My mother, despite her fancy PhD, was hopelessly emotionally stunted.
Fiercely proud of her academic accomplishments, she decided in her thirties to get married, leave her career and have a bunch of kids. Her mom, a Slavic, Catholic immigrant, had had seven kids in quick succession, so perhaps my own mom didn’t put much forethought into her decision to transform into a mother.
Without a firm sense of self, she judged herself and others by accomplishments, so for her, a PhD, a husband, and four small kids meant success.
Regardless, she quickly came to deeply resent her life as a mother of four small children. Her husband, meanwhile, turned a blind eye, both to her misery and the extent to which she inflicted it upon us kids.
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She regularly told us how much we held her back from some other life, lamenting between fits of rage that she could have really done something, been in the FBI, CIA, something. Anything.
But, as she termed it, we had her “trapped like a rat.”
With four kids, two of us (my sister and I) were deemed “bad” while her only son and her youngest daughter (ever the people pleasers) were “good.”
Fast forward thirty-something years later, her children are now all in their thirties. Only one has married. Two have reproduced (one by accident). All (including myself) are riddled with paralyzing intimacy issues.
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Myself, I am thirty-five and still living at home with my parents.
Why?
I have a fourth-grade daughter and no man to help care for us, both because I’ve been too focused on mothering and because on the rare occasions when I attracted stable, secure men, I panicked and sabotaged.
Like clockwork.
My siblings suffer from similar patterns, though they sometimes manifest differently, like when my 31-year-old nurse sister, who hasn’t seriously dated a soul for past ten years, frantically demands attention from our parents and her friends in a way that feels disruptive to their home lives.
Or like when brother abruptly let his law firm in another city to move back next to his parents, and visit daily for meals and dog-sitting and plenty of mommy-daddy time.
In his mid-thirties, he also hasn’t brought a significant other around in nearly a decade.
Our only married sister (who now has three little ones) was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder before settling down. She was also — not coincidentally— the most common victim of my mother’s vindictive moods when we were kids.
She was, to put it bluntly, occasionally psychologically tortured by our mother, the rest of us turning a blind eye both to avoid becoming her next target and because such behavior had become somewhat normalized for us.
Powerless and confused, we let the most fragile and hypersensitive among us take the heat.
Sometimes I think that my mother took out so much inner rage on her because she reminded her of her own child self. I see the similarities, always have. Physically, they look almost identical in some older photos. Personality-wise, both are very neurotic and hypersensitive to any sort of perceived criticism.
Through marrying and moving away at a relatively young age, my sister did escape her mommy issues. In other ways, perhaps she will always be stuck.
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Me though?
My karma (or unique life journey) has me stuck here for a decade now, living alongside my mother and trying my best to make the dynamic work in a way that doesn’t totally screw up my daughter.
I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process, and all the deeply engrained, pervasively subconscious ways that I embodied the way I was raised as a child.
I’m a lot to deal with, they say.
But I’m getting better every day, changing myself and no on else, rising above, counting my blessings.
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Thankfully, my mother has mellowed with age, and because as her children became adults and began to perceive her with subconscious disdain, she broke inside.
She is tamer now, facing her own guilt as she enters the final years of her life on earth.
That’s the thing about aging. It makes people slow down and examine themselves and their lives in a brand-new way. Almost like, the past is all there is now.
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I’ve mellowed as well. In large part due to my daughter, whom notices even the things no one else does.
Kids are funny that way. And terrifying.
A while ago, she told me, voice choked with tears, that she wants me to be nicer to her Gammy. Basically. she thinks I can be mean.
I cried. I try harder nowadays.
With time and deep healing practices, it’s become easier and easier. Most of the time, nowadays, I am largely unfazed by her irascible moods.
At the same time, I must give credit where credit is due.
She actually has truly changed her ways in some respects. She’s still the same ornery, insecure misanthrope, but she makes effort now to back down from a fight, to expand her personal interests, to see things from a different point view.
I guess it’s never too late.
I don’t worry too much about her, though. I’ve got my own life to deal with, and my own particular set of demons, many of them inherited from childhood.
Don’t we all?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Vitolda Klein on Unsplash