Arrival, Light

I wanted to make sure to mention that Ms. P seems to be entirely out of her depression these days. It's easy to note the bad times in detail and never mention that they've gotten better. I realized the other morning that despite the fact that she's stressed to the ends of her patience with an enormous Christmas drive at work, she's just stressed and not assuming that her stress really means she's a bad person. So things are much better on that front.

On the other hand, I'm having all kinds of alone time because she's at work all the time, and while it was nice for a little while, I really kind of miss her. I'll be happy when this project is over and we can return to our regularly scheduled lives.

Me, I've been in therapy a few weeks now, and that's just perfect for having emotional things jump up and bite you in the ass. The last few sessions I've been talking about my family and both the difficulty I have with them and the difficulty of explaining that difficulty.

See, in many ways, my parents were great. I have great memories of things like my 8th birthday party, when Mom brought a pile of unpainted ceramic animals, covered the dining room in plastic, and set us to with paints. She was known around neighborhoods (and hated by her working-outside-the-home friends) for making holiday sugar cookies and special paintable icing and, again, letting a bunch of kids make a huge mess in her house. They were great for these kind of active, practical things.

What I'm realizing, however, is the depth of some of the problems. The really concrete one I can haul out and share easily is this:

When my sister was 13, she got clinically depressed. While this may have gone unnoticed, attributed to teen moodiness, she gained a bunch of weight and that did not go unnoticed. So off she went to the doctor, who ran a bunch of tests and figured it was likely depression. Off they go to the therapist, with whom they have a few sessions. This, however, upsets my mother, because therapy makes her feel like a bad mother. So my father convinces my sister to quit therapy. And she was then unmedicated, untherapied, and clinically depressed until she was 21. Let me say that again: my parents knowingly left my sister clinically depressed for seven years.

For years, my sister and I have both said about my mother in this situation, oh, she didn't know Dad asked that. Yesterday, however, I realized that whether or not she knew where it came from, if her 14-year-old depressed daughter says she wants to stop therapy, the responsible answer is "fuck no." And none of this excuses my father, who valued his wife's emotional comfort over his daughter's mental health.

I've said for a long time that I don't know if I'll ever forgive them for this. What I realized last night is how many other things happened that were smaller, more easily-excused versions of this.

We were repeatedly told by my father to erase, ignore, or squash negative feelings--even transitory anger--towards my mother "because she does so much for you and just wants you to be happy."

My mother actively denied our feelings, either telling us things like "we don't hate people; we like everyone" or reinscribing our feelings as bad, irresponsible behavior.

My sister was a tantrum-thrower, and my job in the family was to be the one who compromised, gave up things, had things taken away, and lived with unfairness in order to placate her.

In all of these scenarios, it was my job to be as emotionally invisible as possible in order to maintain my mother's emotional comfort level. It left me with a lingering belief that having big emotions would break the people around me or make them not love me anymore. Luckily I have Ms. P, who is full of big feelings herself and who is more than capable of both demonstrating how one has big feelings and how one can react when other people have big feelings. And neither of us are broken and no one is going anywhere.

But what do we call this kind of emotional abandonment, this emotional erasing? How do I point to it, to explain to others what's going on with me these days, what's going on with my family?

In the years since I've left home, I've slowly come to meet some of my own emotions. And the more I live in my own authentic emotions, the more alienated I feel from my family and the more uncomfortable seeing them is. People talk about how going home makes them into 12-year-olds, no matter how old they are. I spend any visit experiencing the conflict between my actual, authentic life, in which I have emotions that inform my life, and my inner 12-year-old, who knows that emotions will make Mommy angry and distant and cold, or worse, weepy, which will make Daddy white-hot angry.

I'm not done with that recovery work, obviously. I suspect I'm in that stage of emotional discovery where they're all a little bit bigger and more forceful than they will be when there isn't so much time-pressure behind them. And I'd like to hope that at some point I can be authentic around my parents and let them have whatever reaction they need to have.

The irony of all of this is that my mother desperately, almost cravenly, wants connection with me. She thanks me profusely every time I call. She changed her tune damn fast on my marriage when I called her on it, when it was clear this was not negotiable and nothing she could do would manipulate me into something she liked better. But the language of connection is emotional, and we do not have that, we two.

From right here, there is a smidgen--not of hope, exactly--of possibility that she will change because I am, because I am learning these things. It is likely she had an experience similar to mine as a child, that she is careful to protect her emotions because she has no more idea of how to deal with it than I once did. These things are passed on like the skin that is just like hers. Unlike the skin, though, I can break the cycle here. Things can be healed, and in healing my own, I may model a path for her. May it be so.

Comments

[Sfrajett]

Glad to know someone else out there had a mother who needed to control everyone's emotions so she could not feel like a bad mother. I can't tell you how many relationships I've left because I felt too erased and couldn't figure out how to access a way to be that pushed back. I want to find out more about lesbians as their mothers' daughters in part because this subject is so fascinating, and because our stories often have an eerie similarity.

[Pronoia]

Oh, interesting! I didn't know this was a trend, although now that I think about it, Ms. P has a related but different version of this with her mother. It's interesting that, given these histories, we have our most intense emotional connection to other women.

Since I'm in the middle of figuring this out, I'm also noticing when some interaction of ours looks like one with my mother, even though it's really different. So, for instance, Ms. P will sometimes try to make herself very small, because she's in a difficult place and doesn't want her difficult place to bleed onto me. But because of my history with my mother, it makes me ABSOLUTELY CRAZY. So we keep talking about that.

Got any good advice or suggestions for such maternal relationships?

[art-sweet]

Wow! I'm reading your archives to reward myself for 24 hours of unmitigated push on a grant application and I come across this one. "It was my job to be as emotionally invisible as possible in order to maintain my mother's emotional comfort level." And I have one of those bloglove moments: the I could have said that (but not so well) moments.

When I was 17, I went into what proved to be the first of many depressions. Now mostly balanced by pharmaceuticals, thank you. My mom, who had her own Depressive Incident when I was 13, somehow managed to ignore the fact that her teenage daugher could not get out of bed in the morning. When I told her that I wanted to die, she told me to stop being a melodramatic teenager. Okay, if I really felt like I wanted to go to therapy I could. She wouldn't stop me, even though I was being ridiculous.

Years later, trying to figure out why I have such a hard time with anger, my therapist asks me if I wasn't angry at my mom for getting so depressed, for scaring me. If I wasn't angry about having diabetes. And I realized that my strategy for trying to Protect Mom was to not allow myself my own emotions, because she so clearly couldn't handle them.

I'm still struggling with this one - with standing up for myself emotionally around my mom, and not going automatically into doormat mode. It's really hard though, isn't it?

Thanks for writing this!

[Pronoia]

It is *so* *hard*, yes. And the only way I manage even the bits that I manage is to be overly forceful about them: to kind of present them to her as nonnegotiable and not even wait for her response. This isn't how I want to be doing it long-term, of course, but it's a step right now. And it's so very hard.

Thanks for the comment!