Never Simple by Liz Scheier is the memoir of a woman who grew up the daughter of a mother who had borderline-personality disorder. What this meant for her was that her life was built on lies. It meant her mother could be volatile, violent, big-spirited, sassy, and creative. It meant Scheier had to consistently walk the line between figuring out what she owed her mother- and what she didn’t.
There was a quote that I found particularly poignant about complicated love. (Insert spoiler alert here.) Here is the excerpt:
The rabbi had gotten across, succinctly, everything I had said to her the night my mother died. She had tried her best, but because of her hard life, and because of her illness, her best had not been enough. I wanted to get across that two opposing things can be true. She was a chaos monger, and she had brought much of this trouble on herself, and also she was a sick, vulnerable old woman to whom terrible things happened in the last few months of her life. It’s easy to think of reaction to abuse as binary: you’re under the abuser’s thumb, or you cut them off. But that’s not always how it goes. You can still love someone who caused you a lot of harm. You can want to protect them from some of the shittier things the world throws at them. It is really, really hard to know where the line between enabling and rescuing is, especially when mental illness is at play. Friends from normal families would shake their heads when I told them about her worse days and ask why I didn’t just cut her off, that she would fend for herself, that I was being codependent.
Maybe I was. But it wasn’t so easy for me to know where to draw that line. She shrieked at me hysterically on the phone for hours on end and also she didn’t have money for rent; she lied about who my father was and also she was in pain, physical and psychic, every day of her life.
Now that I have my own children, I see how much of her best my mother did. She tried. She gave me what she could, and she protected me from everything she could, and she loved me with all her heart. But love doesn’t solve everything. It isn’t even always a net positive. Love is like alcohol: it takes what you are and exacerbates it. If you live from crisis to crisis and from anger to fury, that’s what your love tastes like.
But: she tried.
I thought about that service a lot in the days after the burial. Organized religion takes a lot of guff for being, well, organized. The standard prayers, repeated verbatim, are criticized for being rote and irrelevant. But I found the lack of personalization very comforting. The service is all about God, and assumes nothing about the people receiving the prayers, or about their relationship to the deceased. As she had instructed, I didn’t give a eulogy, and no one expected me to cry, although I did.
The burial service acknowledges the passing and the change of death without any sop about the perfection of the mother-daughter bond or the perfection of the deceased. These words had been recited by millions before me, said with love and with anger and with grief and with weariness and with indifference. They assume nothing. They leave room to grieve a person and grieve a relationship, separately. I, Nechama Gila, daughter of Tzena Fayge, put my mother in the ground. Not her beloved or loving daughter, not her unconflicted, adoring or mourning daughter. But she had conceived me and carried me and gave birth to me, sweating and screaming, sixteen floors above First Avenue. Say what you will about the rigidity of tradition, but it gave me a framework to work from when I had no idea what to do or how to feel.
-pages 255-256
There was so much about this excerpt that spoke to me. Perhaps most of all, this segment:
Love is like alcohol: it takes what you are and exacerbates it. If you live from crisis to crisis and from anger to fury, that’s what your love tastes like.
But: she tried.
And also the piece about how organized prayers were so comforting and helpful for her. There was a process and a ritual to enable her to bury her mother that did not involve her having to put on a show and claim that she was entirely loving towards her. There were words that had been said for centuries and she could find herself among them.
I find organized prayer difficult - I always prefer to pray in my own words. But I understand the value, resonance and comfort it brings others, and it’s helpful for me to be reminded of that.
Never Simple is a work that documents a woman’s struggle- pure and simple. Her struggle to figure out a life of chaos, a life of lies, a life with a mother who could be compelling but other times frightening. Some of the passages are breathtaking. There are others that I would have cut if I had been the editor. But overall, it’s a solid, moving read, and a testament to what people can endure- and how they can keep on going.