she loves me, she loves me not

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." —Robert A. Heinlein

One of the questions that tortures adult children of narcissists is whether or not their parent actually loves them. It cannot be denied that the parent feels strong emotion, and that the parent may even believe that this strong emotion is love. Many of us even heard "I love you" growing up, which makes it even more confusing when we realize that we don't feel loved. 

When I start going into a "maybe I'm not giving her enough credit, maybe she really does love me and miss me" tailspin, it helps to ask myself, does she act in a loving manner? How does a person behave when, as Heinlein says, the happiness of another person is essential to his or her own? I'm guessing that they would not belittle them, or attempt to control them, or act like they dislike them.

As a kid, I was taught that sometimes you don't like family, but you always love them. Today I would say that this isn't true. While I might be irritated by somebody at one specific time, if I don't like them as people, how can I truly love them? And if I have been aware for many years that my mother dislikes me, I have my answer to the love question, don't I?

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. 

listening to shame

I just watched a powerful TED Talk from shame researcher Brené Brown. Wish I could embed it, but since I can't, I'll just ask you to follow the link, and I'll leave some quotes that caught my attention below:


"Vulnerability is not weakness, and that myth is profoundly dangerous... Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage."

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change."

"Shame drives two tapes: Never Good Enough, and if you can talk it out of that one, Who Do You Think You Are?"

"There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive."

"We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame."

"Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it, to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other."

"If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too."

"If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path."

for my fellow truth-tellers

AMEN to that! I've found this to be very germane to both my feminist truth-telling and my family dysfunction truth-telling. People might not want to hear something, but that doesn't make it any less true.

part 3: love crumbs

My husband and I got into the car, and he told me what the phone message said. My mother, in a strained I'm-holding-myself-together voice, saying "I didn't get the chance to say I love you." End message.

Oh, sorry, I didn't give you the chance to say you love me. I was too busy defending the boundary that you crossed several times within a half hour - appearing at my door, leaving cards for my children, calling me on my phone. All things I've asked you not to do. But, you know, if I'd just calmed down for a minute, I would have heard that you love me. And then what? It would have magically been true?

We talked about how I reacted - I wanted to know what he thinks would be ideal, and he said that he thinks how I handled it was perfect. I wanted to know what he thinks about how I process this stuff - I need to talk about it afterward, mull it over. He thinks I'm at a good place - definitely not the way I was years ago. His hope is that someday it wouldn't bother me at all, just be something I could toss off at the end of the day: "hey, my mom dropped by."

He mentioned that he doesn't feel angry at her, because it would like being angry at a dog that bites you. It isn't really the dog's fault. It's a dog. It's in its nature. That reminded me of the story of the scorpion and the frog, which always comes to mind in the form of this scene from The Crying Game:

He has a point. I know she's never going to change, and that means she will probably continue to drop by with these "innocent" gestures. It's in her nature. This is what I can look forward to on birthdays, Christmas, Mother's Day, Halloween, Easter, Valentine's Day, forevermore.

Over cocktails at dinner, I told him that it just makes me feel so mean. I preach compassion, and then I bluntly refuse to have anything to do with her? How compassionate is that? "Shouldn't I just suck it up and be kind to her? Not let it get to me?" "What would that do for you?" he inquired. It's a rhetorical question. We both know that I extended that kind of compassion toward her for many years, knowing that she couldn't help who she is, and that it hurt me, and hurt him because it hurt me, and hurt our kids. It's like the airline-inspired bit of wisdom that I've seen applied to parenting: put your own oxygen mask on first, before helping others.

I confided that her ambush coincided with a resurgence of left-out feelings. I recently saw some photos of my siblings and my parents and my nieces and nephews together, and it dragged up old baggage. A few days later, I read Jonsi's post about immunizing yourself against narcissists, which quoted an article from Dr. Martinez-Lewi:

Don't be surprised at the number of people who follow and are true believers of narcissists. They crave being a member of the inner circle even if they are infrequently thrown crumbs or are honored to kiss the ring of the anointed.They have thrown away their identities, strapped themselves to the narcissist for the E ticket ride. They will do anything to be identified with this person. They believe that he or she is a good human being because of outside trappings and the wielding of power over others.

In my comment on the post, I wrote:

This was very true of me before I extricated myself and is still true of my siblings. Getting over it is a little like being an addict - you're never truly all-the-way better. A glimpse of your old drug can bring new cravings. I saw some photos of a sibling/Nparent gathering last week and even though the rational part of me doesn't want to be part of it at all, the old inner-circle need is still there. I still feel left out, even though I've chosen to BE out! I don't want to kiss the ring, but I still sometimes miss the crumbs.

