In my last newsletter, I focused on some of the important lessons my mother passed down to me. This week, I am looking at some of the hard lessons that caused me harm growing up.
I often think the most important things we learn from our closest family and friends are the things they are not really able to change. There are some people who think we should not mention these seemingly negative things about the dead – or dying – and if you have those reservations, I have them a bit too. And I also think it’s helpful – individually and as a grieving community – to take a deeper look at those things. So, if you’d rather keep the messy stuff invisible – as my mother did – take this as your content warning and proceed with caution.
My mother drank too much as a young woman – it was the 1960s, and everyone drank and smoked publicly. When my mother went out to a party on a Saturday night, the next morning was not nice.
She was tired and sad and “had a headache.” I wanted to help her feel better, but I couldn’t. That dynamic of activating your children’s desire to help you, but being unable to accept their help, is something I see in myself. This family dynamic is exaggerated by alcohol, but alcohol is not the root cause. There is a very fine line between venerating one’s elders, and feeling one needs to take care of them. My father said about my mother, “You see things that she cannot see, so you need to be the bigger person.” That phrase “the bigger person” has come down to me like a commandment. When a person is overwhelming, I try to understand them and stay with them through the challenge. “Bigger person” can easily slide into “better person,” and that is not a good thing. My needing and wanting to tend to my mother, but in that process also causing her conflict and pain, is a tension she leaves me to wrestle with and hopefully find a way of peace she could not give herself in life.
In my mother’s mindset there was very little space for failure.
My shorthand for this is saying “In college, my mother was the Grand National Women’s Debate champion.” So many complicated discussions with my mother ended in one person – almost always her – being right. Even when we were talking about me, it felt like she saw her point of view as more important and right, her feelings as facts, and my lived experience as not even worthy of being voiced. What’s interesting to me is how I can also be like that: honing my own ideas as if they are swords, focusing on exactly the right words to get my point across rather than sitting calmly and listening for what is real for the other person. If you have this challenge, Marshall Rosenberg Non-Violent Communication (1999) was a game-changer for me: a book that gave me a framework to look at myself and my own shortcomings with compassion and curiosity to change.
Worst of all the things my mother bequeathed to me was her perfectionism.
She was so hard on herself, always pushing herself to learn more, do more, be better. As a little girl, I felt she noticed only the places on my report card that needed improvement. As a teenager, she rejected my friends and me when we were having challenges and needed an adult guide the most. And, as an adult, she kept pushing me so hard – in her directions, not mine – that I often felt triggered, and occasionally crushed, just being in her presence. Sometimes I see myself do this to my own children, and it’s excruciating to be repeating this thing that caused me so much pain over so many years.
In my next newsletter, I’m going to take up this question of things we learn from our mothers – not just our biological mothers, but the maternal line – where those ideas come from, and how we might shift them.
Gently note things in your parents – or other elders – that have caused you harm, and where you see yourself doing the same thing and inadvertently harming others. The first step of any transformation is to look honestly at more of the things you were once afraid to see – in yourself and other people. Just notice them … that is a big step … and love yourself as you want others to love you, even with those tenacious ancestral threads clinging to you from the past.