All About my Mother of a Daydream

A rough week at work led to a short break for daydreaming toward the end of my shift tonight. Recently, daydreams tend toward thoughts about my mom, who died last month. Tonight’s catalyst was “Manuela,”  the name of the woman on the other end of the phone.

Enter (brain right) another “Manuela,” this one played by Cecilia Roth in Almodovar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Toward the end of the film Manuela comes face-to-face with Lola, the baby daddy (now baby mami — it’s Almodovar, after all) of their son, who dies near the beginning of the film, so I can skip the spoiler alert.

Lola’s past actions and Manuela’s pain have led us to expect a confrontation marked by anger, rage, and hatred. Instead, there is calm, peace, and acceptance, although not reconciliation, since there is nothing to reconcile.

Anger is an abandoned possibility. Manuela would not choose to hate, and she understands that a person must decide to be angry. Anger, she has learned, does nothing for those you love, including (especially?) your own damn self.

Back to the then present moment, I opened up a web-browser to check my Facebook newsfeed. Cabby Dave had written a thoughtful post, “A Dishonorable Man,” about an easy target for the Madison Left, Dick Cheney. Scanning  the post’s comments, I jumped to the words of Rebecca, my friend, life coach, and coworker:

Wishing an asshole like Cheney dead does, in fact, commit spiritual violence, which is why it’s a self defeating wish that plunges the wisher into his world. Not a world I want to be part of.

Whereas pain can be inflicted,  anger is an emotional state we enter by choice, usually but not always a bad one. My job is filled with moments where understanding this can make the difference between comfort and exasperation.

My own mother, however, would have freely admitted she did not teach me this lesson. She would sometimes revel in her anger, refining it to a point whereupon she was clearly having fun, such as that time when out of nowhere and with great pride she announced during her last Thanksgiving dinner that she hoped Rick Santorum would someday “get caught fucking his cat.” (I think he preferred talking about “man on dog,” but whatever.) My mother was more like Manuela’s friend Agrado, who ruffled her costumes until they were real. She had fun faking it til she was making it, having learned to love it by the time she succeeded.