Tag Archives: mother trouble

Working up to the letter

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Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

Where is the balance?

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I am having a whole lot of feelings. I am feeling out of sorts and off balance. I feel like I usually struggle with the intensity of spring–that’s a whole thing. But I have additional things weighing in. I am still in my feelings about my mother in law. I need to figure out how to word a deeply emotional appeal to her that is about shaping our relationship going forward. We have been in a much better spot for a while and I want to continue that but I also need some boundaries. The past couple of months have involved a flurry of advice. I’m not great at advice. This is going to be hard. I have to describe myself in a way that has weight and intensity without sounding overly controlling or fierce because this is all stuff I need her to want to do and it is a departure from her normal wants and that’s a big sell.

I am struggling with some friend dynamics. I have put a ton of energy into out of town stuff that has since fallen through and that is causing a major crash emotionally. I have different energy for starting, middling, or ending projects. I used a lot of start energy only to have it fizzle out, which is deeply demoralising. It makes it really hard to push forward on starting energy in other parts of my life. I have so much that I need to be starting that it is creating a really terrible loop in my head. I just don’t want to. It feels pointless and stupid and demoralising and like I can’t force myself–it’s too hard. Hell, I don’t know how much is going to turn into middling energy projects and I don’t know how big the load is going to be.

It makes me feel really timid about agreeing to anything in the medium term. Even more timid about the long term. My energy level for long term projects is very close to capacity. Yet I can’t help but feel like I am missing a really big important track of thought if I don’t think about the long term because most of my long term at this point is less long term than I have truly internalised.

Pam, I just finished watching the entirety of Fresh Off the Boat; I had only watched one and two before this. It appealed to me so deeply I cannot even give it justice. I feel like I had to immigrate because that way I get to have an opportunity to live up to the standards of my parenting role model: Jessica Huang. When white parents think that I am intense/odd/overly forceful I have a whole montage of parenting. To be fair, before the last few weeks it was mostly a combination of the Hispanic and Black mothers I knew as a young child but man I want Jessica’s vanity. I do. I want to love myself with that bone deep conviction. And I am now an immigrant mom so I am allowed a lot of leeway. I win.

But, as Jessica wisely says, you retire when you die so you should master a set of skills then move on to your next big focus. I may have 13 more years of active parenting ahead of me but that’s… not the long term. That’s a lot marathon of endurance but I’ll be 55. It doesn’t give me the lead time on a next thing that finishing at 47 would have given me, but life choices have consequences. I’m really glad to have her.

Five really is my favorite age. I am coming down like a hammer on some behaviors I have problems with. I am having intense internal conflict around the fact that I need to be honest with myself that it is not the same thing as formal ABA therapy… but it’s a similar dynamic. I have some substantial needs around behavior interactions. This is where it gets really fucking tricky living in a house with a bunch of neurodiverse people. It would be really easy for us to have a negative set of interactions a lot of the time because we are all kinda jerks. Five is a magnificent opportunity to work on code switching behaviors. Five year olds think mommy is the most magical, god-like figure on the planet and they are simultaneously food avoidant, intensely individuating, and really fucking sure they are the boss of the universe.

It’s a lot of goddamn work.

In many ways it is much easier this time around because I am living with the product of my hard work. Like Jessica, I feel validated. Sure, my measure of success is very different and I have different goals for my kids but that’s ok! I’m a Californian mother moving to Scotland not a Chinese mother moving to the US; there are going to be differences.

I relish this challenge. It is time to introduce code switching. I did it earlier with the other kids and it was a more gentle on-ramp but the pandemic has changed my timetable. I now get to do in a year what I usually do in four years. Well hey, part of the point of home educating is you get to do things on your own schedule and adapt to life as it happens.

We need a baseline of “this is what it feels like to live and move in a body that is being given what it needs.” We have been in survival mode for a very long time. It’s time to slow that all the way down and teach this five year old what it needs to be like.

And now I am out of time after being interrupted three times. Sigh. I did not complete the thought.

This is a little weird

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Ok, so I think I am starting to have a better relationship with my mother in law. Apparently she finally decided that she couldn’t get rid of me and she now has affection for me? She said it in a really awkward sort of way. She said that her sons don’t think she will love the people they have sex with–it’s their modesty. That’s why we had such a rough introduction to one another on the phone when he had his motorcycle accident back in the day. Or something? It was confusing.

