My sister left dinner last night in a huff. The family was having an odd, random conversation, sparked by the fact that my mom has lost a bit of weight since last fall which she chalks up to the fact that she walks my dog when I’m out of town. It’s a decent guess; he gets about two hours’ total walking a day, split between a long midday walk of an hour or so and several smaller walks in the morning and evening. Since I’m out west every other week for my son, plus random travel in addition to that, she does get a lot more walking now than she did before I moved back to Maine. That, plus eating healthy and my mom’s usual routine of cleaning everything in the house twice a week, probably has meant she’s slimmed down. Not alarmingly so by any means, but she’s the fittest non-triathlete mom I know.
In any event, my sister said that my mother was walking too much; apparently my dad’s physical therapist recommended 30 minutes of exercise at a time at the maximum, and the dog’s midday walks are clearly exceeding that. Mind you, my sister avoids exercise like the plague, so any guidance from a licensed medical professional that sets a limit on exercise would meet with her approval. She told my mom that she needed to limit walks to 30 minutes at a time because the extra exercise was bad.
I basically told her that was balderdash. I said that the physical therapist would surely endorse Mom’s exercise routine. My sister then somewhat abruptly said she wasn’t going to be accused of lying, that she had had enough of my insults, and left. She kissed my dad, told my mom she’d be thinking of her tomorrow for Mother’s Day (although Mom didn’t get a kiss), and pointedly said goodbye to my dog but ignored me.
After a few seconds passed, I asked my parents if I had accused my sister of lying. No, my dad said, you just asserted your position without any room for exception. You do that a lot, he said. You’re apodictic.
Adjective
apodictic (comparative more apodictic, superlative most apodictic)
1. Incontrovertible; demonstrably true or certain.
2. A style of argument, in which a person presents their reasoning as categorically true, even if it is not necessarily so.
Don’t be so apodictic! You haven’t considered several facets of the question.
3. (theology, Biblical studies) Absolute and without explanation, as in a command from God like “Thou shalt not kill!”
Yes, he’s right: definition two is a good way of stating how I tend to engage in (or rather, obstruct) constructive discourse; at the very least, it’s the rut I fall into when I’m not being mindful of better and more open ways of approaching discourse. I fall into it painfully often with my sister, who has an uncanny ability to use two forms of argument which annoy me more than anything else: appealing to the authority of experts, especially experts not present in the discussion (in this case, the physical therapist), and asserting moral authority in conflicts in which she has nothing at stake (really? how is my mother walking too much bad for my sister?). That latter technique is a bit apodictic itself, ironically. Those kinds of supports for a given position generally trigger something in me, and I’ll start forcefully asserting positions of my own – I’ll even, and this happens more than you might expect, assert positions with which I disagree entirely but which are opposed to the authority of experts or disagrees with an uninvited moral superiority. If pressed, I’m not worried about backing up my assertions – my entire schooling and my father’s training have shaped me into a willing debater on any subject – but the effect on constructive discourse is, shall we say, not helpful.
It was, however, helpful to have that pointed out by my father, and my parents and I started talking about how I had inherited different ways of thinking and discussing contentious issues from each of them. As such conversations will do, the topic ended up dissolving into a general discussion of who we are as people, how my sister and I came to be the people we are today and the mystery of how we came from these two very different people, my mother and father. And after several minutes the topic of my mother and father came to occupy center stage.
I’d lost my apodictic edge at this point – in fact I had probably lost it in the seconds after my dad made his declaration, as the truth of it set in and as I reflected silently on conversations where that side of me emerged in all its force. I listened to my mother and father play verbal tennis, the topic now settling in more specifically on my mother and her style of discussion. One thing that had happened just prior to the meltdown on exercise times was that I had cleared the table and had started to load the dishwasher. My mom forcefully told me to stop, that she wanted to do the dishes so that they would be done “correctly”. My father brought this up as an example of how my mother has a drive towards the perfect which inevitably disappoints her: she struggles to react to a kindness with kindness, unless that act of kindness meets her standards, and other people become more or less aware over time that that judgment of whether the kindness was “proper” is always lurking in the background. Mom defended herself, pointing out that when I load the dishwasher, the dishes are never as clean as when she loads it – it’s a simple observation of fact, in other words. I quizzed her on this – I can’t tell the difference, and as the son of a cleaning perfectionist, I think I have a pretty good eye for dishwashing – but she held firm. And my dad, loving the humor of it all, pointed out that my mother was ably proving his point.
At this point my dad reminded my mom of an earlier comment, that he loved her dearly and these quirks were part of her. Having been married to her for nearly forty-nine years, and with eighty years of wisdom, he’d adjusted by simply pulling back, not trying to help with cleaning unless specifically asked to perform a specific task at a specific time. His son, being young and much less intelligent, still persists in trying to help with things like the dishes or the laundry, but my father in his sage old age had learned to let that go. I love you unconditionally, he said, and that also means loving the parts of you that sometimes might show disappointment in my efforts. But I can adjust, I can compromise; he said that that was simply what it meant to love.
Mom appreciated this, but then went back to defending her cleaning. She asked my father whether this was something he saw elsewhere. Given a direct question, my father gave a direct answer: yes, judgment is a key part of her being. Her best friend does a strikingly good impression of my mom in this regard, which he reminded her of, and said it’s one of those things that really defines who she is. Chiming in – or piling on, depending on the perspective – I pointed out how this had been a problem with several of my romantic entanglements. You came to be seen by each of my partners as a kind of dark lord of judgment, I said, and instead of that being taken poorly, my father wholeheartedly agreed, and added that judgment was, really, the usual leading edge of how my mom approaches situations. I pointed out that nearly every woman I’d been involved with long enough to meet her eventually came to fear her judgment, sometimes to the point of tears.
