that makes sense.

Why does Elizabeth get the rest of us so stirred up? Certainly her honesty about her medical condition unsettles us, and her blind spots about her cheating husband infuriate us. Her choice to stay married to him disappoints us, but we don’t get to prescribe how another carries out her grief.

She is living out our worst nightmares, but if we turn on her for the way she is doing it, we do none of us justice. And, speaking of arrogance, to imagine that the rest of us know what we’d do in her awful circumstance is at least naïve, and more likely evidence that we’re in denial ourselves.

Here is the elephant in the room that Elizabeth sees and her critics can’t: She is going to die and her children will have the shock of their lives – the kind of shock that will change them forever – their brains, their trajectories, security, expectations, worldview. Her death will cost them in a thousand ways. Grief will climb on board and accompany each of them through the rest of their lives.

While the opinion snipers accuse her of complicity, passive-aggressiveness and the rest, Elizabeth stays put, preserving stability for her children, cushioning them from additional upheavals. She knows that they will end up with their father, and is saving them a side trip into divorce and further trauma. She has a higher mission than pleasing her critics. It’s not that John is worthy of her loyalty, but her children are.

She is colluding – with the notion that they are a family and that John is the person she entrusts with their future. If she has to turn away from full-reality living for a time to accomplish that, to allow herself to direct her attention to the parts of her life that she can still control, so be it.

Her disease has taken away her chance to see her life unfold the way she’d hoped. So did her son’s death. So did her husband’s actions. The rest of us shouldn’t take away her opportunity to complete the things she can control as she sees fit.

There’s one more thing I hear her saying: I may not have much time. But I have something to say, and it wouldn’t kill you to listen. I’ve been places you haven’t and know things that you don’t.

The rest of us might learn something if we’d settle down and listen to her. We’ll know to thank our lucky stars that for most of us, our particular burdens right now pale in comparison to hers. We’ll know to hug our kids, smile at our partners, and locate our compassion.

CBH 05/09