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cahn3+/5. Recced by Captain Awkward, and it sounded so exactly up my alley that I immediately put it on hold at the library. And indeed it was.
There is a lot of pain in these essays. There are a lot of people... who have really terrible family situations. There are some of these essays where my reaction was something along the lines of, "man, I'm glad I never had to go through anything like that." There are essays where -- regardless or not of whether their specific relationship with their mom was better or worse than mine (generally worse), I empathized with them so hard that it was both painful and cathartic to read. There are a couple of essays by people who had actual good relationships with their mothers, and those were rather a relief to read.
I think the essay I enjoyed most was Leslie Jamison's "I Met Fear on the Hill," talking about her mother's first marriage, before she had children, and how it refracts how she thinks about her mother and her relationship with her mother. (This is one of the good relationships.)
The essay where I found myself wincing in empathy the most was Carmen Maria Machado's "Mother Tongue," not that my mother is really so much like that, but somehow there is a consonance in the relationships, more perhaps in the way that I'm like Carmen than in the way her mother is like mine, except that she is rather more self-aware than I was at that age.
I almost didn't quote that bit because, after saying I identified with this essay a lot, it honestly isn't very much like my mom or like our relationship, at least surface-wise -- and I had the same trouble with the other quotations I was thinking about using. My mom was really proud of me, in fact. She never told me to make better choices, nor did she wish she had made better ones.
So now you're saying, well, how are they similar at all? I think there can be a certain amount of... insecurity, for stay-at-home moms. For achievement in your career you can't point to something you made, or customers you made happy, or money you made. You pour yourself into these kids and in the end you only have what they make of themselves, which in the end you have no control over, and if they're screwed up or don't live up to the potential you think they had or come back from therapy telling you that they think you didn't give them what they needed... I think it can lead to insecurity. And that's what I see in this essay, even if Machado didn't explicitly write about it.
The one that kind of annoyed me was Andre Aciman's "Are You Listening," about his deaf mother who learned how to mimic hearing people very well, in which he says,
I mean. My mom is (a) not deaf and (b) really, really super-competent at a whole bunch of things. Including math! She majored in math in college. She's not dumb at all. And yet all those things (including some I left off just so I could finish this post) are things she doesn't do either. If you asked her if she thought in words she'd look at you like you were crazy. I just... feel like it's sort of reductive and obnoxious to say it's because she was deaf, or because of her education. Maybe it was! But maybe his mom was just like that!
There is a lot of pain in these essays. There are a lot of people... who have really terrible family situations. There are some of these essays where my reaction was something along the lines of, "man, I'm glad I never had to go through anything like that." There are essays where -- regardless or not of whether their specific relationship with their mom was better or worse than mine (generally worse), I empathized with them so hard that it was both painful and cathartic to read. There are a couple of essays by people who had actual good relationships with their mothers, and those were rather a relief to read.
I think the essay I enjoyed most was Leslie Jamison's "I Met Fear on the Hill," talking about her mother's first marriage, before she had children, and how it refracts how she thinks about her mother and her relationship with her mother. (This is one of the good relationships.)
When I told Peter [her mother's first husband] this essay would be about his evolving relationship to my mother, it was the truth. But it wasn't all of the truth. Because the essay is also about my evolving relationship with my mother, how some part of me wanted to humanize her myth, and how I found, in Peter's portrait of her, another gaze saturated by worship -- but also the puncturing of that worship with the admission of her actual, textured self.
The essay where I found myself wincing in empathy the most was Carmen Maria Machado's "Mother Tongue," not that my mother is really so much like that, but somehow there is a consonance in the relationships, more perhaps in the way that I'm like Carmen than in the way her mother is like mine, except that she is rather more self-aware than I was at that age.
A vast and unbridgeable crevasse erupted between us. Whenever I saw her, she found some way to let me know that despite my accomplishments, I was failing. "You need to learn to make better choices," she told me, though what choices they were, she never specified. Besides, all I could hear was, I wish I'd made better choices. And I couldn't help her with that.
