i just used up half of my allotted cell hours earlier this evening on a phone call with my mother. most conversations typically end with me being jacked up emotionally one way or another but right now i'm not sure what i'm feeling.
the short version of my history with my mother:
- it's always felt like it's always been more about her than me. that she perceive herself to be a good mother regardless the actual impact on me;
- i've seldom received any sort of response from her that gave me any assurance that anything i've ever said has been comprehended. i thought we'd gotten past that to a large degree based on an event i've blogged about previously, but it seems that my mother's mind is slipping a bit with age, so when you add that to the language barrier and my natural inclination to try to be really precise in my choice of words when the subject matter is especially meaningful to me, plus the natural cultural conditioning to take things personally, things really haven't improved all that much;
- i've been conditioned to believe that it's been inappropriate to voice any sort of needs that could be seen as an imposition not just on her, but of others as well. this comes primarily from one moment in my childhood which i may elucidate further, but i'm still in the middle of deprogramming my thinking right now, but in some ways it ties in to everything else;
when it comes to dealing with people who make it about themselves, i've come to learn that the healthiest thing to do is to effect boundaries around them so as to limit their influence on you, in this case yet without disobeying the biblical command to honor one's parents. i've been really challenged in this because it's extremely unnatural for me to try to listen to someone who apparently doesn't hear anything i say.
maybe i made a breakthrough tonight; after i don't know how many attempts to paraphrase things, it occurred to me to express it as follows: "this is what i understand: when i say something, and then you say something that has nothing to do with what i said, the only thing i understand from that is that you weren't listening to what i was saying, especially when the answer was in what i just said. and that makes me really angry." i don't know for sure if my mom understood exactly what i was saying, but there was a release in being able to say what i was feeling.
as i think about it now, it occurs to me how much i've suppressed in deference to my mother's shortcomings and sense of inadequacy about that. oh, i suppose i might as well go and talk about the bedtime story.
having watched shows such as dennis the menace & leave it to beaver, my world view was that it was normal & american (though i didn't think of it quite that way at the time - the american part, that is) to be read a bedtime story. so when i was 7 or 8 years old. i asked my mom to read my a bedtime story.
my mother's schooling had ended when she was 9 when her father (the village schoolteacher) died. that and 3 months of ESL was all the schooling she'd received, and she was very aware of her lack of education and was worried about her ability to read a story for me. but i persisted, and some 45 minutes later, she'd managed to stumble through the three little pigs. she was in tears, as was i. all i could remember was that i'd wanted something that came at such a cost to my mother even though she'd done the best that she could and so i projected all that shame onto myself and became extremely self sufficient. (plus i believed that i was somehow wrong and twisted for wanting something that would come at such cost - more on that later) not only was she under-equipped to be the kind of mother a precocious kid like me needed, i chose to try to minimize reminding her of that in any way. not that i was actually that good at it. all that suppressed anger oozed out of my pores 24/7 when i was younger.
at first i thought i had responded mainly by making few physical demands, but i now see that i'd allowed myself to be held hostage by her sense of inadequacy and her conditioning to take everything personally to not express my feelings about things for fear of her taking it the wrong way and making her feel bad about herself. but tonight i felt like i expressed my frustrations in a healthy way that did not project guilt or shame and i wasn't concerned about primarily about her taking what i said in the wrong way.
my mom didn't say much to that so i continued by saying that i was trying to be as open and honest about my feelings as i could, and that i didn't know what else to say.
if this was as cathartic as i suspect it might have been, i'd expect my snark level to be noticeably lower for a while. the problem is that i feel drained, and i have so much stuff to get done.
