probably the biggest challenge as a parent is making divisions between the roles of parents and the obligations we have to ourselves as individuals. separating the two is hard, and often results in a split persona, parent or person.
i have never been a good liar or a good faker. emotions are all over me like hair, and you can't miss them. trying to hide them is almost always a failed exercise, so over the years i just have stopped trying. it hasn't won me any battles, but at last i can just be free to be myself. i guess. which means, basically, that i have been a person and a parent, and the line has been blurred, often with disasterous results. i have never been able to adapt to the individual roles, and now i will pay for it.
Where i am now? Who am i now? it's said that no matter how you try to rectify the mistakes of your parents, you will duplicate them or, better yet, invent new traumas for your own children. obviously, i bought into some of that, trying to be more affectionate, to be honest, to not hide anything from austin, all things i longed for from a parent. i wanted a relationship with him. i have one. but my honesty has apparently backfired on me, and i don't have a clear solution or many choices in trying to correct the error.
i have been going to see sue fuller for a number of months, and i think for the first time in my life, i am actually making progress towards living my life with a little less baggage. the confrontation that i had with my mother this summer was quite the freeing experience. not that i haven't gone back to some old habits with her, but i am surely a little less afraid and apprehensive about dealing with her. she doesn't have the power over me that she once had. i have forgiven her for doing what she did. i have never believed that the sources of her anger towards me were intentional, just like my sins and mistakes with austin were not intentional. but it makes for a terrible pattern of behavior in terms of how i look at the people i care for and what i expect from them in the form of proving that they really do care about me.
always, always, always i have sought approval and validation from my mother that i was lovable and a good person. she is incapable of doing that in the manner that i deemed to be normal...hugs, attention towards you that isn't negative. an awful pattern it has been. i have expanded the horizon for validation to include all of the people who are close to me, if anyone is.
what i have realized is that there is never enough to convince me that someone really cares about me. i have put up a wall and even if someone does do things for me out of kindness or caring, i don't fully accept the acts as legitimate. i don't feel that i am worthy of caring for. and i am suspicious of any gestures, as they could be found to be merely gestures and baseless in their sincerity.
i poured a lifetime of love into austin, and now i am standing quite alone, haven driven him away i guess by my poverty of spirit. i know that he hates my imperfections, especially my health issues. he feels guilty and he feels heavy with the burden of being the one person i now look to for validation of love. on the outside, the scenario is pretty bleak. one on one time with him is awkward and i don't know how to talk to him or even approach him. his attitude now is one of picking, again, as he did last spring, trying to use anger as a way to distance himself from me. sue seems to think that his automatic response to me is one of guilt and then anger. he doesn't want to have to see me like i am, nor does he want to help me when i need help. he knows, because i have told him so, that i don't have anyone else in my life. i never thought that caring for someone would be a burden and that you would eventually learn to hate seeing them because they remind you of what you don't want to do or be.
obviously, my first response to understanding this was to talk to him. but about what? why don't you like being around me? well, now i know. so what to do?
i have to continue with life as i have been living it since he went to college, which is being wholly independent of him and his demands and learn to function without his emotional input. independence now means doing things by myself, including the hard physical things that i have needed him to help me with. it is confusing and saddening when i have to beg for help and he is mean about it. it seems by all logic that if someone you care about needs help, you help them because you love them. in the perfect world, i guess this would count. but i dont' live in that neighborhood anymore, and i haven't for a long time. austin has changed his address in a lot of ways, and this is one of them. this isn't home to him anymore and he is more comfortable at his dad's house. there are no emotional demands from his there i guess. what i ask him to do is hard for me, but just annoying for him. there doesn't seem to be any common ground anymore between the two of us, even baseball. i understand where he is. but that doesn't make me any less sad.
sue says that i have to learn to believe that he really does love me, which will require me to reexamine the parameters of how a person shows this to me in a way that i would believe. right now, trying to do nice things for him or be pleasant isn't enough. he just rejects it and it just makes me mad and more rejected. so i have to learn to make myself happy and not think about how he hurts me.
certainly i need to find pleasure in my own day to day life and explore the possibilities of how to make myself feel whole and valid, and not just by the things that others do or give to me. christmas has always been one of the few times when i look for the validation (other being birthday) and i have most often been devalued if it is based on effort towards doing something especially for me. every christmas holiday presents its own issues and problems. this year's is my gearing up for rejection for a month from austin. what i have to do is concentrate on making the time happy for me, and the hopefully, happy for him. he is going to do whatever he wants to do, and i know i am a postscript with the mind set he has now.
i have freed him from the two christmas obligations that we had, which are trimming the tree and putting up the outside lights. these are things that i enjoy, even without him, so i will do them in the spirit of happiness...for me.
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