Tag: motherhood

Brinking

If I’m honest, coming up with a daily blog post has become a drag.

You will know if you read a recent post of mine that I am less than two months away from achieving my one year goal of publishing a blog post every day.

Looking back on my life, my ennui and that attitude is kind of predictable.

I tend to run out of gas and ambition on the final leg of any journey.

That was true in the case of coming up to completing my university degrees, pending motherhood (by month 9, I was ready to extract my baby with a vacuum cleaner (just kidding) – I think that “get it out of me” feeling is nature’s way to prepare you for giving birth), house buying (in one case, I actually bailed on the day the house deal was supposed to close – turns out that was very poor judgment), and many failed so-called intimate relationships.

Relationships broke down as I edged closer to true intimacy. I was a baby adult, you see. While I presented as a walking, talking, competent adult, I was – in reality – a mewling infant. If I started to get emotionally close to someone – that is, feeling vulnerable and safe – the infant side of me took over.

There is nothing particularly attractive or romantic about a twenty something year old carrying on like a five year old. Temper tantrums. Blind selfishness. Acting out by running away.

I was the living epitome of the hurt and angry child who packs up all her belongings in a handkerchief, sticks them on a pole, heads out the door (slamming it, of course), and down the road.

That works until close to nightfall when said child is faced with the looming cold and dark. It’s about that time of the day that your horrible parents don’t seem that horrible any more.

In truth, I wasn’t really much more developed than that. Arrested emotional development is real, my friends.

The value of a healthy family, I came to realize, was that it can (should) provide a safe container – a nest, if you will – where you can work out and work through childish emotions as they come up year after year. It’s called growing up. From about age 5, I grew mostly sideways.

This growing up business is, of course, far from a perfect science. Many people are simply shut down as children and forced to stew in their own emotional pain perpetually. They can grow up to be emotionally arrested, too.

The ideal of a safe family environment in which to take root and grow is just that for many – an ideal. None of us gets through childhood without scars.

So the urge to bolt at the gate just as things are starting to go right was habitual with me for a long time. Maybe I did that because otherwise I would be forced to acknowledge that I was a real grown-up adult. I wasn’t having it. I was still looking for a knight in shining armor.

The acknowledgement of total personal responsibility would have forced me to accept that I did have power over myself and my choices and my fate. Frankly, that seemed like way too much responsibility to take on.

And the other truth was, I feared failure and disappointment so creating those conditions myself gave me a lopsided sense of control. “See,” I could say to myself, “I knew this would never work out.” And son of a gun, I’d be right.

I call it brinking. Giving up just before you are going to succeed. Giving up just before an important goal is realized. Giving up shortly before I could catch the brass ring. (It wasn’t always that, in reality. I stuck with and accomplished a good number of goals. It’s just that the self-talk was discouraging and total joy killer.)

My self-talk in young adulthood was guided by self-loathing and a broad-based lack of self-confidence. Not exactly a loving and supportive voice. It has taken years to change it. To “grow out of it.” The first challenge was to see it, observe it as it was happening and call it what it was. Something like I am doing now.

The accomplishment of publishing a daily blog post every day for a year that I will celebrate won’t matter to another single living soul but me. But here’s the difference between little me and struggling adult me.

I now realize that the primary and only single living soul I have agency over and who matters to me is me. Not in a selfish sense but in a sense of total accountability for my own life. As poet William Ernest Henley famously phrased it in his poem Invictus:

“I am the master of my soul, I am the captain of my fate.”

I quite liked this summary of the poem’s meaning:

The last two lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus‘ contain invaluable advice to those who blame God for their failures. It is not only about God, but the mindset that makes one surrender while faced with challenges. Challenges make one stronger but mentally submitting oneself to those impediments extinguishes the inner light that one carries inside the heart from infancy. Through these lines, Henley tried to say that it’s not about how difficult the path is, it’s about one’s attitude to keep moving forward without submitting oneself to fate’s recourse.

https://poemanalysis.com/william-ernest-henley/i-am-the-master-of-my-fate-i-am-the-captain-of-my-soul/

I finally get it, Mom and Dad.

You did what you knew and the best you could.

