Read Oprah’s Favorite Chapter from Her New Book Club Pick, “Bittersweet”
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One of my earliest memories: First afternoon of kindergarten, age four. I’m sitting at a kidney-shaped table, coloring blissfully. Yellow Crayola for a bright sun, green for the grass below, between them a blue, blue sky. I glance up, and there’s my mother, standing with the other moms at the back of the classroom, waiting to take me home. She smiles her loving, endlessly patient smile, and I fill with joy. To me it’s as if she wears a halo encircling her curly red hair. To me it’s like being picked up from school by an angel, and following her home to the Garden of Eden.
Throughout my childhood, she was like this: ready after school with a dish of chocolate ice cream, happy to chat about fourth-grade social life, always present with a gentle joke or, when things went wrong, to soothe tears. My siblings were much older; my father was a medical school professor who worked long hours. I loved them dearly, but my mother was everything. Did a better, more loving mother exist anywhere on earth? That would have been impossible; all my friends said I was lucky to have a mother like her. She made chicken soup and pot roast and lit candles on Friday nights. She rarely raised her voice, except to encourage things I said and wrote.
She had taught me to read and write when I was three. I soon claimed the floor under the card table as my “workshop” and there, crouched beneath the tabletop, produced plays, stories, and magazines on lined paper stapled together. We didn’t know, back then, that this act of writing would tear us apart. And I didn’t know how complicated my mother actually was.
She was an only child; her own mother had been very ill throughout my mother’s childhood, lying in bed for years, facing the wall. What would it have been like—what might it do to you—to see your mother’s back turned, day after day, year after year? My mother was convinced that she’d done something horribly wrong to make her own mother so sick—and tormented by an insatiable desire to be seen.
My mother’s father was a rabbi—loving, wise, and twinkly; extremely devoted to his daughter—but mired in heartache. In 1927, at age 17, he’d come from Eastern Europe to Brooklyn, on his own, to get married. Only a decade later, when my mother was five, he’d called her to the radio to hear Hitler speak. “Listen, Mamele” (meaning “little mother,” in affectionate Yiddish), my grandfather told her as the führer’s clipped, stentorian tones invaded their narrow sliver of a dimly lit kitchen. “This is a very bad man. We have to pay attention.” Soon the bad man had killed his mother, father, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins back in Europe, every single person he ever known and loved. In public, my grandfather lived a vibrant life dedicated to his congregation. At home, the air in their one-bedroom apartment was heavy with his sighs.
The tragedies that surrounded my mother became part of her; later, they became almost all of her. She was consumed by feelings of fear and unworthiness. But she managed to hold them at bay when I was a child. Looking back now, I see the signs of what was to come: how she panicked if I wandered steps away at the supermarket; how she forbade many normal childhood activities—climbing a tree, riding a horse—that she deemed too dangerous; how she said that she loved me so much that she would, if she could, wrap me up in cotton. She meant this as an expression of love. I understood that it was also a prison sentence.
From an early age, we also stood on opposite sides of the fault line of religion. My mother raised me as an Orthodox Jew—no driving, TV, or phone calls on Shabbat; no McDonald’s, no pepperoni pizza. But it never stuck. One of my earliest memories is surreptitiously watching Scooby-Doo on mute on Saturday mornings; another is eating bacon—profoundly unkosher, deeply delicious bacon—on a school ski trip. This was partly because my family was a confusing grab bag of influences: on the one hand, my beloved grandfather the rabbi, and my mother the staunch loyalist; on the other hand, my father, a tacit atheist whose gods were clearly science and literature. Also, I was a born skeptic. To this day, if you say “X,” I automatically think: “What about Y?” As an adult, this tendency is intellectually useful (though sometimes it drives my husband bonkers). As a girl, I couldn’t see why we should keep kosher in the name of a God I doubted was real.
But the real conflict between my mother and me didn’t start until I was in high school, when the minor restrictions of childhood gave way to an ironclad code of chastity: No suggestive clothing. No unsupervised time with boys, ever. My mother even watched as I got my hair cut, chastising the hairdresser if he styled the angles too provocatively. Theoretically the rules were religious and cultural in nature. But their real function was to serve as an anchor to keep my ship docked in my mother’s harbor. When I followed the code, the ship rocked gently in her lapping waves. When I deviated from it, her gale-force anger tore us both to smithereens.
By American standards of the 1980s, I was polite and responsible and a little too straitlaced. But invariably I would break the rules—wear the wrong clothes, make the wrong friends, attend the wrong party—and panicked, hostile accusations would follow. Waves of anger, floods of tears; days, then weeks, of stony silence. During these wordless eternities, it was as if all love had drained from my soul. My stomach churned; I couldn’t eat. But the weight I lost was nothing compared to the emotional hunger—and the guilt I bore for making my mother so sad.
