you and i and she and he are beautiful

Earlier this year, I joined a "boot camp"-style workout program. If you're not familiar with the boot camp fitness model, the idea is that you're more likely to push yourself physically if you're with a group of people rather than working out on your own, and you're also more likely to stick with it. Why I signed up for something I would ordinarily hate is another story. For now, suffice it to say that I'm in better physical condition than I have been for most of my adult life. I'm down 20 pounds and up a fair bit of muscle tone. This is the first time in my life that I have a) enjoyed exercise, b) exercised regularly, and c) had enough muscle to see and feel. I love it. I mean LOVE it. I might be a little obsessed with my biceps, which are far from Linda Hamilton-esque, but *I* can feel those guns, and sometimes I find myself rubbing my arm, enjoying how healthy skin over healthy muscle feels. It's lovely.

In the middle of one of these moments of (healthy) narcissism, I suddenly realized: I don't remember my mother ever enjoying her body like this. I don't remember ever hearing her say positive things about her body. Not what it looked like, not what it could do, not how it felt. Nothing. That is not to say that she said negative things about it all the time, but in general, I had the idea that she didn't think she was pretty or shapely or strong. I don't remember her ever reveling in what her body could do. I don't recall any sense of physical prowess, of excitement at a physical feat. I also don't recall her engaging in beauty routines just for the sake of enjoying them. She only did her hair and makeup for the stage (she was an amateur actress in her younger days) or for social events that also had an air of performance - an important business meeting, a church gathering in which she had a public role. I don't remember her ever dressing up for my father or even just for fun. I certainly don't remember any indication that she sometimes felt sexy or pretty or kickass. A memory came back to me of the time in my teens when she refused to buy a black bra for me because black was "sultry and seductive." Funny thing is, all of her underwear was pale beige cotton. So not only was sexiness not for teens, but maybe it wasn't for adults, either. (Not to say that you can't wear beige cotton and feel sexy - but by her own definition and actions, I didn't get the impression that she ever felt that way.)

I know that she was proud of her weight in her early 20s - below 100 pounds - even though she also indicated that she was underweight and didn't eat well and had self-esteem problems at the time. She seemed wistful about her youthful slenderness, but also a little ashamed of it. She never considered herself to be pretty, and envied her younger sister's looks.  I thought my mom was beautiful when I was a little girl, but over time, after hearing her talk about how she was NOT the beautiful sister, she was the plain one whom boys never wanted, I think I learned that my ideas of beauty were wrong. She didn't like her skin. She didn't like her breasts. She didn't like her lips. She didn't like her hair. Eventually I didn't like them, either. I started to dread ever looking like her. This causes some problems for me now, on occasion, when I look in the mirror and see her staring back at me.

I don't remember her ever being fit. She disliked exercise and never engaged regularly in it. Exercise was a chore, one to be avoided. People who enjoyed exercise were weird. Physical prowess was something a person came by naturally, in which case being proud of themselves was vanity, or through fanaticism, in which case it was shallow, obsessive, and unhealthy (and still vain). If there is a physical activity that she enjoys, over thirty years of experience with her never revealed it to me.

Now, everybody doesn't have to be an athlete. And women don't all have to enjoy doing their hair and makeup or wearing frilly dresses. But I would hope that every healthy person would have a sense of enjoying living in their body and liking the way it looks and the ways it can be used, regardless of whether or not that body is "perfect" by societal standards. I suspect that my mother was (is? I don't really know her any more.) divorced from her body, in a way. There was no sense of liking any part of herself or wanting to take good care of her body for the sake of enjoying living in it even more.

I'm not sure what any of this really means within the context of her narcissistic personality disorder, or with regard to my experiences as an adult child of a narcissist. I do know that in the past decade, I have learned much about living in my body (which is, in many ways, very similar to the zen concept of living in the moment).