The rest of my story and how it unfolds is up to me.

Heigh-ho.

The Power of Two

My son – my eldest child – got married yesterday. To a beautiful, elegant, intelligent bride. I was not there. None of his family was. That was by choice and not an antagonistic one.

The couple deliberately sought and got the privacy and simplicity they wanted as they exchanged their vows. Family watched the live-streamed event at Ottawa City Hall from a great distance on our computers. Technology, eh?

Our society creates so many false expectations and financial demands around weddings. So much so that it didn’t surprise me when I read many divorces take place because the couple seems to forget that a wedding is followed by an actual marriage. Which is way different.

For years, I pooh-poohed the importance of having an intimate, loving relationship in my own life. If I’m honest, fear held me back in single, celibate check. I figured if you can’t skate yourself and everyone in your family is a really bad skater, don’t head to an ice rink and make a fool of yourself.

My parents made a complete cockup of their marriage. They both brought a bag full of unprocessed issues and dysfunction to the table. Within that marriage’s walls, three daughters were dutifully born one after the other.

I was number one. A precarious perch to hold in any family dynamic. That place in the siblings’ birth order is loaded with expectations and often imposes a sense of excessive responsibility on that child. Perhaps even moreso in the specific circumstances of my birth once my origins became clear to me.

Unearthed in counseling, the wise woman listened patiently to my seemingly endless tales of maternal betrayal. In one pivotal session, she stopped short, looked up from her notepad and piercingly asked: “Is there any chance your parents had to get married?” My world flipped. The immediate sense of potential truth I had shook me to my core.

That night, I called my father and uncomfortably asked him the question. His response was sheepish, but honest. “We were going to get married anyway.” It was a sweet phone call tinged with sadness.

Then I called my mother asking the same question. I might just as well asked her if she routinely drove pins into small helpless animals for sport. She shrieked at me and called me down and accused me of all manner of foul things that I even DARED to ask such a question. “How could you!?” Her response was my answer.

I married my children’s father under a Sword of Damocles. My mother was clearly upset leading up to and at the event itself. Still she didn’t say a single negative word. Instead, she smiled too much and too broadly, paced about the room and looked decidedly drawn and anxious at the little wedding ceremony we managed to have.

That marriage was not a great romantic story. I believed the guy I married was the ”boy next door.” Plucked carelessly from the available pool surrounding me at the time. Safe and harmless, I reasoned. We would have one of those loveless marriages of convenience. We’d raise good kids. He would be the chief cook, bottle washer and cheering section to support my rising star.

Since I was not in love with him, I believed he could not hurt me. That delusion was emphatically ripped away after my son was born. In spite of two university degrees, it turned out my real education was only just beginning.

My mother’s abundantly and publicly supported my son’s father. And I, like a hapless beast who finds itself being sucked into quicksand or a tarpit, faced the dawning realization my mother was my mother in name only.

The flimsy bonds of attachment I had had to her already unravelled in an instant. Never marry or have children to give your parents grand babies. The ensuing years were difficult and traumatizing.

Such is the unwelcome gift children inherit from unhealed, immature parents. “Growing up” isn’t easy under the best of circumstances. In our family’s convoluted and dysfunctional dynamic, the damage and scarring continued well into adulthood.

My greatest regret was the trauma and deprivation foisted upon my children. They were born into circumstances they had no control over and didn’t deserve. What child does?

So my son and his bride’s decision to marry yesterday after his own faltering first attempt was and is – as all important ventures are – a victory of hope over experience.

I feel the same about my own marriage. Truly a “whodda thunkit” situation. After years on my own, I was blessed in my dotage to find someone I can love and laugh with. I love and appreciate my husband beyond my own understanding. We treasure each moment we have together and all the more because we know our time together is limited.

There is a simple happy moral to the story at this point. The bonds of intergenerational trauma in my little family – while far from being fully healed – have at least been confronted and challenged.

My two children and me – and their father too, to be fair – have committed to and follow our own healing path. Admitting there is a problem, they say, is the first step to overcoming it.

For Cameron and Shaar, I wish them every imaginable positive experience and joyous occasion their formal union now opens to them. They have had a pretty phenomenal run as partners.

