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Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

Never Let It Rest
By ADAM SOKOLOW

  Adam Sokolow
  Adam Sokolow
Senior Advisor

When she was only 5, my mother, along with her four sisters, was sent off to a Jewish orphanage after her mother died and her father married a woman with her own young children. It was during the Great Depression, and my grandfather, a man of artistic temperament and modest means forced to focus on his own welfare, believed there would have been too many mouths to feed, so he abandoned his own five daughters to the Jewish Federation. My mother always told me that life at the orphanage had been good: her new home was a grand old building nestled in a bucolic, tree-lined section of Germantown, Philadelphia. Living in community, she felt cared for and protected and was easily able to make new friends. With a little ingenuity (she intentionally took a job in the kitchen, so she was always able to abscond with a little extra food), there was always plenty to eat, at a time when she knew many less fortunate children outside the orphanage often went to bed hungry. Sadly, after a few years of settling into her new life, my mother experienced another shocking loss: her younger sister Sarah, who was her best friend and constant companion, died of bulbar polio.

When my mother finished high school at 18, it was time for her to leave the orphanage. Around that time she met my father. He came to the orphanage in a car with two of his buddies for a blind date with my mother and two of her friends. My mom tells the story this way: “Our three dates arrived at the orphanage courtyard in a car; I couldn’t see their faces, so I said, ‘Simon, please get out of the car and stand in front of the car’s headlights so I can see what you look like!’” She must have been pleased with what she saw, and he also, so they began seeing each other. Not long afterward she told him, “Simon, my sister Ann thinks we should get married.” My father simply said, “Okay!” They had a modest wedding ($10 extra for the musicians) and within a few years my older brother, Steve, and I were all part of my mother’s dream-come-true real family.

Unfortunately, when I was about 5 years old, another bolt of life-altering lightning struck my mother for a third time. My father, wanting to provide for our family, had started a wholesale fruit business with a close friend. All was going well until one day he tried to pick up a crate of fruit that was just too heavy. His back dislocated and he ended up in the Naval Hospital. The doctors told my mother that there was nothing they could do—he would never walk again! It would be best, they told her, if she just left him there at the hospital. Without hesitation, my mother declared, “Simon, you’re coming home with me!”

It wasn’t just his back that was broken; under the strain, his mind was shattered too. I remember the blankets hanging over his bedroom windows so the light wouldn’t bother his eyes; I remember being told to be quiet because the noise upset his ears; I remember the moans that woke me in the middle of the night.

Imagine, if you can, what it was like: My mother, who as a child had lost her mother and been abandoned by her father. My mother, who as a little girl had lost her dear sister. My mother, as a young lady with two young boys to care for and her husband paralyzed, gazing at me, her 5-year-old child, with an incredible protective intensity, annealed from love lost and reclaimed, singing sweetly, “Good better best, never let it rest! Till the good is better and the better is best!” My dear mother never, not once, conveyed a moment of fear; she held me fast in her story: that everything was going to be just fine. And I clearly remember thinking to myself at that time, “Okay, Mom, I’ll never let it rest! I’m going to help you make ‘the better best’.” Thus began my first long-term life project, for I became her ally to hold together and protect her dream-come-true family.

It wasn’t easy for any of us, but through the healing powers of my mother’s will to love, my father regained the use of his legs and was again able to refocus his mind on the necessities of providing for our family. But he didn’t come through the experience unscathed—my father had changed. Before the accident he had always greeted me with a genuine smile and picked me up and played with me. Afterwards he seemed wounded; his smile was replaced by a scowl both distant and inscrutable. Everything I did seemed to annoy him. He ignored me, and when I tried to get his attention, he would often say off-putting things like: “Whatever!” and “Who gives a shit?” Sometimes, when it really got bad, my mother would back him off, saying, “Cy, you stop that!” To me, she became his interpreter: “It’s not you! He’s still hurting inside. Your father really loves you, but he just can’t show it.” As my mother’s ally, I was bound to accept what she told me, and we were able to keep the peace at home as best we could.

This must have been the formative time in which the seeds of my interest in depth psychology were planted, for I had to precociously deal with the fact that things were not as they appeared to be. My father always seemed angry, and yet somehow he loved me? Yes, I was my mother’s ally, but could I discern for myself the truth of what she was saying to me? To do this, I had to learn how to see beneath the surfaces of things. What’s more, if what she said was true, as her ally I knew that I had to figure out how to help my mother repair my father’s broken smile.

It was not until I was studying psychology on a graduate level that I serendipitously came across a possible solution to my perplexing problem in a book titled Iron John, by Robert Bly. Bly, a poet/storyteller/shaman/psychologist, shared what he had learned through his difficult experience with his own father. Simply put, he illuminated an alchemical key for unlocking the barred door between sons and fathers, namely: Sometimes it is necessary to reverse everything that we had expected. When we are able to embody our solution, our problem will lose its power over us. When Bly finally gave up expecting his father to do the right thing by him, in a flash of alchemical insight he was able to convey to his father all the things that he wished that his father would have expressed to him. By reaching out, in essence, he, the child, became the healing father to the wounded child within his own father.

Consequently, after more than 20 years of uncomfortable estrangement, I reached out to my father and wrote him a letter illuminating all the things that we had in common, such as: both of us had good minds with a very high mechanical aptitude (he worked as a tool designer, creating large industrial machines; I worked as an architectural designer and builder). I also observed that both of us were good with our hands and physically adept at sports. I went on to say that unless things changed between us, it would be a shame that we would never get to know each other. And I closed by saying that I liked him and wanted to get to know him better. And, just as Robert Bly had modeled for me, my father responded in kind, asking me questions about myself that he had held in suspension ever since I was a teenager.

By accepting my mother’s healing words—“He loves you, but he just doesn’t know how to show it”—I had always been able to remain connected to the emotional image of the father I knew before the accident. Guided by Bly’s insights, I became like Bly: a spiritual alchemist determined to help my own father return to who he really was. Over time I observed my father slowly transform back into himself, and by the time my brother’s two grandchildren reached out to him, and I saw him playing with them the way he used to play with me, I knew everything was going well.

     I now live in New York City, and my parents live in Florida; every Sunday when I call them my thoughts invariably wander to how much better things are now. Just a few weeks ago I was happy to hear my father tell me (just one month before his 94th birthday) that he had pitched his softball team into first place; my mother (as usual) told me that I was very precious to her and to stay well and stay happy. But beyond that I can always hear something special in the tenor of their voices that reveals to me that they are both strengthened and at peace that our family has remained close over so many years.

All of us are looking forward to storytelling, hugs, and smiles when Pop Pop Cy and Char Char—as my brother’s grandchildren, Gabrielle and Sebastian, are wont to say—return north this coming summer to celebrate my father’s birthday. As for me, in my reflections I feel a quiet pride that “I never let it rest, and made the better best,” by succeeding as my mother’s ally—in making her dream family come true.


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