As my little family soap opera continues to unfold, abate, get dull and tedious, then recycle, many people are sharing their own stories of adjustment with their grown children. One reports that her kids like her but hate each other, which is painful but probably not as painful as it might be if they, like mine, had bonded over their dislike of her. Another says her kids aren't on drugs (probably), but in their twenties, one with a child, and all still living with her. She feels ambivalent about the household, but loves the granddaughter and is glad she's there. One tells me that I was the mother she always wanted to be, that her kids didn't finish college, and she likes them okay, but really depends on her friends for diversion, support, connection. She says my kids, and I, should be goddamned grateful that they're educated, healthy and have JOBS, and they should stop whining and I should stop caring if they do.
My friend Cathy tells me that the only time she ever hit her kids was when the younger, ruder one was 18, and she slapped her, hard, across the face. Cathy has never forgotten it, but has never for a minute felt guilty about it. Those of us who have lived with teens understand the impulse, and I'm a little envious. I wish I'd had the nerve to do something like that when confronted with unspeakable rudeness and disrespect. I might -- MIGHT -- not be in the spot I'm in today. I told Cathy how she was a kind of hero to me, and she told me the story of her next door neighbor -- it's a cautionary tale.
When the neighbor's kids were teens they were unbelievably snotty to her. It was relentless and steadily worsened over time. Cathy remembers feeling terribly inadequate because the neighbor mother was unfailingly loving and patient with the little bastards, ignoring the slights and insults, always encouraging and rewarding their occasional good behavior, while Cathy was short-tempered and, finally, see above, physical when one of her kids mouthed off to her.
Finally all the neighborhood kids left home, and one evening, after the neighbor's daughter had been arrested in Argentina on drug charges and then released and deported back to the US, the girl went on Nightline to talk about it, and to say that the whole incident was her mother's fault. The neighbor's son, after being sprung from drug rehab for the nth time, came to his mother's house and tried to kill her when she refused him money for more drugs. Failing in the matricide, the kid ran to his father's house (father had divorced the mother when he found a younger version of her) for sanctuary, and his father, a lawyer, waited three days before turning him in.
Now, my mother urged us always to take the high road in relationship squabbles, and I am doing my level best to proceed as she would have, but I gotta say tales like that one give me pause. Not that any of my kids are completely nuts like that, but there are times....
And another friend this morning said what's up? I'm not supposed to be thinking about them anymore. I can only say it's got to be a process, that it doesn't begin and end with a decision. I'm thinking in terms of a wound -- a skinned knee for example -- that scabbed over too early and became pussy and inflamed; it takes a while, and a lot of antibiotics, topical as well as systemic, to fix it. The Chinese say we heal from the bottom up and the inside out, so just getting the pus out is a major accomplishment. I haven't yet found the appropriate, metaphorical antibiotic cream.
Too much? Sorry, but the metaphor seems apt this morning.
---
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
The 9190.8km morning hike: HUT HUT HUT
All right, boys and girls; let's leave the gore for a bit and try to focus on today's lesson: Connection across space, over time. Last week, while getting ready for her adventure in Vienna, Mary said that her pre-trip anxiety had more to do with distance than time away from home. If there's an emergency here, she can't get back to help easily or quickly; she worries that I'll not be able to handle Things -- the present family psychodrama while grinding out daily chores -- and I have had some concerns about that as well.
Besides that, she knows that the sudden immersion in a different culture makes for disorientation and a certain sense of having cast oneself away: Where is home? Who am I when I'm not at home? Where are my loved ones, and will they love me still, now while I'm so far away and later when I get home, altered by these strange circumstances?
In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a big, fast ocean liner, changing my clock every night when I retired, and so I had time to adjust psychologically and physically as readily as I did chronologically. After five days of clock- and body-resetting, a day in Cherbourg, a night on the English Channel, then a couple of days in London (after a hellish train ride up from Southampton), it all seemed like tourism, "going abroad" as it was probably experienced by the upper classes for several centuries before air travel. I enjoyed the whole thing, and while I missed my home, I felt the connection to it, solid, waiting, welcoming.
Today I rest inside that home and my connection with Mary (who soars at 35,000 feet at the moment) feels more secure than my own feet on my own floor. True, I'm still trying to find my way through some tattered relationships, to get back inside myself, to act initially and continuously as if I'm going to be fine until I truly am fine. (That formula really works, by the way, and if I can just keep it going, it shouldn't take too long to accomplish.) Irrespective of distance, then, connection is sustenance; and we can communicate readily in any number of ways (viz. those poor children on the streets of Tehran, Tweeting as if their lives depended on it, blazing their cell phone videos around the planet). I am sustained, fed, supported, encouraged, loved -- I can feel it. It thrums along some kind of invisible fiber optic channel; it practically catches me in the middle of a stumble, lifts me and sets me squarely on my feet again.