I wish them the strength and wisdom they will need to face and overcome inevitable challenges and disappointments that will come into their lives.

I support their growth, their love, and their boundaries. It is their life and their show. I am happy to be invited to watch that show occasionally and take part in the assigned parts I am given as I can.

From where I sit, the vows Cameron and Shaar took today exhibit a maturity and commitment that will serve them both as they evolve in their married life.

In ideal relationships, we believe love will give us the security and support to help us heal and grow. I wish that for both of them.

Let the future unfold as it will in the spirit that abounded at yesterday’s lovely and intimate ceremony.

Much love and good wishes on your forward path, you two. God bless and Namaste.

Mother’s Day

I have written about mothers before. I have written and will continue to write about my own mother. It is a primal bond, yet the relationship can be difficult, no matter what its origin story. I wrote yesterday about idealized motherhood as a special, sacred state. The day-to-day reality can be quite different and difficult. There are common themes in the universal experience of motherhood. Yet each mother’s story is unique. This is one of those unique stories.

Lala and Her Son

“The child was tightly wrapped in the threadbare blanket his mother had taken with her as they were leaving the camp. At the immigration center, she struggled to quell her nerves and quiet her baby. The baby had a cough. The cough needed to be suppressed.

If even a slight cough was detected by an immigration official, the whole family – dad, mom, sister, and baby – might have been diverted to quarantine for suspicion of TB. Getting out of the detention center and on with their lives in Canada could have taken them many more months. The family had already spent what seemed like an eternity in a European refugee camp. Lala wasn’t sure how much more they could survive.

Homemade cough medicine liberally laced with brandy and administered in quantity had quieted her fussy boy before they disembarked at Pier 19 in Halifax. It had been effective in putting him into a deep slumber. Still, Lala worried the effects would wear off and the baby would wake and delay their plans.

The baby’s conception and birth originated in a post-World War II European refugee camp. It was there Lala met her future husband. Both parents were suffering from the brutal treatment and losses imposed by World War II Nazis. The post-War effects of displacement and relocation only compounded the traumatic effects.

At the war’s end, they jumped at the chance to come to Canada to begin life over again. They made it through the customs inspection and boarded the train for Toronto, Ontario.

Thanks to friends and relatives in the similarly displaced post-War community, they were able to buy a house. Eventually, his mother opened a dress store on the ground floor.  The family lived upstairs.

That baby had grown into a bright and mischievous little boy. He remembered spying on naked women through the cracks in the changing room doors. The ladies paid him little attention as he was but a child but he reveled in the memories. He vividly recalled the pretty ladies.

A concern in this family was the little boy’s birth origins. The baby was now a boy. He was short in stature and tended to obesity. Food was comforting for him in a way his traumatized parents could not be. On top of the traumas of war, his father harbored deep fears that his son was not his own. He took out his anxiety on the child.

The story persisted that Lala had been raped by Russian soldiers in the camps and the story muddied the waters of the boy’s origins. His father feared that the boy was the product of that violent act and not his own biological son.

One of the results was that his father measured the boy regularly. He stood him up against a door jamb with a yardstick and pencil to mark his growth. The father made careful note of how tall the boy was.  The boy recalls standing on tippy toes to appear taller to avoid his father’s rage. If the boy’s measurements “came up short,” a physical beating might ensue from deep within the wells of his father’s anger and frustration.

The boy had an older sister whose origins were equally murky. She was not the product of rape. But Lals worried her daughter was the product of another displaced Jewish refugee in the camp. When the daughter discovered her alternate origin story, she flipped out.

She stole her parents’ credit card and flew to Israel to seek out the man she believed might have been her “real father.” Israel is purportedly where he went after the war. The sister had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental hospital for a time with depression and suicidal ideation.  Her brother was enraged and disdainful.

Her parents flew to Israel to find her and bring her back to Canada. The travel costs and the psychiatrists they paid to have her seen, were a burden on her family’s limited financial resources. Her brother saw all of her “acting out” as a “choice.” In his mind, she was a stupid and selfish brat.

