One More Perspective

If you are still reading and have been in this for the long haul, Thank You!  This is not a short story, as it involves the many facets of complicated humans.  There are many layers and many perspectives, and conflicting accounts don’t invalidate any of those layers and perspectives.  I’m not writing about good vs evil, nor am I buying into the game of invalidating parallel realities;  that’s what got us here in the first place.

My relationship with my Mother struggled greatly during my second marriage in the early to mid-2000s. She didn’t click with my second Husband (they couldn’t be more different in temperament, and he was vastly different from my first Husband), but she didn’t say much of anything to me about him.  I appreciated that, especially in light of how fond my Mother was of my first Husband, so fond, she was convinced I was the bad guy, despite ever talking with me about any details of that marriage, especially after I moved away and my Husband wooed her.  In her world, there always had to be a bad guy; all complex issues and personalities eventually boiled down to single-word descriptors.  Most bewildering to me from this time period was how free my Mother felt to have running commentary regarding my children. Specifically, she had strong opinions about my Daughter, her (technically) second Grandchild. Already, we were very rarely seeing her, but my Mother still believed she had sufficient insight to our lives, to my Children’s lives, to make judgments and draw conclusions. It was many years later, I would learn she used the same language about my Daughter not just in front of adults but also to my Daughter’s big Brother: “Crazy. Your Sister is crazy!” My oldest finally came out with it, a decade later. The only way I could know he was telling the truth was because I had heard my Mother say those same hurtful things about my Daughter in front of me, too.

I knew my Mother had great reservations about a lot of things about my life, and I certainly felt her disapproval of my Daughter. Why? My brilliant Daughter was anything but a compliant, docile wallflower, and I think that was enough to disturb my Mother. By the age of five, my uniquely beautiful Daughter had a fierce intellect, a temper, and a ferocious capacity for reading and learning. From there, all of her attributes were increasing in volume, creativity, vocabulary, and wit, and compelling more and more attention with each year of her energetic life. My Daughter was simply not to be contained, and she greatly challenged my Mother. My Mother most bonded to my eldest, who by now could understand the value of compliance with his Grandmother, and was therefore seemingly cemented on her good side. It was very stressful for me to be around my Mother and her judgments, and I felt very protective not only of my Daughter but my Children’s Sibling relationship. Consequently, we saw next to none of my Mother in those years, 2003 to 2007.

Then in 2008, my Sister near-simultaneously graduated from College and had a beautiful wedding.  My Mother was very pleased with her choice of Husband, and thought I, too, was married to someone very nice by that time.  Hell, my third Husband was a saint, really, my Mother believed, since he married her Difficult Daughter and accepted her with her three children in tow.  I was four years in therapy when I embarked on another reboot of my relationship with my Mother, and I was confident it was the right thing to do.  After all, I was approaching her under the most favorable construct in her eyes…for the moment, my life looked good on paper.  She could hold our picture up and speak of her other Daughter, the eleven years older one (the one more illustrative of my Mother’s actual age); the return on her investment appeared finally to be there.  She now had two well-married Daughters who had the Husbands she was still trying to land.  My memory gets fuzzy here, but at some point by 2008, my Mother’s Husband (my Sister’s Father) had decided to move on….move on so far, he retired in Europe.  My Mother also had a massive falling-out at her Megachurch; she believed they didn’t support her after she had an at-work fall on their premise, but to me, it was obvious she had worn out their welcome, their tolerance, and then finally, their risk-mitigation plans.  I’ll explain. 

Once, there was a brilliant movie starring Cher, titled Moonstruck.  In it, Olympia Dukakis’ character speaks the following words of brilliance to be heeded by all:  “Don’t shit where you eat!” In the movie, it pertained to a professor sleeping with his college students. In the case of my Mother, the root cause was her habit of feeling like she had to have opinions about most things and people (very much learned; as I detail in the chapter on my Maternal Grandparents), combined with a cellular-level need to be liked. Once my Mother struggled through multiple schemes to be accepted by the high-society of her Orlando Megachurch, skimping to buy the Mikimoto pearls, the Longaberger baskets and other flashy consumables, she eventually arrived at her inevitable and deeply unfortunate destination: defeat and bitterness. Also, my Sister had aged out by now, so the secondary benefits of the Megachurch were no longer making up for how my Mother daily saw herself when compared to the Megachurch women. With that, she began to harbor more and more overt negativity toward them, up to and including the Megachurch leadership. Things she previously overlooked, the wealth of the Megachurch leadership, the disproportionately welcoming stance toward the richest of the members, questionable relationships, and vanity, she now noted in painstaking detail. Over time, taking note turned into commentary. Commentary then turned into gossip at work.  My Mother was oozing years of frustration and sharing it with people at the Megachurch who had nothing to lose, but a lot to gain by repeating to the Church Leadership what they had heard my Mother freely share. My role? I repeatedly pointed out the predictable ill consequences of her behavior. Well, of course. No, I simply wasn’t smart enough not to. Golly, yes, again.

