Monthly Archives: April 2023

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.