As an academic years later, he would publish a paper called The Myth of Mental Illness. Although he didn’t mention his sister specifically, there is no doubt she was his intellectual inspiration. It is common for those who have grown up sublimating their distress to condemn as weak those who struggle.

Her brother was angry at the financial and emotional cost to his parents. They were not wealthy people and his sister had racked up a hefty credit card bill that his parents were forced to pay off. Her rebellion stirred up troubling memories of the war.

The boy sought comfort in food and his girth expanded in proportion to his loneliness and distress. His Ph.D. thesis explored the lengths that fat people go to appear “normal” in society. Those efforts to “cover” up their fat were a study in learned manipulation that Lala’s grown son transferred to other parts of his life. He would learn to hide his rage under layers of charm and intelligence that took him up the ladder of career success in fairly short order.

He was a product of the abusive background he came from and became a volatile and violent abuser himself. Survival skills bred in post-war European refugee camps and in his family home came in handy for a sad and angry little man-child. He was intent on making up for the miseries his parents suffered that caused him to suffer in kind.

Sadly and perhaps inevitably, he inflicted that suffering on others. Lala’s boy became as twisted as the Russian soldier (allegedly) responsible for his presence on the planet.”

Not My Children

Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday. Have you noticed? If not, are you living in a cave in Tibet? We collectively shake our heads over the commercialization of this single day in the annual calendar. We may trivialize it but heaven forfends that we ignore the chance to publicly honor Mom. Because if we do, she will undoubtedly “remind” us.

There is more grounded discussion these days about the real cost and sacrifice in choosing motherhood. Where “this blessed event” was once wreathed in ephemeral images of ribbons and lace and sweet babies raising a dainty hand to their mother’s radiant face, the new narrative has become more realistic. The real underlying narrative of that earlier time was driven by economics and even harder necessity. Children were needed as much as they were wanted.

Parenting is tough. Motherhood is tougher. It comes with a host of unspoken expectations and “rules” that no mother ever fully gets until she gets there. Motherhood can be a bitch. (I like using BITCH as an acronym: Babe In Total Control of Herself). Nothing adequately prepares you for the literal gut punch that babies bring into your world.

Their demands are urgent and incessant. Thank god Nature takes you over and every fiber of a mother’s being strains to ensure her newborn’s survival and comfort. Thank god there is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business devoted to the business of ensuring that that perfect little baby person you are holding remains that way and develops accordingly.

And when they don’t? Brace yourself for “Mother Guilt.” Or more accurately the mother of all guilt. After my son was born, I remember how sensitive I was to his every gurgle or whimper. If he started crying, there was a mental checklist to go through: “Is he hungry? Is he wet? Does his diaper need changing? Does he have gas? At a given time, it may have been any one or two or all of those. It is often said that babies do not come with instruction manuals which, if I may put my oar in, was very short-sighted on god’s part.

In my early days of motherhood, a wise and kind woman friend advised: “Never wake a sleeping baby.” The biggest psychological shift comes at the minute they hand that squirmy and wrinkled little bundle to you in the delivery room and you officially “become” a parent. For the rest of your life, your mindset will be: “Oh my God, if I don’t take care of this child, nobody else will. It’s totally on me.” My brother-in-law put this perfectly: “Parenting is unrelenting.”

The constant fussing and protection rather get in the way of a lot of parent-child relationships when they come of age. Especially if you are still treating them as if you need to cut up their food and wipe their mouths. I know. I’ve done it. Odd how sarcastic your grown-up baby boy becomes in public after he’s put on a few years.

I also learned – the hard way and in other ways – that neither of my babies was entirely “mine.” They have their own thoughts. Imagine? They have their own ideas. What? They may gently tease and cajole (constantly) to remind you that they are the new guard and you are the old. “Well, fetch me some tea then. Please?”

As they often have in my life, words helped me cope and understand. No one has done this more eloquently than my favorite poet Kahlil Gibran. Over the years, I have bought around twenty copies of his magnum opus, The Prophet. His books make beautiful and meaningful gifts. His poems cover the waterfront of life from birth to death and in between.