I guess I can go ahead and crash around the house, weep or sleep depending on what needs doing; my healing is not arrested, not even postponed -- it continues regardless. It's heartening, and I thought you all ought to know about it.
---
Besides that, she knows that the sudden immersion in a different culture makes for disorientation and a certain sense of having cast oneself away: Where is home? Who am I when I'm not at home? Where are my loved ones, and will they love me still, now while I'm so far away and later when I get home, altered by these strange circumstances?
In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a big, fast ocean liner, changing my clock every night when I retired, and so I had time to adjust psychologically and physically as readily as I did chronologically. After five days of clock- and body-resetting, a day in Cherbourg, a night on the English Channel, then a couple of days in London (after a hellish train ride up from Southampton), it all seemed like tourism, "going abroad" as it was probably experienced by the upper classes for several centuries before air travel. I enjoyed the whole thing, and while I missed my home, I felt the connection to it, solid, waiting, welcoming.
Today I rest inside that home and my connection with Mary (who soars at 35,000 feet at the moment) feels more secure than my own feet on my own floor. True, I'm still trying to find my way through some tattered relationships, to get back inside myself, to act initially and continuously as if I'm going to be fine until I truly am fine. (That formula really works, by the way, and if I can just keep it going, it shouldn't take too long to accomplish.) Irrespective of distance, then, connection is sustenance; and we can communicate readily in any number of ways (viz. those poor children on the streets of Tehran, Tweeting as if their lives depended on it, blazing their cell phone videos around the planet). I am sustained, fed, supported, encouraged, loved -- I can feel it. It thrums along some kind of invisible fiber optic channel; it practically catches me in the middle of a stumble, lifts me and sets me squarely on my feet again.
I guess I can go ahead and crash around the house, weep or sleep depending on what needs doing; my healing is not arrested, not even postponed -- it continues regardless. It's heartening, and I thought you all ought to know about it.
---
Friday, June 26, 2009
Field Work
Okay, here's today's lesson in the cursillo entitled Connection 101-544; this time it's practical application, field work, if you will. Remember in the last post I told you about the slap in the face as you get off the bus at boot camp? Today we're past that and on to the shaving of the head and donning uniforms that don't fit (yet).
My children and I have agreed on a trial separation. We are all of us very familiar with the steps toward mending or abandoning a broken relationship, and we proceed in order. It doesn't matter, for the sake of this exercise, the nature of the presenting issue; it doesn't even matter what each of them has to endure for his/her own growth process (since I can't do anything about it), and the less I know about what they might be going through (or not!), the better off we all are.
And THAT'S because I am retiring as Mother. I know, I know, I should have retired long since; all but the baby are in their40's, for God's sake, and the baby is racing towards that milestone herself. I should have abandoned them to their own resources years ago. The problem is that today, this morning, I'm not so sure I ever really fit the MotherMold as generally thought of, so it's possible that I have to paw through all the detritus of this dynamic even to figure out what I'm leaving behind.
I've pretty much been making up Motherhood from the start, since I have no younger siblings and therefore could not follow my own mother's excellent model for how to love them, civilize them and not kill them (or myself -- a distinct and frequently-occurring possibility) in the process. Their father, whose mother died tragically when he was fourteen, didn't have a model either, except for his own father, whom he chose not to emulate except when on automatic pilot, and that emulation was unhearing, uncaring and often brutal. Furthermore, any rule books we might have studied for help were cast away -- if not burned along with the bras -- in the sixties and seventies, so the old standards were not only not followed, they were to be eschewed. That left us -- all parents, single or not -- on our own, and most of us had relocated far far away from our extended families, who could have helped with all the gratuitous advice we so hated when living in each others' pockets. Cruel irony, that.
By the evidence at hand, I've done okay Mothering my kids: none of them is on drugs, none has been arrested (well there was that time when one of them slugged a neighbor, but the neighbor richly deserved it, so I'm not counting that; oh, and those little shoplifting peccadilloes during a troubled adolescence -- let's not count that either); they all graduated from college, they are all employed and functioning, even contributing, members of society; and three of the four are in therapy. (Wait, is that a good or a bad indicator of the quality of their Mothering? That has got to be a whole 'nother blog....) Two have divorced (and paid the price for it, so it's a good if painful thing); they enjoy each other's company, finally, and are even sweet and generous and careful of each other; they're all really funny, which has saved them (and will again) in hard and scary times.
So, my ad hoc method of Mothering has worked as far as my obligations to society are concerned, i.e., once having given birth to the little savages, I managed to civilize them. They may even have civilized themselves, but at the very least I didn't muddy the process with, say, alcoholism or addiction to smack, that sort of thing.
