The End of Me as The Giving Tree

Saying "No" is empowering.

Photo by Timotheus Fröbel on Unsplash

I lit my favorite candle, a sultry mix of amber, sandalwood, and vanilla. John Mayer sings about his horrible love life with a heavy blues beat and a smooth voice I find familiar and comforting. I’m happy for the first time in weeks. After coming to grips with a change in my mother’s health (and my reaction to the news) I am finding peace. My mother is transitioning to home hospice care this coming week and I’ve been feeling lost and adrift.

I thought it would be different somehow. Mom has always been there. Helping me with math homework in second grade, hemming the skirt of my school uniform, driving me to the city bus stop in high school because I had overslept the school version. She held my baby, her first grandchild, when her youngest was only ten years old.

My mother also accompanied me to the locked door of the psych ward eight years later when my brain broke open. She has been my North Star, my constant. I’ve never contemplated life without her because there was no need.

I’m a grandmother myself now but her imminent demise prompts deep reflections of being a child. It’s difficult to place my heart at sixty-three, but that’s where it should be. I’m working on inhabiting a place of gratitude that I could have a mother this long. Extricating where she ends and I begin was one of my first tasks when I started therapy thirty-five years ago. I still haven’t mastered it.

I needed schooling on family enmeshment because we’ve been tangled together from the beginning. Mom and I each have endured our share of traumas, were both born second into large families and chose traditional stay-at-home paths to motherhood.

When my father died eight years ago, I experienced a certain sense of relief. We didn’t get along well and I felt emancipated from a type of tyranny when he passed. Facing the loss of my mother is completely different. It’s going to be sad, but I have the benefit of a lifetime of memories.

It seems odd to consider my needs at this time but it’s also imperative to my mental health. For reasons I have only recently begun to embrace, I have behaved like Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” when it comes to my mom and other people in my life.

If you’re not familiar with the story, I will fill you in. A boy encounters a tree. He takes freely given gifts like shade, climbing branches, fruit and eventually the wood itself until nothing remains but a stump. When I first encountered the story, a college friend gave me a copy. I thought the tree was a complete idiot. I questioned the tree’s integrity and certainly its assertiveness. Then my friend told me the tree reminded her of ME. I felt foolish and shameful to be compared to a tree that couldn’t say no or stand up for itself.

I donated the book years ago to rid myself of the memory and deny its truth. Today I see it as a necessary cautionary tale. There are groves of Giving Trees out in the world today and if it takes a 1964 children’s book to help you realize you’re one of them, so be it. The realization my generosity was being abused and I would soon be reduced to a mere stump was quite the comeuppance.

The “give ‘til it hurts” comes from a need to be accepted and loved at a terrible cost: my self worth. It has become unsustainable and damaging to me to take care of others needs over my own.

With that knowledge, I wrap myself in a cloak of hard-earned wisdom shedding the garment of the child desperate for love and attention. I will care for my mother and myself as she winds down her life. I owe that to myself to honor her legacy as a woman of personal power and strength.

End of life caregiving is layered. It’s physically and emotionally draining. But to deplete yourself in service to your loved one is actually a disservice to both of you. As it relates to mental health, I’m at my most vulnerable to a psychotic break when I give too much of myself whether it be time or effort.

With this in mind, I will try to stay in the present moment, remember to keep consistent with my sleep hygiene, and not sign up for more than I can reasonably accomplish. I want to give freely and of my own volition, not in an attempt to be loved or garner favor.

Can you relate to being a Giving Tree? Tell me how you reforested yourself or if you’ve come to realize that lifestyle doesn’t serve you.

Let’s discuss.

Colleen aka CBD