My mom shrank a bit at this. She asked my father if this was what he saw in her. He said yes, of course. She got a little quiet and said, well, if that’s what you see in me, I don’t know how you could love me.
This struck me hard. I had had this conversation before with someone else.
My father sat back a little and said, you’re forgetting what I said earlier. I love you. Unconditionally. Every day I’ve been on this earth with you has been better than it would have been otherwise, because of you. Even on days where you judged me, when you’ll judge me in the future, I love you and I recognize the depth of your love. You sometimes ask for perfection and you hurt yourself when you do that, because as long as I love you the way I do, there’s really almost nothing you could do to hurt me. I don’t ask for perfection, he said, I just simply release myself into loving you.
And you do the same with me, he added. Which is why every day I have been with you has been better than it could have been without you.
But how can you see me in that light, she asked, as a dark lord of judgment, and still love me? He smiled quietly and said, well, you asked me if I saw you as a judgmental person. You didn’t ask me for the full portrait. That is a very different question.
I started breathing again. That wasn’t how the conversation went when I had had it.
I get another part of my discussion style from my father. My father has been in enough lawsuits, as any independent businessman will, and has had enough adversarial interviews that he learned to answer questions directly as posed, and to not assume you know the context until that context is explicitly revealed to you. He trained me on it, to the point where I found being deposed came naturally; lawyers have repeatedly told me that they love having me as a witness because I need very little coaching, generally speaking. But there’s a dark side to it when the technique falls into conversations of understanding. Understanding requires full disclosure; it requires opening up more fully than you think is strictly necessary because understanding has no limits. Even as we find ourselves understood in a moment, we will change and our partner in conversation will change.
My father had answered a direct question from my mom – am I that judgmental? – directly. But he knew enough in a conversation of understanding to look to what was central to understanding him, and my mother, and their relationship. It isn’t built on the fact that they like one another’s personalities, or appearance, or dreams. They love some of that in each other, not entirely though and certainly there have been times where they have been frustrated with different outwards aspects of the other. But those outward aspects change every year; expecting to be aligned on those is a folly. Their relationship is built on an unconditional love for each other, regardless of what doesn’t mesh. A full release – my father used that word several times last night, calling his love a full release into the person of my mother, with nothing held back, nothing held back or grasped onto out of fear for what would happen through that full act of release. We both, he said, have loved one another as we are, without fear of the sides of ourselves which are imperfect. There are adjustments, sure – he doesn’t wash the dishes much anymore – but she makes adjustments too, probably more than he does, and they are simply the natural gifts and blessings of that unconditional love.
The dog – who knows all of this instinctively – snored quietly under the table.
I told them how lucky they were, and how fortunate I felt – and I know my sister feels – to have been raised in the presence of their love, to be given their example. I told my mom that I had inherited some of her debating style, true, but I had also learned from her the simple grace of loving another person entirely, and how that enabled her to love her children, their pets, their friends with the same openness – and no little amount of unhelpful judgment, true, but fundamentally, to love. I sometimes wish I had less of the apodictic edge, and I’ve learned to let go of the judgment (at least, most of the time), but if the gift was to learn how to love fully and without reserve, than it was more than worth it. I’ll have to deal with the rough edges, but we all have to do that.
We then talked about other people, some of whom seem incapable of taking that jump into the unconditional, others who resist it, who hold onto their conditions for love so tightly that they lose all sight of it, decide not to love. And we talked about cleaning, and tick season, and the dog shedding his winter undercoat. My mother asked if I had been smoking out of the window in the garage, and I said yes, I didn’t want to disturb them with opening the front door late at night. She said she could tell because the curtains weren’t straight. I told her I’d work on my technique in the future. She hates my smoking – truly judgmental, although one has to agree with her, I have no arguments in my favor other than “I enjoy it” – but I had the impression that the mussed curtains were an even greater source of disappointment. But we laughed at the comedy of it all.
I sat in bed later that night, listening to the Mariners win the second game of a make-up doubleheader on the radio, reading essays and ordering books on Amazon for an upcoming trip, and savored the evening. For a long time, my parents didn’t have a conversation like that in front of me. For a long time I probably wasn’t willing to hear them, as it was too difficult to compare their love for one another with what I had in my life. But for a few years now, they’ve relaxed. Maybe it’s their age, impending mortality making any pretense seem pointless, but I’d like to think that it’s because I’m able to understand it now. I think that is the case. They are both born teachers: they instruct, but if the student doesn’t appear interested, or is defensive, they defer. They wait to be asked, or for signs to emerge that you’re ready to listen. And then they reveal the entirety of the lesson, and help you to change your life because of it.
I took the rest of the dishes off the table, placed them neatly and simply in the kitchen by the sink, and then put away the table linens. My mother said I had done a very good job clearing the table. The dog got up and stretched and started shaking his collar, signalling that it was time for his nighttime walk. Dad started his slow, painful, step-by-step struggle to make it up the stairs and into his armchair for the night. I asked him if he was okay; he said no, but continued moving on. I put on my jacket, pocketed my cigarettes and some poo bags and a leash, and walked out the front door with the dog as my mom started rinsing off dishes in hot soapy water, preparing to place them – properly – in the dishwasher.