Okay, so I fit the MotherMold in terms of results, but not so much in terms of throwing myself whole-heartedly, selflessly, even gratefully, into the job of Child-Rearing. Not having any rules, and embarking on Motherhood at the age of 19, I never knew if I was measuring up, or if the kids were, for that matter, until each was safely launched. I never learned how to play with them, for example; their father did that (thank God), by wrestling and shooting hoops and taking hikes, etc. I felt too painfully the onus of taking care of business, like the laundry or the cooking or the nursing or the bathing or the shopping or the education, all of it for four children, and I always felt I came up short. It was a JOB, and one I never felt I was very good at, therefore I didn't feel I could take the time or energy to enjoy it, even if I knew what that meant, since I was always having to buckle down.
ANYWAY, I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I'm damned if I know what they were, and I've been too guilt-ridden to ask any of the kids. I do know that I worked hard and constantly to get it right, I never didn't do the best I knew how. Since the children have grown and gone, I have connected with them mostly from a position of sorrysorrysorry, craven and crawling, begging for crumbs of attention. My God, we do teach people how to treat us, and my reward has been entirely appropriate to what I thought I deserved.
Gotta change that, gotta find a new way to connect -- or choose not to -- with my kids. In 1989 I was driven to figure out how to live my life in full without a live-in male; it took years, but I figured it out, and have even come to enjoy the company of men again. I'm hoping this cursillo won't take as long to learn; I'm running out of time.
It seems obvious that, if I'm no longer the Mother of my kids, then we have to determine if there's any OTHER reason to sustain a relationship. That will have to happen with each one of them, with different criteria, 'cause if I'm not Mothering then I no longer have to treat them equally, right? Of course right.
My children and I have agreed on a trial separation. We are all of us very familiar with the steps toward mending or abandoning a broken relationship, and we proceed in order. It doesn't matter, for the sake of this exercise, the nature of the presenting issue; it doesn't even matter what each of them has to endure for his/her own growth process (since I can't do anything about it), and the less I know about what they might be going through (or not!), the better off we all are.
And THAT'S because I am retiring as Mother. I know, I know, I should have retired long since; all but the baby are in their40's, for God's sake, and the baby is racing towards that milestone herself. I should have abandoned them to their own resources years ago. The problem is that today, this morning, I'm not so sure I ever really fit the MotherMold as generally thought of, so it's possible that I have to paw through all the detritus of this dynamic even to figure out what I'm leaving behind.
I've pretty much been making up Motherhood from the start, since I have no younger siblings and therefore could not follow my own mother's excellent model for how to love them, civilize them and not kill them (or myself -- a distinct and frequently-occurring possibility) in the process. Their father, whose mother died tragically when he was fourteen, didn't have a model either, except for his own father, whom he chose not to emulate except when on automatic pilot, and that emulation was unhearing, uncaring and often brutal. Furthermore, any rule books we might have studied for help were cast away -- if not burned along with the bras -- in the sixties and seventies, so the old standards were not only not followed, they were to be eschewed. That left us -- all parents, single or not -- on our own, and most of us had relocated far far away from our extended families, who could have helped with all the gratuitous advice we so hated when living in each others' pockets. Cruel irony, that.
By the evidence at hand, I've done okay Mothering my kids: none of them is on drugs, none has been arrested (well there was that time when one of them slugged a neighbor, but the neighbor richly deserved it, so I'm not counting that; oh, and those little shoplifting peccadilloes during a troubled adolescence -- let's not count that either); they all graduated from college, they are all employed and functioning, even contributing, members of society; and three of the four are in therapy. (Wait, is that a good or a bad indicator of the quality of their Mothering? That has got to be a whole 'nother blog....) Two have divorced (and paid the price for it, so it's a good if painful thing); they enjoy each other's company, finally, and are even sweet and generous and careful of each other; they're all really funny, which has saved them (and will again) in hard and scary times.
So, my ad hoc method of Mothering has worked as far as my obligations to society are concerned, i.e., once having given birth to the little savages, I managed to civilize them. They may even have civilized themselves, but at the very least I didn't muddy the process with, say, alcoholism or addiction to smack, that sort of thing.
Okay, so I fit the MotherMold in terms of results, but not so much in terms of throwing myself whole-heartedly, selflessly, even gratefully, into the job of Child-Rearing. Not having any rules, and embarking on Motherhood at the age of 19, I never knew if I was measuring up, or if the kids were, for that matter, until each was safely launched. I never learned how to play with them, for example; their father did that (thank God), by wrestling and shooting hoops and taking hikes, etc. I felt too painfully the onus of taking care of business, like the laundry or the cooking or the nursing or the bathing or the shopping or the education, all of it for four children, and I always felt I came up short. It was a JOB, and one I never felt I was very good at, therefore I didn't feel I could take the time or energy to enjoy it, even if I knew what that meant, since I was always having to buckle down.