But the last visit was frankly pretty dang positive. I get the impression that my understanding and supportive words and manner for how difficult her mother was to deal was taken well. I did my judgy thing and this time it didn’t blow up. Woo. I told her that I completely understand why she has simply thrown away her mother’s hoard and it was incredibly kind and giving of her to do so much for the woman who abused her so badly. I do not have it in me to do such a thing. That takes an intense level of character to fucking do your duty as a daughter. She didn’t let her mom shit all over her–she had boundaries. But she made sure the taxes got filed. She made sure the bills got paid. She cleaned up the disgusting, nasty, health hazard hoards that her mother accumulated many times in her life. Holy shit I can understand what that means.

I’ve cleaned up a lot of hoards. Including some that required gloves and masks because the air was not fit to breathe.

I saw her mother’s house. I know that I saw the house not long after she moved in and the hoard had been entirely disposed of for the last place she lived. The woman did not deal with rubbish. Including food that was completely and totally inedible and it might hurt someone.

I had a shockingly polite relationship with Great Grandma. We spoke as judgy bitch teachers about methodology and pedagogy. We got along. She was effusively in favor of me homeschooling the kids–but I had to win her over first. When we first met she did that attacking thing she does with fucking everyone and I was able to throw off the names of most of the important academic theorists of the last 100 years and explain exactly which pieces of what research I lean on for the decisions I make. She talked to my kids. Then she went back to the nursery school where she was volunteering to teach gardening to the children. She later told me I should definitely not send my kids to school because I had far more to give them that was of value than all of the teachers in her school put together.

Great Grandma was not a nice person. She was a bitch. She was severely abusive to her children to a degree I have never even nodded at. But she was a single mother to four children in the 1950’s. She parentified the shit out of her kids. She beat them when they didn’t take care of themselves. She beat them whenever she didn’t like a decision they made. She threw them out of the house in night clothes when they tried to take independent action as 18 year olds.

She was also incredibly intelligent and super well educated. She did a graduate degree in geology I think in the 1960’s. She babysat at night so she could help younger single mothers get higher education. She worked in very hard schools. After half a century of teaching she retired… to volunteer in preschools teaching underprivileged children how to garden.

No one is one thing or another. No one is black or white. People are complicated. People have a lot going on and mostly they don’t even know what all it is. It is hard for people to learn how to introspect. It doesn’t absolutely require professional help but it does require time. Time to sit and think and figure out why you are doing stuff. It’s not easy.

Great Grandma put a lot of good into the world. She did a lot of things that were really unusual for someone of her generation and poverty level.

I can look at her and see how I would make similar choices in a similar situation. She had no room for a personal self in her life. She was a tool and she was ground to a bloody fucking nub and shit rolls down hill. I mean tool in my personal usage. The way I see myself. Not like in the P!nk song.

I think I have it in me to be horrible and I am very very lucky that I have been able to construct a life in which I no longer vibrate with so much rage that I scream at my kids.

I understand that she was a bitch. She was a bad ass motherfucker and she was nice when she could be until she had to be effective. There I go but for the grace of the g-d I don’t believe in.

But yeah, I can see how being her daughter was a nightmare. I have a lot of empathy for how much pain my mother in law went through. She was abused and it was wrong and there is no justification for how much pain her mother put her through.

I see both sides of this so very clearly. Given everything I know about both of their lives I do not know how either of them could have done much better than they did. They did the best they could under very hard circumstances. It is so awful when our best results in that much pain for the people we love. I have absolutely no doubt that there was love on both sides–love and pain and misery and duty. I have very different feelings about to whom I owe duty and that’s appropriate given the very different life I have led.

But yeah. Things with my mother in law have improved dramatically and I feel sorta bewildered about that. She is being friendly and encouraging and telling me she loves all of us–which isn’t a direct “I love you” but is so strongly implied I would have to willfully knock it to the side.

Noah’s mom was very rough on him as a little kid. She was still deep in the throes of her own trauma. She did not have more or better to give. She did not have experience with therapy yet. She has come a very long way in Noah’s life. She has done a tremendous amount of work on herself. Heck, in the approaching 20 years that I’ve had experience with her she has come a very long way. She’s not an easy woman and I doubt she ever will be. She doesn’t owe anyone ease and I can appreciate that on a great many levels.

I suspect she has noticed that I talk about how I cannot have a relationship with my mother because the trauma is too great and I have deep respect for how she has managed to do what she did. That took great strength and fortitude. Whether or not we ever get to the point of feeling comfortable with one another in a casual way there is a level of mutual respect.