It's hard to find yourself wanting the crumbs even thought you know that they're crumbs, and stale ones at that. I recalled the time when my mother called me, wanting my support during a trip to a funeral. I felt flattered even though she told me that she had already asked two of my four siblings (yay, third choice!).  I wanted to be helpful, and went, even though it meant leaving my still-nursing baby, suffering engorgement, reorganizing my husband's work schedule, and hearing all about my mother's fabulous mother-daughter trip with my sister the year before. "We stayed in that gorgeous hotel and went to this wonderful restaurant and that beautiful museum..." I had never been invited on a mother-daughter trip before. This was it. The whole weekend was filled with driving from funeral location to funeral location and hearing about my mother's fabulous adventures with other people. My baby cried inconsolably every night while I was gone and I had to buy a cheap electric pump to avoid getting mastitis. It was clear that the bereaved family hadn't expected my mother to come and that she wasn't as important to them as I had always been led to believe. It was also clear to me that I wasn't as important to my mother as I had hoped.

Crumbs. Dusty, dried-out, moldy crumbs from other people's banquets.

Well, last night, I didn't dine on crumbs. I had a feast with my own Valentine, who has seen me through almost two decades of emotional development. We had delicious food, we joked, we told stories, we held hands across the table. He validated my feelings and shored my self-confidence back up. I told him how much I appreciate what he does for me. I felt wanted, and loved, and valued, and enjoyed. All of the things that I don't feel when I'm near my mother.

She didn't screw up my Valentine's Day dinner. In fact, maybe she made it just a little better, because of the clarity I felt by the end of it:

There is no place in my life for her.
My children are precious to me and I will protect them.
And my husband is a gem. I'm so glad he's mine.

labels

I'm reading David Burns' book Feeling Good, and while I'm actually becoming less of a fan of cognitive-behavioral therapy while reading it, I did like this passage:

"Labeling yourself is not only self-defeating, it is irrational. Your self cannot be equated with any one thing you do. Your life is a complex and ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and actions. To put it another way, you are more like a river than a statue. Stop trying to define yourself with negative labels - they are overly simplistic and wrong. Would you think of yourself exclusively as an "eater" just because you eat, or a "breather" just because you breathe? This is nonsense, but such nonsense becomes painful when you label yourself out of a sense of your own inadequacies."

He goes on to talk about labeling others: "When you label other people, you will invariably generate hostility."

These aspects of self- and other-labeling brought to mind both how narcissistic parents tend to label their children (cold-hearted, the artistic one, dependable, moody, forgetful, bitchy, good, bad, etc) and also how we internalize those labels and apply them and others to ourselves. It also reminded me of the special ed mantra "put the child before the disability," because saying "an autistic child" focuses on what you think is wrong with the child, while saying "a child with autism" allows you to think of the child as a whole person, and their diagnosis as just one aspect of who he or she is. It helps you to think of the child in terms of what he or she can do, rather than what they can't.  This is true of any child, not just those with a medical or psychological diagnosis. The difference between a "difficult child" and a "child who is sometimes difficult to parent" can be vast. The same goes for labeling ourselves. Am I lazy, or am I a person who sometimes feels sluggish? Am I forgetful, or do I sometimes forget to do something? 

I'm going to think about what labels I put on myself today. Where did they come from? When do I use them? Can I change the way I apply them?

living kindness

This entry from Jonsi with a passage from Dr. Martinez-Lewi caught onto a splinter of a memory that had been nagging me in the last few days. 

I say that narcissists are not good people because when we know what they reap in terms of human relationships, the picture is ugly. Yes, they may give money to worthy causes. Some of them are generous and that is good and praise worthy. But when we view their personal lives we see close up the psychological havoc they wreak with their spouses and children and other family members.

I think of this as The Kindness Issue. I commented once that while growing up, there wasn't an attitude within my family of serving others in simple, daily ways. My mother objects to this point of view - she countered via email that she and my dad were constantly doing things for other people like donating to food drives and putting money in the collection plate at church and sponsoring a poor child overseas. These things are true, but as Dr. Martinez-Lewi notes, it's not giving money that makes a person good. 