ANYWAY, I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I'm damned if I know what they were, and I've been too guilt-ridden to ask any of the kids. I do know that I worked hard and constantly to get it right, I never didn't do the best I knew how. Since the children have grown and gone, I have connected with them mostly from a position of sorrysorrysorry, craven and crawling, begging for crumbs of attention. My God, we do teach people how to treat us, and my reward has been entirely appropriate to what I thought I deserved.
Gotta change that, gotta find a new way to connect -- or choose not to -- with my kids. In 1989 I was driven to figure out how to live my life in full without a live-in male; it took years, but I figured it out, and have even come to enjoy the company of men again. I'm hoping this cursillo won't take as long to learn; I'm running out of time.
It seems obvious that, if I'm no longer the Mother of my kids, then we have to determine if there's any OTHER reason to sustain a relationship. That will have to happen with each one of them, with different criteria, 'cause if I'm not Mothering then I no longer have to treat them equally, right? Of course right.
- One of them might love me, but there's more a sense of obligation to me than love freely given; I like that kid, but we've never hung out with the same lack of expectation that I have with my closest friends.
- One of them has never really connected with me -- all our contact has either been out of obligation -- weddings, graduations, etc., or at my insistence, or because something was needed from me, like a free night's room and board in Atlanta on the way back from an exotic island; that couple came and went in the dark, so a relationship with me probably wouldn't survive the cold light of day.
- One of my kids can barely control active and visceral loathing for me -- in fact doesn't bother controlling it most of the time; I don't hold out much hope for a connection there.
- And the other kid I've come to love in a very clear and accepting way, probably because we had The Talk years ago, and because I tried to help during a very painful divorce. I think we enjoy each other's company; I have the most optimism for this one, even though I caused pain in the last presenting episode. I've been forgiven before, and I hope to be again.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Uh Oh
Starting today we will be treated to three months of boot camp in the mine-laden field of connection through communication. Lesson one will be the slap in the face as soon as we get off the bus, i.e., in order to get with the program, we must first be punished for NOT having connected well already. "How does it feel to be disconnected, you feckless piece of chopped liver?" "Not good, Drill Sergeant, SIR!" Fall in. The last time I had a lesson in connection was in 1989, the year that the love of my life left me for a younger woman, I went bankrupt, my sister died, and the 7.1 Loma Prieta Earthquake epicenter occurred a mile from my house. You'll excuse me if I'm a touch paranoid on the subject of connection; I learned, God knows, but the lesson was brutal.
Here's what I know so far about connection:
We cannot connect by intention or by design. That's why manipulation doesn't work: you KNOW there's an agenda at work here and it ain't yours.
We can only connect with love:
That's about all I can come up with by intellectualizing, and the intellectual process is merely scratching away at the front gate; rarely does it give one any headway in an emotional or spiritual problem.
I sure could use some help here, my friends. Anybody have any ideas?
Here's what I know so far about connection:
- It's the whole reason for living.
- A life well-lived depends not on what you do, but on whom you know, and it applies on every level, from the most money-grubbing and mundane in service of our baser desires, to the quest for intimacy, to pure enlightened compassion.
- The order of connection is: with Self first (save yourself, love yourself, use the dropped-down oxygen mask yourself before offering it to that squirming screaming child in your lap); then with Other (lovers, children, friends, etc.); and only then with God. (I wonder if the order is set up like that because the only way to God is to love self and then love the other? If you take the cut-through, over the hedges and cyclone fences, across Mr. Dobbeck's lawn, it isn't real? Food for thought. As if I didn't have enough already.)
- Connection begins and continues through the Heart chakra; connection at other chakras is not True Connection, it is merely a matter of convenience or the resolution of karma. (One must not confuse karma with connection -- the drive to reconcile karma may SEEM like connection, as in, "This is my soulmate, I'm just SURE of it!", but that's the drug of karma resolution. True Connection is compassionate, not impassioned.) Obsession is one example of connection NOT at the heart.
- Connection is what you get when you love.
- Love is what you get when you connect.
We cannot connect by intention or by design. That's why manipulation doesn't work: you KNOW there's an agenda at work here and it ain't yours.
We can only connect with love:
- Love beyond recollection (that must be the forgiveness thing);
- Love beyond vision (I don't quite understand that one);
- Love beyond judgment (judgment is almost the opposite of love, certainly it blocks connection);
- Love beyond quality (love is not good or bad or tainted or pure, it just is);
- Love beyond condition (well, YES -- mother love is an example of that, I suppose);
- Love beyond expectation (expectation is massively troublesome, always); and
- Love beyond reciprocation (I think I get THAT one, after all these years -- if you only love hoping for reciprocation, you really are screwed).
That's about all I can come up with by intellectualizing, and the intellectual process is merely scratching away at the front gate; rarely does it give one any headway in an emotional or spiritual problem.
I sure could use some help here, my friends. Anybody have any ideas?
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