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magicforest
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After long wars with my mother I always reflect. I do too much reflecting. You’d think I’d have something tangible after this reflecting about my mother and the everlasting question of how our relationship got like this but I’ve wrestled with it so much I don’t know, maybe it’s a just a combination of things, how she was raised and how I was raised and how all of our experiences made us two people who just repell, the same magnets. I don’t really believe that two people must inevitably fail to get along, I believe that all people can find a way to be civil, but we’ve said so many terrible things to eachother and been wounded so badly I don’t think either of us feel safe to lower our swords. I don’t know what it was that got us here and I don’t know what it is that can get us out of it. I really don’t know anything, do I?
This isn’t peace right now, just another stall before hell breaks loose again, and sometimes I just so frustrated with the futility of trying to make it better and letting her down—and letting myself down—it’s just complete exhaustion, and then I’m immature and pissed off and blow it all again. I don’t know if I should just throw up my hands or what. I think I need to get rid of the shimmering image of me telling my mother how much I love you and that I want to be your girl and her being happy for me. I think I need to get rid of the shimmering image of her telling me that she’s proud of me and that even if she wouldn’t always make them herself she respects my choices. I think I need to get rid of the shimmering image of her welcoming who I am, my ideas and my thoughts and my dreams, just because she loves me. Because her love of me is based on my ideas and my thoughts and my dreams, and when I don’t fit her expectations she thinks I must not love her…god, I want to be welcomed.
But I suppose there are some shimmering images she also has to destruct—the one that I am the respectful daughter who doesn’t question her decisions or instructions, the one that takes her knowledge, experience and advice as my sole guide, the one that lives under her morals and ethics and values and believes in them. She’s not that mother and I’m not that daughter and we keep stubbornly holding onto these ideals, thinking that if we try long enough we will achieve them—and then thinking that we deserve these things, so we must fight for them. Perhaps we do both deserve these things, but we’ll never find it in eachother, because it’s impossible—it’s a paradox, our ideas of eachother’s perfection clash.
We are going to have to find the things we seek in ourselves—give up on eachother, live and live let. I must find pride and approval and dignity and support in myself, because she won’t give me the kind I feel I need. She must find respect and gratitude and acceptance and honour in herself, because I won’t give her the kind she feels she needs.
She thinks we can’t live and live let if we live with eachother, and perhaps she’s right. But nevertheless I am living here, and if we can’t stop this struggle of polarity, life will be unbearable. I know that I am simplifying; there are a million more things tied into this—our pasts, our futures, her obligation as a parent and mine as a daughter, her way of life and mine speeding towards eachother, but I think these are all things that divert from the core of my belief here. Live and live let. My mother always believed that giving up on me was the lowest point we could reach as mother and child, the last resort, the finale. But I think perhaps it was what we should have been working towards all along, instead of these squabbles trying to mold eachother to fit the cookie cutters. I can’t get raised anymore and neither can she. It’s up to ourselves, and not eachother. We can’t rely on eachother anymore for the things we can only get from ourselves.
So I hereby give up on my mother.
I wrote the above entry on January 6th. Today is January 7th. Just a few hours into my Giving Up On Mother new lifestyle, she pulled me into the living room and gave me a talk. She told me that she had known since I was seven that I would be a success at anything I ever elected to do, that the whole family knew that no one needed to worry about me, that she admired me for being a good person, that even if she sometimes hated my choices she would always love me…all of the cliché things I had always wanted to hear…my mother apologized to me. Perhaps I have stumbled onto something. This is so possessed it’s like God interfered…is that what God is? Anything undescribable and unbelievable? Can I call it that? Or should I be honest and chalk it up to innate human interaction?
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040107
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