She tells me often that she appreciates how I care for her son and our children. She sends my son cards addressed to “grandson”. She is usually really careful with my kid about how to be respectful of whatever name or pronoun is working at the current point. (She’s a little muddled on transition stuff and not perfect about pronouns 100% of the time but she also has sewn beautiful skirts for her daughter’s transgender girlfriends. She does the work to be supportive even while being a little sloppy in speech sometimes. I can live with that. It seems like it is good enough to the kids.)

There is a part of me that believes that we had to have over a decade of bristling and holding our own separate castles lined with booby traps. We are both extremely wounded people.

But even stunted trees reach for the light.

The Reckoning

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I knew it would come. The time when my children no longer believe that I am God and whatever I happen to do is Right and Just and Appropriate. It was honestly really weird being in that zone with them and this discomfort and tension is preferable. What I mean to say is last night my big kids and I cried together and talked about how hard it was when they were really small and I would scream at them for hours for stupid things that little kids do. They talked about how much I hurt them and why it wasn’t ok.

I said that it is true that I did these things. And I did hurt them. And I am sorry. I do not excuse my behavior. There isn’t a justification that makes it “ok”. We both just have to live with it being true. You get to decide how many more years of knowing me you can handle given how I treated you.

EC said he remembers one time when MC was screaming at him and I interrupted and told MC off and said it was entirely inappropriate for them to talk to him like that. He said he remembers asking me why it was ok for me to do that when it wasn’t ok for MC to do. I didn’t say anything. I walked away. He could hear that I went in another room and cried. He was confused and he couldn’t figure out what he had done wrong.

Last night I told him I was embarrassed. It’s pathetic for a grown ass woman to need to get called out by a child that small for her inappropriate behavior. I knew I was I was fucking up. I knew that my behavior was wrong. I also didn’t have much of a support network and I had very high needs children and I was still deep in the mess of my own trauma. I told him, “That’s why I went to therapy even though you told me you didn’t want me to go. Because you were showing me every single day how I did not have the skills to be the mother you deserved.” Last night I told him a little bit more about what I was going through at the time and why I was fucking up the ways I was. I told him that I could not talk to him about it way back then or I would have made him my confidant and I would have leaned on him for emotional support. He would have completely believed that it was his job to do whatever he had to do to “fix” me.

He said I was probably right and he was very glad I hadn’t told him any of it at the time. But it was hard.

I know.

I mean, I’m still not telling them everything about what I went through. But like: when the older kids talk about remembering me completely fucking freaking out about food waste… when I married their dad I was 2 years out from being food insecure. By the time EC remembers my earliest paranoia and panic and overly extreme reactions I was something like 5 years out from food insecurity? I am more calm about food now. It’s also been over 18 years. I feel in my bones that it’s ok now if we don’t eat every piece of food because there will definitely be more.

I told him that what he remembers and the ways that I hurt him are part of what I mean when I say that he has an ACE point because having a mentally ill parent is a heavy burden. It is hard on your body and I deeply regret the ways I have hurt my kids.

I know that there were people at the time who expressed concern about the level of screaming that I wrote about. I didn’t respond in the moment in the ways that you might have preferred, but I have done the work to change. I don’t do that anymore. It was very hard. I have hope that my third child will not have the need for such intense conversations about my fuck ups. I certainly don’t think I have been as hard on her.

EC told me he hates how in stories there is always this big deal made of the person in his position forgiving the person who hurt them. I told him that it’s partly because people in my position have nothing to forgive. We only have regret and guilt and shame and self recrimination and that doesn’t make for as interesting of a story. I told him that in the stories the character isn’t forgiving for the sake of the person who hurt them–they are forgiving so they can set this experience down and stop carrying it around in their head and in their heart. I told him that I cycle in and out of forgiving my mother and I expect he will have a similar experience.

I told him that I am not asking for his forgiveness. That is not something I deserve and it isn’t something he should feel compelled to give. I told him that if he wants to talk about this more over the years I will and I will explain more so that he can see a fuller picture of what was going on and I do not offer that as a justification. It’s not a justification.

There is a part of me that struggles with trying to figure out the intensity of my own self recrimination here. I didn’t call him names. I wasn’t hitting him. I wasn’t using inappropriate language. I was using inappropriate volume. I ranted for hours and at least a few times for days about stupid fucking shit because I did not have better coping tools for my emotions.