My friends were bewildered when I reported these conflicts, and the depths of my reactions to them. To them I seemed, and probably was, the most rule-abiding girl in school, got the highest grades, didn’t smoke or do drugs; what more did my mother want? Why don’t you just say you’re sleeping at my house, they would say, if we wanted to stay out late one night. They couldn’t understand that my mother and I were so close that she could read my face more accurately than any lie detector test, or that the rules in my house were different from theirs, that to break them was not to commit an adolescent transgression but to destroy my mother’s fragile psyche. That if only I would do the right thing, my mother, whom I loved more than anyone and anything, would be happy again. And so would I. Since neither of us could stand being separated, after each traumatic rupture, we always reconciled; the nurturing mother of my childhood always returned to me. We would hug, shed a few tears; I would lower myself gratefully into her warm bath of love and comfort. With each reunion, I believed the war was behind us. But it was never behind us. Over time, I learned to mistrust the ceasefires. I started to approach our house after school with a stomachache, grew skilled at gauging her mood the moment I entered. I felt I mustn’t do anything to upset her equilibrium or trigger her rage. I became more aware of her childhood sorrows and of her present, gaping maw of emptiness. I started to dream of escape—of the day I’d be free of her.
But I also longed to stay. She was still my mother. And I wanted desperately, more than I’ve ever wanted anything before or since, to fill the chasm inside her, to take away her hurt. I couldn’t think of my mother’s tears—which I often caused— without crying myself. As the youngest child, I mattered so much to her, I mattered too much, I mattered like the sun. To grow up was to condemn her to darkness. Back then, I still believed that there must be a way out of this conundrum, that somehow, if I did everything right, I could find a way to be myself and still make her happy—the way I’d once done so effortlessly, during my Edenic childhood.
All through college, the telephone in my dorm room linked me inescapably with my mother. At first when it rang it was merely incongruous: her voice on the other end, beaming in from the distant planet of childhood. She wanted to know if I was happy, she wanted to know if I was adhering to the code which, of course, required saving your virginity until you married one of your own. Uneasily I weighed these rules against the strapping young men at school who devoured bacon cheeseburgers after crew practice. To my mother, it went without saying that such classmates were off-limits. But to me they were irresistible.
My mother sensed all this; she was sure I’d get pregnant, ruin my reputation, and die of AIDS before graduation. As freshman year wore on, she felt every inexorable step of my separation from her. She became increasingly distraught, the way you would if you truly believed that your daughter had agreed to be devoured by a monster. If in high school we’d followed a repeating pattern of separation and reunion, now the mother of my childhood had simply vanished. In her place was a vengeful woman who telephoned daily with accusations of malfeasance, who stood for hours at my bedroom door during college vacations, threatening that if I didn’t “wise up,” she’d pull me out of school so she could keep an eye on me. I was terrified, not so much by the loss of the degree as by the prospect of living again under my mother’s watch.
Had she been struck down, at that time, by a 10-wheel truck, or a swift and incurable disease, I would have been one part relieved and three parts devastated; and for this there would have been funeral rituals, there would have been a language for the pain, a way for others to understand it. As it was, it never occurred to me to mourn her. Who would think to grieve a mother who was pulsatingly alive and daily appearing, Gorgon-like, at the other end of a dorm room telephone?
Instead, I confided my shameful desires in my journals, filling notebook after notebook. I wrote that I loved her but also hated her. I wrote in excruciating detail about all the forbidden things I was doing at college. I wrote of my dawning realization that the mother I adored—who adored me—was not dead but gone, and possibly had never existed in the first place, that I was motherless in some existential way. In short, I recorded all the things I couldn’t tell her in real life, because I knew that to share them would have been emotional matricide. And in this way, I made it through freshman year.
And now we come to the part of the story that you might have trouble believing. All these years later, I can’t believe it myself.
It was the last day of the school year. For some reason I can’t recall, I needed to stay on campus for a few extra days, but to send my belongings home. My parents arrived to help with my bags; we greeted each other in my empty, echoing dorm room. I felt ill at ease, that my parents didn’t belong here, which only reminded me that neither did I.
The car loaded, we said goodbye. And that’s when it happened. Without having planned it, without conscious awareness of the implications: I handed my diaries to my mother. Handed them to her! Unthinkingly, as an afterthought! I asked her to take them home for me—for safekeeping, I said. For safekeeping, I believed. The story I told myself, at that pivotal moment, was that she was still the angel of my childhood, the mother who would never do anything wrong, like read someone’s diary. Even if that someone handed her that diary…for safekeeping.