Two days after making these realizations, I saw an item linked by a friend, "I've Started Telling My Daughters I'm Beautiful." It strikes near my thoughts about my mother. Namely, if we want our children to feel beautiful for who and what they are, we need to let them know what we love about who and what we are.

I want my kids to be able to listen to their bodies and learn about them, and to eat and drink and work in ways that make their bodies feel really good to be alive. I want them to know about how thigh muscles can feel like springs when you run, and how nice it is to look in the mirror and love your eye color. I want them to know about dressing in ways that feel good on your skin, or look good to you in the mirror, or look good to other people not because sometimes looking good on the outside is not necessarily conformist, but can be a way of giving a gift to them through sharing what you like about the way your body looks and feels.

If I want them to be able to enjoy their bodies and the bodies of the women and/or men that they will someday love, I must show them how I can do that for myself. So I'm going to rest my hand on the curve of my bicep and tell my boys about how awesome that morning's workout felt and how I like the shape of my body and the things it can do.

Hopefully you can do this for yourself and your children, too.

mother myths

While shopping in Target a few weeks ago, I came across some stickers in the dollar section, and in each pack, one of the stickers bore this quote:

As fellow ACONs, I'm sure you've guessed that I did NOT buy the stickers. I'm not terribly big on mother worship.

This phrase is one of hundreds that our mother-idealizing society plays on repeat, increasing in frequency as we get closer and closer to Mother's Day. To honor your dear mum, you may buy this quote on note cards, on picture frames, on refrigerator magnets, on plaques, on jewelry, on art prints, and on vinyl wall transfers. I even saw a cross stitch sampler pattern. I'm sure it doesn't stop there. The message is strong: your mother should get credit for everything in your life. Everything. Even if you did something yourself, it's because she raised you to be somebody who can do that thing. Have positive personality characteristics? Inherited from or instilled by her. Your children? Also her accomplishment. Did another person positively influence you? Well, only because your mama gave you the social skills to network, or was related to that person, or sent you to the college where you met them. And on and on. 

As an ACON, phrases like this hurt. They erase me and my experience. They perpetuate the myth that mothers all genuinely love their children, that mothers are the ones who are always "there for you," that all mothers are nurturing, that mothers who do harm only do so inadvertently, because they had the best of intentions and were trying as hard as they could, and really, what kind of ungrateful child complains about the (surely trivial) harm done in the past?

Phrases like this disregard the many, many people who are hurting because "all they are" sometimes - or often - feels like crap, due to a childhood - and often an adulthood - filled with abuse. 

Now, I don't think that people who utter this (and I'll include the supposed originator of the quote, President Lincoln himself) really believe this to the core, even if they say they do and think they do. And that's because deep down, we all know it's not true. It's certainly not true for those of us who have had to break away from abusive mothers. Sure, your life bears her marks, some good and many bad, but there's also a hell of a lot that YOU did yourself, and it's absolutely OK to claim it and be proud of it. 

It's not true even for normal, healthy mothers. No matter how supportive, how nurturing, how fantastic a mother a woman might be, she is not her child. And since the child is his or her own person, he or she deserves credit for doing whatever he or she did with the raw materials provided by dear Mama. As for all a person "hope[s] to be" - can you imagine anything more defeatist than saying that you cannot ever be anything other than what your mother made? How awful. Even if Mama was truly an angel, how horrible to have no destiny other than what she provided. In the case of a child born to an emotionally unhealthy mother, what a terrible life sentence for "all I hope to be" to have no actual hope.

This relates to personal accountability, which is a theme often touched on in discussions of dysfunctional mothers. If "all that I am" is due to my mother, than all she is is due to her mother, and so on back through the ages. Nobody, then, is really responsible for her own actions. You know this not to be true. Each of us receives some DNA, some nurture (or neglect), and some programming from our mothers. Many of us may have run on the scripts handed to us for a long time, but if we're able to come out of the auto-pilot of our family programming, we receive something that is entirely ours: autonomy. We get to decide what to do with the DNA and the history. We can make changes to who we are and what we do. We can work to heal our wounds, enrich our lives, and pass a different package on to our own children, for them to use in their own way when they are ready. 