Take comfort from his wise words, fellow parenting people. If your babies are still with you, cherish every minute with them. Soon enough, you will be one of those parents who wistfully realizes their babies left the nest altogether too quickly.

Kahlil Gibran – 1883-1931

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

     You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Sayin’ Ain’t Doin’

My beloved daughter just returned home after visiting for a week. So many feels.

I write this blog primarily to share what I’ve learned about personal healing. And to eventually capture all of that learning in a book, of course. Intellectually, I know a lot. But navigating fraught emotional waters with actual human beings is a whole other ongoing challenge. I still have lots of trauma and triggers inside me. Turns out, so does my daughter.

She is at a different age and stage than me. Duh. It is the way it is supposed to be. She is a smart, ambitious, accomplished, and interesting adult. But she is a much younger adult who has had an entirely different life experience than me. Kindly, she backs me up when I say she has a much better relationship with her mother than I had with mine. Frankly, it wouldn’t have taken much.

I started early on the healing path in my children’s life. The marriage to her father broke down in fairly short order after their arrival. The consequences were devastating and endure. When I moved my two young children (6 and 4 y.o.) from the East Coast of Canada to the West Coast over thirty years ago, I immediately enrolled them in a community program for children of divorce called, Caught in the Middle.

I didn’t like that their conversations with therapists were confidential. I believed that knowing what they were talking about with those strangers would help me better meet their needs as a mother. That hope was quickly shut down. Session disclosure was against the rules and ironically, it helped break down my habitual patterns of triangulation.

At some point in my academic studies, I learned that “triads” were the most stable – if dysfunctional – of social relationships. Three individuals involved in a triad – I learned – are the “perpetrator,” a “victim,” and a “rescuer.” A perpetrator would somehow “hurt” a “victim” who would then run to and disclose that hurt to a “rescuer” who would then comfort and validate the “victim’s” hurt feelings that the perpetrator caused. Then the “rescuer” and “victim” would form an alliance against the “perpetrator.”

So the pattern of issues or hurts went round and round and was rarely resolved. I have learned resolving issues is best handled by working it out with the person you hurt or who hurt you. Triads prevent this by deflecting the energy and the issue to someone not directly involved. So the wheel of hurt keeps going around and around.

The most public (and tragic) example of a triad in my generation was the relationship that Bill Clinton’s young paramour Monica Lewinsky had with her so-called friend, Linda Tripp, about her “boyfriend” troubles. Triads in normal daily life rarely generate such widespread interest or put a Presidency on the line. However, triads that play out on a smaller scale can be just as hurtful and damaging.

[It amused me that a Google search on “triad” revealed a more common usage of the word today for “polyamory” or “throuples” (a three-person romantic relationship). Gotta tip my hat to them who can manage that. It was everything I could do in my romantic career to keep one relationship on the rails. But I digress.]

Love is action. I was desperately confused about that for the longest time. Of course, I was desperately and generally confused about what love was, period. The sexual component was fairly easy to operationalize. But all the other love stuff intimidated and confounded me. Caring for someone by actually “taking care of them” and putting their interests above my own was a stretch for the traumatized child I was, dealing with my own history of inadequate care.

Then my babies came. Words are inadequate to explain how profoundly one’s life changes when a baby comes into the picture. In their earliest days, I was utterly unprepared and overwhelmed by the experience, and beyond. Motherhood has been a step-by-step, learn-as-you-go proposition. My beliefs about love were upended after having children.

It wasn’t made any easier for me by my discovery that I had married an incompatible partner with his own set of unresolved childhood issues. When I was a little girl and into adulthood, my parents frequently said, “I love you.” But their actions did not consistently match those words. I became wary and suspicious about the utterances of love and was careless about using them myself.

During my daughter’s visit – which was largely fabulous and filled with joy and gratitude and fun – we had a couple of glancing blows on triggers we didn’t – okay, I didn’t – even know were still there. With both my daughter and my son, I have tried to mobilize actions to back up words of love. Her visit – and her presence on the planet – reminded me that there is always more work to do in a loving relationship that wants to heal, grow and be truly loving.

My brother-in-law put it best: “Parenting is unrelenting.” No matter how old they or you are. Duh.