a new life, a new me

I'm coming up on the five-year anniversary of what I think of as my personal Independence Day. November 1, 2007 was the day that I simply said no to my mother, who was asking for unreasonable concessions from me, and when she went from sweet-innocent-asking-for-something lady to mom-in-a-rage, I stood my ground, calmly, self-assuredly, with the knowledge that I did not have to be angry or defensive or apologetic. I simply had to say "no."

I shook for two hours after I got off the phone. Did I really just do that? Did I defend my boundaries? Did I refuse to be sucked into a fight? Did I politely end the conversation because the other person could not engage in a polite, constructive manner?

Oh, yes I did.

In those five years I have mourned the loss of the mommy that I had wished for, seized control of my own life, discovered new skills and a new identity, launched a new career, and refused to take any bullshit. I have worked on being simultaneously more firm and more flexible, more compassionate and more detached.

I have also struggled with depression, anxiety, self-doubt, and weight gain. I've dealt with siblings who won't speak to me, cousins my children will probably never know well, and a sense of alienation from my childhood and family. It hasn't always been wonderful, but it has always been moving forward, no matter how slowly, toward a whole new way of interacting with the world.

Six months ago, I seized my life in a whole new way. I joined an exercise group, one of the "boot camp" types, because it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that I wouldn't like. It scared the everliving shit out of me. I hate waking up early. I hate exercise. I've never, ever gone jogging. But I want to have a strong body. I want to have muscles that feel the way my new psyche feels. And you know what? It has been AMAZING. I can run almost five miles, which is HUGE for me. I'm stronger than I have ever been in my life, and I'm much more energetic, and together with the other changes in my life, it's adding up to a fantastic total package and feels GREAT.

So great, that I hit a new milestone the other day - some unnamed person (but I'm sure you and I can guess who) sent flowers to me for my birthday. The type of flowers sent was a little too coincidental to be from anybody but la madre, and when I opened the FTD box and saw the unsigned card, I was annoyed. And to be honest, I wanted to throw them away or something. But I stuck them in a vase and left them on the counter to be dealt with later, while I went out and had a fantastic evening with people who like me for me, and felt very whole and healthy. The next morning, I decided to mix them with the flowers my husband gave me and put them on the table. My middle son adores this type of flower, and they really are beautiful, and together with my husband's flowers they represent lots of different things about my life, and isn't that kindof what a birthday is about, anyway?

I think I'm turning a new page. Sure, my mother is still stalking me by sending packages and cards. It's infrequent, and kindof annoying, but I think maybe I'm moving beyond feeling controlled by these things. I can decide for myself whether to keep or dispose of these things. I used to feel like there was some *right* way to handle her bombs, but now? Meh. Who cares? I can't change her. I can't make her not be a sad, dysfunctional, stalkery woman whose daughter doesn't love her. She can leave things at the door and it doesn't have to mean anything to me.

Let's hope I can hang on to this feeling. I think I probably will, though. The last five years have been the best of my life, and things just keep getting better.

Declaring my independence was the best thing I ever did for myself. I highly recommend it. 

individual

At coffee with a friend last spring, she looked across the couch at me and said something about how I was really, really restricted as a teen. I think her words were "not allowed to live." And you know, she was right. I was, in many ways, not allowed to live. I was expected to live my mother's life - or at least the life that she had wished she had had, colored by her warped child-of-narcissist adult point of view. She was never a normal child, so how could she conceive of what normal and healthy adolescence should be?

A few days later, my husband reviewed our collection of Monty Python DVDs and reported to me that while we owned The Meaning of Life, we do not own The Life of Brian or The Holy Grail. Thinking about this transported me directly back to my days as a high schooler involved in the theater group. There were some kids who were clearly theater kids, and there were some kids who were involved in theater routinely, but were somehow not really part of the theater group. I was one of those. I remember that during my senior year, I was finally allowed to join the end-of-run cast party, held at one thespian's home (I never saw his father, I still have no idea whether or not his father was even present). We watched various episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it was completely, utterly, mind-blowingly new to me. It was a sense of humor that was completely different from anything I knew. And I loved it.

What I didn't know at that moment was that the reason this humor was so new to me was because it came from outside of my family paradigm. It was something that appealed to me, as an individual, as a member of a community that existed separately from my family. I was seventeen before I discovered this.

When do children normally start experiencing life independently from their family? I don't know, because my "normal" is different from the "normal" of my peers. All I know is that many of them seem to have been experimenting, exploring, testing the waters of individuality many years before I even started dipping my toes in. While they were figuring out who they are, what they like, how things worked for them, I was isolated. I was kept at home, allowed out for specific, strictly-supervised activities and nothing more. By the time I started exploring, they were all so far ahead of me that it made it nearly impossible to catch up.

My oldest son is not quite a "tween" yet, but I can already see him starting to stretch his individuality a bit. Even though I've been working on my initial, pre-programmed "nip it in the bud" reactions to my kids for almost ten years now, I'm still finding new things that make me balk and feel like digging in and saying "no" just because, I don't know, it seems like I should shut this stuff down? How stupid. And yet how conditioned I am (and most of us are!) to think that we should say no, no, no to most requests from kids. My son asks for small things and my immediate impulse is to deny his request, and I have to force myself to slow down, think about whether or not it really matters, and say yes. We're talking about little things like wearing daytime clothing to bed instead of pajamas. Meaningless stuff...except that it's not meaningless to him. It's his first steps toward figuring out how he likes to do things, what other things feel like. He's supposed to be doing this at this age. He needs "little things" to explore right now, and we have to support him in figuring out how to make decisions about what to explore now, before we get to bigger explorations like sex and drugs and driving and such. Thinking about my son and his non-pajama sleepwear reminds me of the time when I was a teen and I wondered what sleeping in the nude was like (I had heard that some people did it), so I tried it. My mother woke me up in the morning, noticed the lack of clothing on my shoulders (the rest of me was under the covers), chastised me for not wearing a nightshirt, and let me know in no uncertain terms that this would not happen again. Why? What did it cost her for me to choose how much clothing I wore while sleeping? How was a decision about my body hers to make at all?

I don't want to make all of the decisions for my children. I want them to be able to explore who they are in both little and bigger ways while they're still living in my home and have the safety net of mom and dad to fall back on. I hope I'm able to remember this as they get older and more separate from me.