But of course, upon handing her that stack of notebooks, into which I’d inscribed the story of our great love and its traumatic unraveling, I’d chosen to sever our relationship. It’s painful for any parent to hear what their teenager really thinks of them. For my mother, it must have been unbearable. As indeed she testified, when I got home the following week and she stood at my bedroom door, holding my journals and miming a guillotine blade across her neck. I felt that she was right; I felt that I was, in some psychologically true point of fact, my mother’s killer.
Childhood will always end; but these weren’t the ordinary pangs of adolescence. For the decades after I gave my mother my diaries, we still talked on the phone, still saw each other at holidays, still said “I love you,” and meant it. But she haunted my dreams, appearing in different guises as a sometimes menacing, sometimes fragile protagonist to whom I was yoked, someone I loved yet longed to escape. In waking life, we circled each other, warmly but warily, many of our conversations still fencing matches best concluded quickly. I didn’t trust her, and she didn’t trust me. I learned to keep my distance, to have stronger boundaries, to understand our not altogether uncommon situation, in which the parent tells the child that she can be herself or be loved but she can’t be both, in which the child believes that if only she agrees never to grow up, she’ll be loved forever. Often, the child conspires with this agreement. Until, one day, she doesn’t.
It took me a very long time to forgive myself for breaking my end of the bargain. It took me even longer to do, emotionally, without a mother. But I learned to deal with the sequela of having grown up this way: my tendency to avoid conflict, distrust my own reality, defer to others with stronger opinions. There was one me who marched to her own drummer, who followed her own true north, as I’m constitutionally inclined to do. And there was the other me, who surfaced during times of discord, who assumed that other people’s interpretations of events must be correct and should naturally trump mine. I’ve come such a long way; I’m still working on it; I will always be working on it.
But for a very long time, even after my life had moved on and even soared, even after I had a home of my own, a family of my own, in so many ways the vibrant life I’d dreamed of as a child, even then I couldn’t speak of my mother without tears. I couldn’t even say a simple thing like “my mother grew up in Brooklyn” without crying. For this reason, I learned not to speak of her at all. The tears felt unacceptable; it made no sense to grieve a mother who was still alive, even a mother as difficult as mine. But I couldn’t accept the chasm between the mother I remembered, who’d been my greatest companion, champion, and love, and the one I had now. Yet that childhood mother—if she’d ever existed in the first place—had walked away with the diaries I handed her on the final day of freshman year, and it was, for all intents and purposes, the last I ever saw of her.
I’m telling you how I loved and lost my mother, but not because of the particulars of my story. Your stories of love and loss—of bitter and sweet—are different; I’m acutely aware that they might be much more traumatic (but hopefully less so) than this. But I decided to share this story because, whether you consider it a small loss, in the scale of the world’s sufferings, or a big one, because mothers represent love itself (as we just discovered from Darwin and the Dalai Lama), I know that you’ve lost loves of your own, or you will. And it took me decades to understand the events I just described, let alone to heal (mostly) from them. Maybe I’ve learned something that could be of use to you.
We’re taught to think of our psychic and physical wounds as the irregularities in our lives, deviations from what should have been; sometimes, as sources of stigma. But our stories of loss and separation are also the baseline state, right alongside our stories of landing our dream job, falling in love, giving birth to our miraculous children. And the very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it’s not.
What are you separated from; what or whom have you lost? Did the love of your life betray you? Did your parents divorce when you were young, did your father die, was he cruel? Did your family reject you when they discovered your true sexuality, do you miss home, or the country of your birth, do you need to hear its music to fall asleep at night? How are you supposed to integrate this bitter with your sweet, how are you supposed to feel whole again?
To these questions there’s an infinity of answers; here are three.
One: These losses shape your psyche; they lay down patterns for all your interactions. If you don’t understand them and actively work to form new emotional habits, you’ll act them out again and again. They’ll wreak havoc on your relationships, and you won’t know why.
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Two: No matter how much therapeutic work you do, these may be your Achilles’ heels for life: maybe a fear of abandonment, a fear of success, a fear of failure; maybe deep-seated insecurity, rejection sensitivity, precarious masculinity, perfectionism; maybe hair-trigger rage, or a hard nub of grief you can feel like a knot protruding from your otherwise smooth skin. Even once you break free (and you can break free), these siren songs may call you back to your accustomed ways of seeing and thinking and reacting. You can learn to block your ears most of the time, but you’ll have to accept that they’re always out there singing.
The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.
You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet. But we can’t have one without the other.
My mother told me constantly, ever since I was a child, that the days my siblings and I were born were the best days of her life, and I believed her. I still believe her. Everything is broken, everything is beautiful—everything including love.
Susan Cain is the author of the bestselling books, Bittersweet and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which has been translated into 40 languages. Her TED talks have been viewed over 40 million times.
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