What If You Never Agree on What Happened?

My mother says we had a happy home. I remember my father’s temper, and her going quiet in the kitchen while he shouted. I am forty-one. We have not had a real conversation in five years, because every one of them ends at the same wall. I describe something. She says, “That never happened,” or, “You were always sensitive.”

I have told her I cannot come back until she admits it. She says there is nothing to admit. Do I keep waiting?

Radhika, I believe you about the kitchen. I also think you may be waiting for something that is not coming. Those are separate matters, and I want to keep them separate.

Two accounts, both sincere

The sociologist Karl Pillemer once went with a man in his fifties to visit the mother he had not seen in twenty-five years. Pillemer interviewed her alone. She described a decent home that she had worked hard to hold together after a first husband left. Afterwards he sat with her son and daughter. They described a harsh stepfather and a mother who looked away and told everyone that things were fine.

Each side used the same word for its own account. Reality.

From this and many similar interviews, Pillemer drew a conclusion that he counts among the most important in Fault Lines. A major barrier to reconciling is the urge to make the two versions of the past line up.

Why the versions will not match

Memory is selective, and we build our memories into a story. Pillemer cites the psychologist Robyn Fivush, whose work shows that such stories are more than a record of events. They carry motives, judgements and a sense of who we are.

Your mother’s story has a heroine too. She is a woman who kept a family going in a difficult marriage. To accept your account, she would have to give up her own. People seldom do that at seventy.

Does that make your memory wrong? No. And this is the point I most want you to take from the book. The people who reconciled did not abandon their version of events. They stopped requiring the other person to sign it.

The apology that does not arrive

Pillemer makes a sharp observation about apologies in long rifts. People are rarely asking for an apology for one act. They want an apology for a whole childhood, which amounts to an apology for being the person one is. Almost nobody can give that.

So the reconcilers changed what they asked for. They stopped looking for words about the past and looked for behaviour in the present. One couple simply spent time with his parents when the parents behaved well and withdrew when the old sarcasm returned. They asked for no apology. The behaviour changed.

There is a curious finding here as well. For several people the apology did come, later. One daughter had dropped her demand and resumed seeing her mother. Some months on, over an ordinary dinner, her mother began to cry and said she wished none of it had happened. The daughter’s view was that her mother could only say it once they were back in each other’s lives.

Build something that is not in the history

If the past is closed as a subject, what do two people talk about? The reconcilers’ answer was to make something new. A mother and daughter who had said terrible things to each other signed up for a three-day weaving course. Two sisters who had fought over an estate took to visiting a casino once a month and playing the cheapest machines. They hardly spoke of the estate. Slowly they had other things to speak of.

Where the past can go

You still need a witness. It does not have to be the person who was there. One woman in the book reconciled with a sister who thought their father had been wonderful. She did not agree and never will. She decided that if the old pain troubled her, she would take it to a counsellor and not to her sister.

Pillemer closes the subject with a line from the philosopher Kierkegaard, which I will paraphrase. We make sense of a life by looking back at it, and we can only live it in the other direction.

Letting go of agreement is not the same as pretending you were not harmed. If what happened to you was abuse, you do not owe anyone a reconciliation, and a counsellor is the right first witness.