These days when I can feel that starting I walk away until I am calm enough to come back and say, “I am not ok with this for x, y, and z reasons. I need you to do a, b, or c to make amends because that was not acceptable.” I’m still really freaking not ok with active lying. You can tell me to my face that you are not going to obey some restriction I have put in place and have far fewer issues than you will if you tell me “Ok I won’t do it” and then you do.

In the birthday book that Noah and Pam put together years ago there is a quote from Jenny: “When you look at yourself you see how far you have to go. I see how far you have come.” Ok, I’m paraphrasing. I haven’t looked it up in a bit. I think I’m right +/-3ish words. I am a lot closer to being who I want to be in this world. I have dealt with a lot of my shit.

Hell, I wonder how much Andrew telling me off and telling me that I was addicted to my rage spurred me on. There have been a lot of things and a lot of pushes from people who love me.

I am not the parent I was and mostly I think that is good. If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and think “Wow, I really sucked” you aren’t trying hard enough. I’m looking back 10 years ago. I really really really sucked. It is hard to feel that I deserve to have a relationship with my children as adults. And that’s one of those tricky self-fulfilling prophecies. If I feel that way I will act shitty and I will push them away.

I mean, even with telling me that sometimes the way I handled shit wasn’t ok he still comes into my room for snuggles on a regular basis. He still radiates confidence and self-assurance and happiness most of the time. He now says that he can foresee a future when he will probably want to move out but he’ll be surprised if it happens much before 30.

He looks back on the arc of his life and thinks I want to double this amount of time with my parents.

I agree that when I screamed like that it was abusive. Maybe it is kind of an ordinary level of abusive where if you knock it off people won’t reject you permanently. I don’t know. I don’t get to decide. I just need to keep on walking and keep on trying to be less of a prick.

What is it about me?

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Recently someone who, about two decades ago, asked to be my Leather mom tried to friend me on facebook. I actually unfriended her about six months ago because I was weak when she came around a year or so ago when I filled out my facebook profile more and included California people. I unfriended her because when I see her posts about how terribly she misses her daughter and how the lockdown was traumatizing to her because she can’t see her baby it cuts like a knife. It jumps up and down on my old buttons about how other people deserve to be loved and I don’t. So instead of being an asshole I just unfriended her.

I uhm was not as nice this time around. Instead of ghosting her I let her know (with a fair few words) just how much she hurt me and that continuing to stand near her at this point makes me think about killing myself and I just can’t do that anymore. She responded with ethos and just how broken she is now and an attempt to gain sympathy and support from my end. I am not going to respond. Because if I did it would be something hostile about how she fucking dumped me years before her partner died so if she is broken in the aftermath of his loss I don’t fucking care anymore.

This is like my mother expecting me to start handling all of her financial needs when I was 18 and I got the accident settlement. She didn’t really raise me–a whole series of foster placements kept me fed and clothed and not homeless. But hey I owe her because she is so needy and she’s my mother. Naw. Fuck off.

Many years ago now my Leather Dad told me that he’d be happy to let my kids call him grandpa but I needed to keep in mind that he wasn’t going to do anything to help me because all of his money and support and property was going to his kids. Then a couple years after that he asked to borrow $10,000. We worked out a loan agreement and I gave it to him and he paid me back. Then he came back asking to borrow $25,000. For someone who was absolutely fucking clear that he wouldn’t help me he sure expected me to help him. I said no the second time.

I talked to a good friend about how they are the only person Sarah has lived with who Sarah doesn’t owe money because they didn’t charge Sarah rent. When Sarah broke up with me she had effectively stolen money from me; it was put in an account to buy groceries for the family. A couple weeks later she had a plane ticket to see her sister’s graduation and she needed more money for groceries. This was never really discussed because if I got angry with her then she would tell me I have Borderline Personality Disorder and she can’t deal with me because I am triggering because I am just like her mother.

They say that extreme independence is a sign of trauma and it’s not a good thing. I’m told that me being a bit on edge and not 100% trusting Noah means I shouldn’t be married to him because I am being abusive to him. Basically what that means is because I am a traumatized person I should be alone for the rest of my life–hey independence!

For reasons I don’t really understand he thinks that having this much of me is better than having none of me.

Recently I read something that I found interesting: The Unified Cutlery Theory. I feel like over the last two months I managed to turn the corner and all I have are knives. I posted a while ago about doing well and I think that was a stupid thing to do. I burst my bubble.