forgive my mother

These have been very challenging months with my mother, but I think slowly, I am making progress. The whole thing is about dropping resentment (I guess this falls under the “let go” goal), and just taking any action from her as a reflection of what I myself am attracting. In other words, taking full responsibility for anything external that is happening in my life as something I have created for myself. And, at least for the last few days, this has worked. Still get upset with outbursts of aggression, but if I am seeing out there, it’s for a reason.

Read more about it here.

I almost lost it again a couple of days ago with my mom; actually, that was the reason I had not written in a while, it knocked me out so bad.

But, sometimes between yesterday and today, as I was walking alone, trying to get myself together, it dawned on me: I have the option of leaving my home, of getting out. I could totally walk out. But my place is here. My home right now is actually the place where I need to learn not to get emotionally involved in attack, to break the action/ reaction chain, and to see that what I am seeing around me affects me due to my own interpretations, not the reality of what is actually out there.

And that has made me committed to staying here, and to be able to leave my home with having worked out the inner wound with my mother: to face up to it, and not to run off and feed it my energy to keep it alive.

Again, just like yesterday—my mother asking private, intimate questions, assuming I will just answer.

Why is she such a total control freak? Why does she ask these questions non-chalantly? Yesterday: what does that scar mean? Today: what do you do in your room when you lock the door? (And no, nothing like that—just anything to get privacy, even if I am just checking my e-mail. Tonight, it just so happened I was journaling though).

Where does this need for control come from? Why do I attract it, not only in my mother, but in other relationships (a control freak colleague that monitored my every move?) Why do I attract people that control me? Why do I want to be controlled?

My mother has a strategy of just launching random questions that carry extraordinary depths during ordinary moments, without much leading up to it. As if we are in such close terms that she could do this.

That is one thing about my mother which bothers me—and it is that she assumes we have a closer relationship than we really have. As if those terrible moments where she was hurtful never happened. It bothers me that she thinks I am such an emotional lightweight so that I would start revealing deep aspects about myself despite those terrible moments. Almost as if they never happened. What ensued is a pattern where the relationship does not acknowledge or try to mend the bad moments, but where toxic energy is released without closure. It just sort of hangs there.

This morning I realized that I just had to reach a point where I was not bothered by my mother’s outbursts of rage. I understand she has them because she has no release, because she’s stretched her feminine self too thin. I want to be able to reach a point where I can see things happening without being emotionally attached to them. I have the image of a helicopter surveying a city from above, seeing the blocks and buildings and streets, but not getting in the nitty-gritty of being amidst it all. Everything looks calm and pretty from above.

I guess the place where I want to be in general is seeing all my emotional connections “from above.” Not just with my mother, but with everything in general.

So one strategy is to help her with housework—which, essentially, is what my mother’s life revolves around, both due to imbalanced gender dynamics in her relationship with my father, but also out of choice.

She was much closer with me today, both after having walked together and after I helped her with housework (something I do not always dare to do, given my mother’s perfectionism). She was talking with me, telling my stories. Actually, she started changing since yesterday, when I seemed to not react to the idea that she might want to leave my father—even though she has stayed with him for thirty years, and never made a move in that direction. I guess just thinking about that being a possibility makes my mother feel less imprisoned than what she might feel like.

I want to understand my mother in order to get along with her. I have not had an easy relationship with her during my lifetime. Now, I am trying to have it improve, both by looking at myself critically and trying to comprehend her behavior.