LOVE & LOYALTY: WHO IS THE FINAL ARBITER?

LOVE & LOYALTY: WHO IS THE FINAL ARBITER?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 28, 2009

“No disguise can long conceal love where it is, nor feign it where it is not.”

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1630 – 1680), French courtier and moralist

“Among the faithless, faithful only he: among the innumerable false, unmoved, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, his loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.”

John Milton (1608 – 1674), Paradise Lost

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Some years ago, my mother and sister had quite a spat. Both were very controlling personalities with little give in their respective gives. My mother chose to treat my sister as still a dependent although my sister was quite independent and successful in her own right. My mother also chose to see her daughter as a possession because she was her birth mother and that gave her rights in perpetuity that were irrevocable. Her daughter was allowed to be an individual and private person only on terms that were comfortable for her, the mother.

Unfortunately, my sister could see through my mother’s schemes and self-deceptions. She not only refused to play along with them, but also would remind my mother that she had been found out, which to my mother’s mind was tantamount to betrayal.

My sister saw it differently. And so the war between the two fine ladies grew more intense through the years, but now, for some reason, it had reached the point beyond which there was no return. It made little difference that my sister was a mother and grandmother. The little give they once shared was now totally gone.

At this point, my mother knowing I was devoted to them both, got me on the horn, and said, “Jimmy, I’m at my wits in with your sister.”

She then went into a well-rehearsed litany of crimes and misdemeanors my sister had committed against her with dates, times and the quality of the aggravation. At the end of this diatribe, she said simply, “You have a choice to make my son (something she never called me always calling me Jimmy), either you choose to love me only, and reject your sister, or I’ll never speak to you again.”

Although used to being an arbiter in these forays, as the histrionics were quite predictable, it was obvious my mother had gone beyond “no man’s land” into another dimension of hostility.

“Do you know what you are asking of me mother?”

“I know exactly what I’m asking of you. You have a choice to make. You can no longer hide behind all your learning and big words and expect to get out of this with sweet talk. Fish or cut bait!”

She had never fished in her life nor had I so that came – while we are in metaphor – from left field.

“Mother, that is exactly the point. I have a choice to make as to whom I love and to whom I am loyal. No other person on God’s green earth has the right to make that choice for me. I belong to no one, mother, not to you, not to my wife, not to my children, not to my friends, not to my employers…”

“Will you stop it? I get the point! So who do you choose, your mother or your sister?”

“Mother, sometimes you can be quite exasperating.”

“I told you, no big words, who do you choose?”

“Mother I am not your possession. I’ve never been your possession. I choose who to love and who to be loyal to, not you.”

“If you say so,” she came back just as defiantly, “so quit stalling, whom do you choose?”

“Well, mother, I choose to love and honor you as long as I live, and I choose to love and honor my sister as long as I live. I am loyal to you and I am loyal to my sister, and nothing on earth will ever change that.”

My mother hung up on me, but called back the next day from Iowa to where I was living at the time, Louisville, Kentucky, as if nothing had happened the day before.

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