Gratitude, mothering, my mother

I am so grateful Noah is okay today. Actually, having Noah in my life at all has made me a much more grateful person. I am grateful for the kindness of strangers who are nice to my son. I am grateful for sunny days and sandboxes. I am grateful for the bluejay that we look for every day. I am grateful for health and growth.

One thing I have been grateful for too is that my parents have turned out to be better grandparents than I thought they would be. My dad still has problems engaging with Noah, but he tries so hard that Noah doesn’t notice (and engages with my dad). My mother definitely still lives in a bit of a bubble of narcissism and I don’t always feel like she appreciates the real Noah but rather how he reflects on her as matriarch. Also he has to be the most special at everything, and fortunately her perceptions make this easy for her to believe.

But as a grandparent, it really doesn’t matter. She provides love, attention, hugs, books, and cookies. This is totally enough as far as Noah is concerned.

And both my parents have really been there to help out, coming over for a few hours when Noah was sick so Carl or I or both could frantically work, and so on.

So I am grateful for that. And perhaps all that makes what I am about to say even worse but…

the thing is, my relationship with my mother is still horribly toxic to me.

My mother in law was here over Easter and she took a few minutes to mention to me that during the Easter dinner experience my mother had treated me pretty badly. And in fact, she had. I just really hadn’t noticed. I think the issue in the present is that mother is really not comfortable with the choice I have made to work. But she makes strange comments like:

“I’d like to tell my friends about your job, but I don’t really understand what you do.”
(I’m an editor. My mother worked as a freelance copy editor. It is not that hard to understand.)

What my MIL noticed is that whenever I started to say anything, my mother would interrupt me to talk about my sister. (Who, by the way, is moving to Texas for a really lucrative job that she deserves and has worked hard for. It’s just that the lucrative part is what comes up. Every 5 minutes or so.) And the comparisons that then took place put me in a bad light. I finally (after 14 years!!) explained to my MIL that I am the black sheep of my family in that I continually have failed to live up to my intellectual potential and that nothing I do besides producing children really has mattered to my mother since 1993 when I dropped out of school.

These sound like small examples I think, and they kind of are. But like water torture, it’s not the drops themselves that are horrible. It’s the consistency of their arrival that makes sore spots sore. And it’s not just about my work. It’s my looks, my money, my house, my parenting (although this last tends to get the biggest pass).

I really am the black sheep in the sense that nothing I do seems to be entirely comprehensible to her. This should not come as a surprise especially as my mother outright said (when we were thinking of moving to Ottawa) that she could not stay with Carl and I because she does not like us the way she likes my sister and her husband (and with whom she can stay overnight as a result). But it still does, every time, kind of hurt.

And the irony is that I’m reasonably sure that it will be me who does the old-age hands-on caregiving in whatever way, both because of geographic proximity and because… I don’t have the hugely lucrative job to maintain! (Kind of a joke because my job is just as important to me in my own way.)

Anna, my therapist, used to encourage me to cut contact with my mother. I didn’t then and now I really wouldn’t, as Noah really does get huge joy out of that relationship. But I do think that this constant wearing down of my personhood that happens around my mother is not helping me out right now, and I need to come up with some strategies to address it.

You can tell I just commissioned my Mother’s Day lead article, no? Yes, I’m on short lead times this year. :-)