I almost didn't quote that bit because, after saying I identified with this essay a lot, it honestly isn't very much like my mom or like our relationship, at least surface-wise -- and I had the same trouble with the other quotations I was thinking about using. My mom was really proud of me, in fact. She never told me to make better choices, nor did she wish she had made better ones.
So now you're saying, well, how are they similar at all? I think there can be a certain amount of... insecurity, for stay-at-home moms. For achievement in your career you can't point to something you made, or customers you made happy, or money you made. You pour yourself into these kids and in the end you only have what they make of themselves, which in the end you have no control over, and if they're screwed up or don't live up to the potential you think they had or come back from therapy telling you that they think you didn't give them what they needed... I think it can lead to insecurity. And that's what I see in this essay, even if Machado didn't explicitly write about it.
The one that kind of annoyed me was Andre Aciman's "Are You Listening," about his deaf mother who learned how to mimic hearing people very well, in which he says,
[My mother] had spent her first eighteen years learning how to do what couldn't have seemed more unnatural: pretending to hear... [My mother's school's headmistress's] method had disastrous consequences for my mother's ability to process and synthesize complex ideas. Past a certain threshold, things simply stopped making sense to her. She could talk politics if you outlined the promises made by a presidential candidate, but she was unable to think through the inconsistencies in his agenda, even when they were explained to her... She might like a painting by Monet, but she couldn't discuss the beauty of a poem by Baudelaire... Did she think in words, I'd ask? She did not know...
I mean. My mom is (a) not deaf and (b) really, really super-competent at a whole bunch of things. Including math! She majored in math in college. She's not dumb at all. And yet all those things (including some I left off just so I could finish this post) are things she doesn't do either. If you asked her if she thought in words she'd look at you like you were crazy. I just... feel like it's sort of reductive and obnoxious to say it's because she was deaf, or because of her education. Maybe it was! But maybe his mom was just like that!
no subject
Date: 2019-06-18 05:31 pm (UTC)That quote from the Machado essay isn't exactly like my relationship with my mother, but it's close enough to really resonate.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-19 04:07 am (UTC)Right?!
That quote from the Machado essay isn't exactly like my relationship with my mother, but it's close enough to really resonate.
YES THIS. I mean... it's not about either wrong choices or insecurity really, it's about that chasm, that gap between who our mothers wanted us to be (or what they thought they wanted us to be) and who we actually are. I think.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-28 02:41 am (UTC)None of it really resonated closely in terms of my relationship with my mother, but one of the essays may have led to a breakthrough in terms of my understanding of my mother's mother. She's the one person in my family who has a major mental illness that I've never been able to fit into any kind of a diagnostic box. Catastrophic thinking, yes, paranoia, yes, impostor syndrome, yes, but none of those fit her outstanding traits of mental illness. Those are all minor issues.
My mother always told us, "Maybe schizophrenia?", so that's what I grew up telling people about my grandmother, but when I started to learn about mental illness, I couldn't fit her in a schizophrenic box at all. As a diagnosis, it made no sense to me. I think my mother was just going by the paranoia.
But when I read, "[The book Understanding the Borderline Mother] explained how we worked together as a family to manage, excuse, and ignore what was happening inside our house. It explained how my father enabled. It explained how my sister and I were respectively cast as the all-good and all-bad child, both labels coming with dangerous repercussions." I had a total Aha! moment. That's my grandmother, grandfather, uncle, and mother respectively.
The more I read, and I went back and reread, the more of my grandmother I saw in the borderline mother.
Even one of the patterns that my mother said went with schizophrenia, is also found in borderline parents.
See, my mother once watched a talk show where someone talked about growing up with a schizophrenic mother, and how he learned from a young age to interpret the expression in her eye to tell whether she was Crazy Mom or Loving Mom at any given moment. My mother came and told me with the excitement of validation, "That was me! I learned to look for a certain look in my mother's eye so I knew when to avoid her." So that supported her schizophrenia guess.