With apologies to Mr. Lincoln, I suggest we throw away his mother-worship for something more true, written by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." 

All you are, or hope to be, you owe to yourself. 

i am NOT my mother

I've never been a post-it affirmations kind of girl, but lately I feel like I should stick little pieces of paper all over the house with this mantra on it. I am NOT my mother. I am NOT my mother. I am NOT.

Motherhood is full of NO right now. No, you may not eat nothing but granola bars all day, every day. No, you may not stay up until eleven o'clock. No, we cannot have a playdate with your friend today. No, you can't run up the wall in the house. No, it's not ok for you to hit your brother because you didn't like the face he made. No, no, no. I really do know many ways of saying YES to children, of setting them up for success, of relaxing and letting go of my agenda, but lately my kids have been pushing pushing pushing. It's one thing to provide lots of options to which I can say YES, it's another when you're being asked for the six millionth time for something that you simply are not going to give to the kid.

I'm a "gentle discipline" kind of parent, but sometimes after patiently explaining and redirecting and modeling and teaching for the umpteenth time, I just want to scream, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!" I mean really, sometimes kids are a royal pain in the ass, no matter how developmentally appropriate and normal they are.

And then I start to remember how many times I heard my mother use the exact same tone of voice that just came out of my mouth, and cringe. I think of how I lived in fear of her anger, how I disliked her even as a child, how unfair and excessively strict she always seemed to be. And I wonder, was I really just being an annoying little kid? Am I just forgetting the thousand times she responded patiently and kindly while remembering the thousand-and-first time, when she got exasperated? Have I become my mother, unreasonably strict and controlling, or have I misjudged my mother, and was she nothing like I remember?

When this merry-go-round starts turning in my head, it's time for a reality check.

I have no problem with the fact that my mother expected us to eat healthy food, get enough sleep, refrain from injuring siblings, say please and thank-you, value family, respect authority, et cetera. Those are things that every parent should teach her child.

I don't even really hold a grudge regarding the many times she lost her temper, or the choice she made to have more children than she could emotionally handle, or the level of control she exerted over her children through their childhood and extending beyond their adolescence. I think they were poor choices, but I understand the factors that led to them - both the realities of being a frazzled parent, and the context of her own personal history.

When it gets down to it, I don't even really take issue with my childhood. I mean, yes, I do take issue with it, but only because it serves to illustrate that the problems I have with her in the present did extend into the past, and demonstrate a consistently dysfunctional relationship.

The real problem, the thing I'm truly worried about when I hear my mother's voice come out of my mouth?  Who she is today, and how she treats me today, and what I worry will happen to my relationship with my own children as they get older.

I do not want to be a woman who:

• refuses to take ownership of her actions
• never acknowledges hurts that she causes to others
• never apologizes
• considers tactlessness a character strength
• acts like her children are uninteresting or obnoxious to her
• plays her children against each other
• has favorites, denies having favorites
• demeans and shames her children
• has to have everything her way, cannot set her wants aside to meet children's needs
• will not acknowledge that her children are experts on the topics of their own lives, experiences, thoughts, and feelings..as well as other things
• makes fun of people who are smarter, dumber, fatter, thinner, prettier, uglier, richer, poorer, less talented, more talented, etc than herself
• projects her own insecurities onto her children
• lists her children's flaws when she is frustrated with them
• cannot allow her children to make their own choices
• identifies the parts of herself that her children need for physical or emotional support, and uses those things to manipulate them
• disregards her children's autonomy and physical or emotional boundaries

How do I know that I'm on the right track? How do I know that I'm not doing irreparable damage to my children? How do I know that I'm making choices that will help them to be healthy in the future and will ensure a healthy relationship between them and me?  My mother didn't know. What makes me think I can be any more self-aware than she was?