Things I never saw my parents do:

• approach somebody on the street who needed help and offer assistance
• run errands, prepare meals, or otherwise help out a friend or community member who was ill or had had a baby
• go without something they wanted in order to give it to somebody else
• perform random acts of kindness
• perform hands-on service (medical missions, soup kitchens, Habitat for Humanity, trash pick-ups)

Now, my mother says that she and my dad just didn't make sure we saw them do these things. That doesn't jive. If they had been in the habit of living kindness in their everyday lives, wouldn't I have noticed? I want my kids to see me do these things, every day. I want them to see me being kind to other people and also being kind to them. I've been challenging myself to act on kind impulses - rather than just thinking about the homeless woman on the corner near a grocery store, go up to her and talk to her, and volunteer to bring her a meal. Get involved in my community, and talk about it with my kids. Involve the kids when I can. Donate food not just when a holiday food drive calls my attention to it, but as a regular part of my grocery shopping. Accept the challenge of service trips when possible. Offer child care to friends who need a break, give my free time to somebody who needs an ear or a hug instead of rushing around on my own agenda.

But there's more. I want my kids to see me put away a shopping cart that was left in the middle of the parking lot. I want them to see me holding doors open for people. I want them to see me greeting people, offering help when it looks like it might be needed, saying encouraging things to harried parents in the check-out line. Rather than thinking about reading a book later to my kids, put down what I'm doing and read it now. Give them unsolicited hugs. Notice good things about them and tell them. I don't want them to see me doing these things so that I look good to them, but so that they learn to do these things, too.

I want my kids to feel like they have enough emotional and physical abundance to share. I want them to notice opportunities to share it. I want them to engage in the world in a loving, giving way, not in a tit-for-tat, stingy way in which one only does kind things for a tax deduction or to look good in front of others.

baggage ♥

May we all have our someone by our sides, physically or online!

the elegance of the hedgehog

Yesterday I stumbled upon several quotes that I had copied from The Elegance of the Hedgehog when I read it about a year ago. The book explores narcissism at times, and while narcissism is by no means the emphasis of the book and, in fact, did not detract from my enjoyment of the book (as it did for Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections), I still found that these passages leapt off the page when I read them.

The first reminds me of myself in my twenties, when, despite having some issues with my mother, I still believed that her general controlling approach to parenting was the right way and that touchy-feely "gentle" parenting methods were "lax" and "permissive" (you must say these words with a sour sneer, as if picking up soiled underpants from the floor). At that time, I thought of discipline as synonymous with punishment. I thought of children as unformed creatures who had to be trained and broken.

"The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. 'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that it's not true, it's too late.  The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things.  All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children." (page 22)

When my first son was an infant, I still clung to the belief that my mother's childrearing practices were mostly good. I was not yet ready to put myself in my son's place and consider the possibility that I was raised in a way that was often unkind and injurious, and denied my autonomy from birth onward.

This next passage immediately called my mother to mind:

"She cannot feel safe if she hasn't crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. A world where there's room for other people is a dangerous world...at the same time she still needs them just a bit, for a small but essential chore: someone, after all, has to recognize her power...she would like me to tell her, while her sword is under my chin, that she is the greatest and that I love her." p 84

For some reason this reminds me of my mother speaking scornfully of anyone who didn't do things the way she liked, like a woman down the street, who worked with my mother, and who had a pair of sons with whom we liked to play. These children sometimes forgot to be perfect please-and-thank-you automatons, and were accustomed to calling adults by their first names. The woman, who was also a single mother, was held up by my mother as an example of all that was wrong with permissive parenting. She was a failure, a bad person. Her children were beneath us. We were discouraged from playing with them and I believe my mother stopped having a friendly relationship with the mother. My mother seemed really hung up on the fact that the boys had a hard time remembering to call her "Mrs. Clairesmom" instead of by her first name. 

Everything was a fight to determine who was right. Her parenting was the right way. Her religion was "The One True Church." Her ambitions at her job reflected the only correct way to run the place, and heaven help those who stood in her way.
One more quote gets to the heart of the matter:

"If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed." (page 85)

Yes, that explains so much. It's very true of my mother, that she took all the faults she found in herself or with the world and turned them into a moral code, a set of absolutes. Nothing was ever a grey area. Nothing. I can sometimes feel the same tendency in myself, stemming from my own alienation from her, from the world, from myself. Again and again I fight that tendency, and struggle not to pass on the universal lie to my own children.

be excellent

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” 

- Jim Henson

on motherhood

During my grand file clean-out, I found a document containing quotations about motherhood. I wonder if my own preoccupation with all things related to children and motherhood is related to the failure of my mother to parent compassionately?  (I'm sure it is.)

Some choice quotations:


To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - is happiness.
- JB Priestley

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
- Pope Paul VI


The art of living is to function in society without doing violence to one's own needs or to the needs of others. The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.
- Elaine Heffner