So Bubba and I spent yesterday with his mother: a woman who has spent the last 56 years making her family fucking miserable. Her misery is poisonous, like long-term exposure to arsenic. She must project her suffering onto her sons, her daughters-in-law, and her granddaughters. Her life is 24/7 pain and suffering. Happiness is for the stupid, the lazy or the mediocre. She most certainly DOES NOT recognize that she is responsible for her life and that her actions — regardless of her ‘best intentions’ — are the source of her pain and suffering, and also the pain of her grown children. Interestingly, the description also perfectly describes my primary maternal figure (a term from one of Spazzie’s current obsessions — attachment theory), my maternal grandmother.
These intensely damaged women aren’t especially unusual. Their generational peer group named the “Silent Generation” (ironically named, apparently because, Dear Jesus, if only they suffered in silence, sometimes). These women had very few life choices. Regardless of their hopes, dreams, talents, or desires, women were expected to marry, become mothers, and stay home. End of their dreams; end of their independence; end of their story.
My grandmother asked me once “So, you’re not going to have children?” I was pushing 40 and had been married for many years; naturally, she asked the ‘kid question’! I responded “Nope,” and Bianca looked me straight in the face and responded —in her Italian-accented English — “you’re smart. If I could do it over, I wouldn’t have had kids either.” I wasn’t shocked; I laughed. I knew Bianca didn’t enjoy being a mother. She always told me what a fabulous life she would have had, if only it had been, in absolutely every possible detail, a completely different life.
My mother – after years of totally traumatic mind-fucking by my grandmother — repeated the same pattern with me. She would have had an amazing life, except my father ‘got her pregnant.' With me. Yes, yes, that’s correct. I am the ‘fucking’ reason (heh, get it?) my mother wasn’t living her dream life. Every time I think about it, I want to scream, very loudly “I HAD NO INPUT IN YOUR CHOICE TO FUCK MY FATHER”!
[Political Commentary: Can’t wait for President Clownshoes Asshat to bring the ‘good ol’ days’ back again! The days when women had no control over OUR reproductive systems. Clearly, being forced to have a child you don’t want ALWAYS works out terrifically great for that unwanted kid and the kid’s mom].
Bubba heard a slightly different, but equally damaging, story from his mother. “You were supposed to be a girl; you were supposed to make up for all the suffering your father causes me. I only stay with your father because of you.” HOLY FUCK! Who are these women, that they must feed on the souls of their young?! They are our mothers and my grandmother; these women repeatedly told us throughout our childhood that they didn’t want us, so we should be thankful for whatever we get and not make a fuss; as if either of us had a fucking choice!?
If Bubba and I were so motherfucking amazing that, before conception, we could have looked across space and time and picked our parents? We’d have made a very different choice. But we didn’t choose; and it’s completely whacked that our mothers are so toxic, they must blame us as though it WAS our choice. As Bubba says, “it’s a whole briar patch of crazy.” Isn’t that the absolute perfect metaphor for a toxic mother? Painfully enmeshed and entagled?
As the children of mothers who so clearly loathed raising children — mostly because of their refusal to take responsibility for their lives, and they're unwillingness to deal with their childhood issues — Bubba and I hold this truth to be absolute: having a child should be a choice and one that involves both parents. I’ve added-in this last bit because one of my mother-in-law’s more ‘helpful’ tips on marriage is “men never want children, so you have to trick them. Stop taking your birth control and then tell him it was an accident”. Nice, huh?
"Beauty". One of my original mandalas. Rest your eyes here, should you need a moment. Many people carry around childhood damage; the goal is to embrace your resiliency, and to stop allowing the damage to define and/or constrain you.