But there's this from the "Her Body/My Body" essay! "The problem was that we never knew which mother we would have, which parents we would have: the predictable parents who made us study and who we knew loved us, or the ones who violently raged at each other and caught us up in their maelstrom. We were experts in reading their moods, always on guard for the moment when the darkness returned."
More quotes.
"The problem was that she saw no difference between her body and my body."
My grandmother wasn't wiping my mother's butt at age twelve, but when my mother ended up in therapy at eighteen, the therapist told her the root problem with her relationship with her mother was that her mother didn't see her as a separate person. And also her mother hated herself. So she took out her self-hatred on the daughter she identified as an extension of herself. And that wasn't just something a therapist said, but something that made sense of a lot of the observed behaviors.
"I’ve watched videos of borderlines in recovery on YouTube explain what it feels like to have a brain that relentlessly attacks the self. Borderlines often have unbearable self-loathing and despair."
Then there was this claim, which I would need to read up on the research to see how well-supported it is, but it was almost eerie: "'Studies show that chronically intense emotions damage the part of the brain responsible for memory . . . . Because the borderline mother is unable to remember intensely emotional events, she is unable to learn from experience. She may repeat destructive behaviors without remembering previous consequences.'
"This is the saddest part of our story. My mother remembers a different life than the one we’ve lived with her."
Now, denial and gaslighting are a standard part of abuse, and this could admittedly just be that, but apparently my grandmother regularly said in what sounded like genuine confusion, "That never happened," whenever my mother asked her why she had done something hurtful. I remember my mother saying in frustration that come Judgment Day, she wasn't going to be found perfect, but the one thing she was going to do was admit to what wrong she had done.
So I went and googled the list of borderline traits. It wasn't a slam dunk, but I also don't know her that well (obviously not well enough to confidently diagnose her with anything), but it was a better fit than anything else I've ever looked at. It was the first diagnosis I'd seen that would explain her *major* symptoms and traits, even if there were also several boxes that I didn't have enough evidence to tick.
Now, I know personality disorders are controversial, possibly just a copout for our ignorance, and borderline in particular may have a component of sexism toward women with childhood trauma. And obviously all the caveats in the essay about how you can't just diagnose someone by reading a book or a page on the internet. "I know I can’t diagnose my mother. I know it’s extremely complicated to reach a diagnosis even when one works closely with a therapist. But what I can say is that when I read about this condition, for the first time in my life, the disparate pieces of my childhood fell into place."
For me, it was the first time I'd been able to put my grandmother in a group with other people who shared a cluster of traits, instead of just "Crazy Grandma", sample size of 1. And that in itself is useful. So thank you!
I have grabbed the Kindle sample of the book referred to in this essay, but it's about $45, and I have numerous books on topics of greater interest to me that are $45 on my wishlist, so even if I like the sample, it'll probably have to wait until I'm back at work or have some less wishful thinking prospect of going back to work. But it's on my Kindle now!
I have a starting point for Grandma, that's awesome. I kind of idealized her as a kid and had an almost entirely positive relationship with her; then right after I turned 13, she turned abusive overnight (from my perspective) and then disowned us all a week later, so there's a complicated history there. Plus of course the way she was the dominant influence on my mother, who was the dominant influence in my house growing up. It would be nice to add some narrative neatness to this story.
(Also, +1 on the deaf mother thing. I'm not sure *I* could discuss the beauty of a poem.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-28 08:17 pm (UTC)So, uh, my weakness is advice boards, and for a while I was frequenting this one:
https://community.babycenter.com/groups/a4725/dwil_nation
Your grandma... is not in a sample size of 1, or even 2, if you start reading some of these posts. And the kids having "fleas" from that kind of upbringing even if they don't themselves have that particular disorder is... very common.
(Now I hang out here a little more: https://community.babycenter.com/groups/a6728031/all_in_the_family
which is similar but not nearly as strident as DWIL.)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 11:32 pm (UTC)Forgot to mention, shortly after this comment, I read the sample for the book (looks good, still holding off on purchasing until the budget is less tight), and discovered that what we now diagnose (rightly or wrongly) as BPD used to be diagnosed as schizophrenia! More and more of all this is lining up with Grandma.