You got my mother but you ain’t got me
A long time ago, when I was working through my panic attacks about having returned to San Francisco when I wanted to be in New Orleans, I started a behavorial modification course that changed my life. Panic and anxiety disorder run rampant in my family among the women, and I learned that it is highly indexed towards Jews. Lovely. One of the things I learned is if you know what is going on in your body during a panic attack, you can counter attack with some handy tools they teach you. I developed a song, it was “You got my mother but you ain’t got me, I ain’t going to live in misery.” It went on and on and I’ll spare you the rest of the razor sharp lyrics. But today when mom called, depressed, in a funk, so gloomy she hasn’t gotten out of bed for a few days, I had to pull the song out of my back pocket and sing it.
I guess it’s perfectly natural that a daughter wants her mother to be happy and healthy. Just like a mother wants that from her child. But when either are depressed, alcoholics, victims of the darkness most of the time – well, it gets a little hard to handle even if you yourself have gotten up in the morning and said your affirmations and rewired your thinking and feel like you can climb back to the top of the world with only a couple of hops, skips and jumps.
I ain’t going to live in misery.