before doing
Why has it taken me so long to read Winnicott? I am finding much comfort in moments of recognition.
It was when we were attending a family wedding in Napa that I knew, with certainty, that my first marriage was over. I remember the bright light streaming in through the windows of the charming cottage we were staying in, how everything outside was washed golden. It was afternoon, before the required activities and appearances had begun. I was stretched across the wide bed reading a book called Motherless Daughters. My own mother had died a few years before, and I saw myself, my deep grief on every page, in every sentence. I knew it before I could speak it, that this marriage, this makeshift raft I was clinging to, that I had been clutching for the last four years, had done all that it could do, and it was time to let it go.
The rest of that weekend is such a blur. What I know of it, I know only from a few photos. I wore a lavender dress. I walked through a field of tall grasses. The light was golden.
Winnicott:
It is possible to show that in some people at certain times the activities that indicate that the person is alive are simply reactions to stimulus. A whole life may be built on the pattern of reacting to stimuli. Withdraw the stimuli and the individual has no life. But in the extreme of such a case, the word ‘being’ has no relevance. In order to be and to have the feeling that one is, one must have a predominance of impulse-doing over reactive-doing.
On the drive to the airport, I remember only one moment. It was when I reached out and placed my hand over his and asked, “Is this what you want, too?”
It all went easily and well — the uncoupling — until it didn’t. But that was all such a long time ago.
It’s so strange to be able to look back over so many years, so much life, to wonder how it all happened, where it all went. All those days and years. All the striving and wanting. Who was I then? What did I think I wanted? I was, I think, a reaction machine. All strutting and fretting.
Winnicott says, "Be before Do.”
Be has to develop behind Do. Then eventually the child rides even the instincts without loss of sense of self. The origin, therefore, is in the individual’s genetically determined tendency to be alive and to stay alive and to relate to objects that get in the way when the moments come for reaching out, even for the moon."
