Nobody can bring the baggage you carry from your mother to the surface like a sibling.
My sister and I hadn’t seen each other in a … while. And it’s okay, we’re not a close family, and I was the pesky baby — and a caboose to boot — so we never exactly bonded as kids. I wasn’t a kid when my siblings were, I was a baby, and then when I was a kid they were getting on with their lives, and for a lot of years those lives were in Los Angeles, so we really didn’t know each other much. We were more like cousins.
But when my sister and I do get together, we don’t waste any time on small talk or pleasantries. We dive headfirst into what we’re processing, into what revelations have rocked us and what the hell baggage we most recently discovered that we’ve been pointlessly carrying around because our mom was … our mom. She did the best she could, mostly. We were not neglected physically. We had plenty to eat and the house was almost disturbingly clean.
But.
It’s not my aim to air the laundry here. (It was my mother’s laundry so, it was the cleanest dirty laundry in history.) I’m here to talk about examining our pasts and letting things go. Looking at the stupid crap our parents did that wounded us because … they just didn’t know. Humans do not come with instruction manuals, and some of the after market instruction manuals have been horrifically bad. But bless the folks for trying to get some help at least.
You have to have a sense of humor about this stuff.
My sister and I met for lunch, and before the appetizers even came, we were in it. At one point, she said, “I don’t want to blame Mom for all my problems, however …” Yep. Same, same, same. And we laughed so hard about all of it. We both have our triggers and our programming and our well rehearsed reactions to things. We both have behaviors that have been written into the marrow that usually we never even think about – but when we do, dear lord. You just have to laugh. You just have to say, “Okay, thanks Mom, but this is yours, not mine, and you can fucking keep it.”
I had girlfriends when I was young who used to say, “Oh, I tell my mom everything, she’s like … my best friend!” and I would just stare at them and think, “I can’t and won’t tell my mom anything. Ever. Because she will use it.” I don’t have any way of relating to the people who miss their moms every day, or wish they could have one more day with her. I don’t feel any of that. I’m not “glad” she’s dead, I didn’t hate her, but she and I were tuned to utterly incompatible frequencies, and that really never changed. It got better as we both got older, but I still kept my rule that I could never tell my mom anything significant about my real life. And I never did. And I don’t regret that, at all. We weren’t close, and that’s fine.
Part of the value of being an adult is being able to look at this stuff with the perspective of experience. My mom had some issues, she was controlling and manipulative and passive-aggressive, lord lord. But, adult me says, she was a polio survivor and for years had virtually no control over her own body, like zero body autonomy. She spent some time in an iron lung, and even more time in a wheelchair, and in the 1940s neither of those were encouraging places to be. She spent years fighting to defy expectations and crush the opinions of doctors who thought they knew what her life was going to be. And using her wits to get her way over those who had it easier than her. And never ever letting anybody take pity on her or feel sorry for her for one second. Some of this is admirable. Some of this is bloody-minded stupidity. But most of it is bad role model material.
She used to get so frustrated with me, and she’d say, “Why do you have to be such a rebel?” (like it was a bad thing). To this day I hate being told what to do, or when to do it, or that I have to do it somebody else’s way. I can’t deal with it. I’m the world’s worst employee because of it. But I finally figured out that working for somebody else wasn’t going to work for me, because I unconsciously projected Shirley onto every boss I ever had, and had to rebel and had to create stress and tension, because that was the program, that was the pattern. I started working for myself because I couldn’t seem to change that internal paradigm. And these have been the best years of my life in large part because I haven’t been striving for approval while rebelling ridiculously. Oh, it’s a strange dance, but I know all the steps. So thanks, Mom, for making me the world’s worst employee, because now I work for myself and it’s the best.
It’s never-ending, but so worth doing.
Somebody said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Amen, dude. (We know it was a dude because nobody ever wrote down anything women ever said. Or if they did, they claimed it was Socrates or some shit.) Becoming conscious of your motivations, of your triggers, of your baggage; sorting out what is yours and what is your mom’s or your dad’s or your gran’s; it’s essential work. I’ve been consciously unpacking that stuff for a while now, more in the past ten-or-so years than before, and I feel more “me” than I ever have. Part of that is indeed the maturation process – but a big part of maturing is sorting out what we are still carrying from our parents versus what we have grown into over the years, and being dispassionate enough to say, “Well, jeeze, mom, this is total crap, it’s outa here,” and “okay, that is useful, thank you.” It’s alchemical. We put our lives into the alchemical furnace in order to break them down and boil off the impurities, and distill what is left into something fine and rare. The process can suck. It can make you angry, resentful, regretful, sad, and depressed. But it can also make you lighter, calmer, softer, easier, and gentler. And sometimes it covers both extremes at one time and you feel like you just got hit by a truck. But when the storm passes and you’re left with what’s truly, authentically, honestly you, it feels so good. It feels like a renewal, a rebirth, even a do-over sometimes.
Maybe you were lucky and had a mom that wasn’t a hot mess, who didn’t have unrealistic expectations and a judgmental streak ten miles wide. Treasure that, because it is rare and wonderful. I do my best to love the memory of my mom, but I’ll probably never get past the frustration and resentment that was my ground state from the time I was about six years old until she passed away in 2011. But when I had my own child, I tried hard to not repeat the behaviors that I found so challenging and difficult when I was growing up. I’m not a controlling person; I don’t want the responsibility for every damn thing ever to sit squarely on my shoulders. I have enough trouble just managing to get me into real pants and comb my hair in the morning.
I honestly used to think I was a willful, terrible daughter. It’s certainly what I was told, so often that I believed it as much as I believed I was too fat or not enough take-your-pick else. Now, with the perspective of experience and understanding, I realize that I was reacting to her doing the best she could and being just as lost as I was. I was reacting to her need to have control over something, and when her own body wouldn’t cooperate, she focused on mine. She was never happier than when I was sick and she could control every morsel of food that went into my mouth, and I had no choice but to lie there in bed and read and be good (okay, full disclosure, I am to this day never happier than when I have license to stay in bed all day with an endless supply of books).
See what time and perspective can do? Don’t be afraid to look at this stuff, to dig in and revision the shittiness that is childhood. We put shit on plants to make them grow, but it has to be processed into something useful first. No crap, no crop, as the Druids say.