There was to be a silver lining for my Mother, and for a while, I would be intensely happy for her. After my Sister’s marriage and consequent move out of state (for her Husband’s Law School) and the Megachurch (after some fifteen years of employment) unceremoniously letting her go, she moved to a place she felt happy and surrounded with Friends: Sarasota. That choice made perfect sense to me. I was so happy my Mother would be liberated from the self-inflicted, comparative hell of the Megachurch women, she would have a brand new start and good company. She was young, beautiful, and inherently energetic. Over time, she and her best Friend cooked up a business together, and my Mother was absolutely perfect for it. Her Friend had the capital to invest, and my Mother gobbled up the necessary schooling and training. Together, they had a compelling business story. Each had been impacted by breast cancer, the story went, so they felt compelled to open a post-mastectomy boutique. Absolutely powerful was the fact that my Mother was a great student of the government and insurance forms required to run the business and help patients get reimbursement for their breast-cancer recovery medical supplies, and more importantly, she was magical with the recovering cancer patients. My Mother was patient, helpful, compassionate, and had a bottomless supply of all things to help them feel cared for and hopeful. This was big! She was finally self-actualizing, and I could ignore the part about how this was probably working so well because the patients were so steadily complimentary of her; so genuinely grateful for her gentle help. It was a wonderful era in my Mother’s life, and we were seeing her a little more often. I was buying business-related, personalized items for her; it was one way I was actively showing my support. I took pictures for her, and my pictures became part of her promotional activities. It was truly a transformative time. I thought she could have this business for twenty years. Despite how well things appeared to be going with my Mother, I should have assumed and projected way less.  I should not have assumed her business experience would be transformative….certainly not for how she related to me.

As life would have it, shortly after my Mother and her Friend went into business together, Medicare laws changed, and health insurance companies followed suit, reducing the benefit (government subsidy) of breast-cancer patients recovering after surgery. The post-mastectomy patients now had a fraction of the covered prosthesis and related accessories, driving a heavy consolidation in the stores serving them. A new business, like theirs, was immediately in trouble as a result of the drop in merchandise volume moving through. Patients had to make due with fewer post-mastectomy support items, and stores didn’t experience patients’ ability to pay for the items themselves. This led to my Mother closing the best thing she had been so proud of and very good at running. I was devastated for her.

My Mother had always been a hard worker and had navigated leaving her birth country to embrace her new one, learning the language and accepting the jobs she could take on, below her formal education level. By the time she was approaching her sixtieth Birthday, long divorced and extremely capable on her own, she gave love two more times, each time with someone I would classify as eccentric. In the first instance, she learned why wealthy people with children are very careful about a newcomer; adult children looking forward to their known inheritance are usually quite savvy about the motivation of someone who could marry their Parent late in life, and impact their decision-making. It was unpleasant for her to realize this man was not interested in allowing her to have say in his finances; she ultimately moved on, and I felt relieved for her. I clearly was operating on different parameters to judge her situation. I was proud she could support herself in Sarasota, still working with post-mastectomy patients, but in hospitals and stores which survived market consolidation. I thought she’d welcome life without the someone-else’s-Family drama she just left behind, but as far as she was concerned, something was still not as she had envisioned. I learned my Mother once again found her way to be among the wealthy, still subjecting herself as the outsider she economically certainly was, and still not drawing any contentment for the quality of life she was creating for herself, on her own. I understood she yearned for companionship, but she yearned for a particular type of a Husband: the Provider.

2011 tuned out to be a busy year. My Sister and her Husband moved back to Florida upon his completion of law school, and while my Husband and I were vacationing with my best Friend from high school and our respective Families, my Mother made a frantic eight-hour trip to introduce someone to us: her new Fiancé. Here we were, four adults and five children, immersed in a week lakeside complete with boat, canoes and other watercraft, taking turns cooking and playing board games, but my Mother thought it opportune to drive to us and make the introductions in person. I was determined to “just roll with it.” My going-in-position was that of a suspended judgment (as she had attempted to identify an opportune suitor a handful of times prior), but being engaged already, that was a big deal.

They drove all day from Sarasota to Seed Lake in Northern Georgia, so by the time we, the four adults in the lakehouse, sat down with them for a conversation, it was quite late. I remember noticing this man was very handsome. I also couldn’t shake I felt this was a dog-and-pony show. My Mother was genuinely happy, though, and I wanted her to be. I wanted to be happy for her. The man was well-spoken and seemed to really want to cut to the chase with me. My Mother had primed him about me, who knows what all she said, but whatever it was, he spoke to me as an adult, an equal, a business person. He didn’t overtly speak of love and other distracting things; in fact, rather quickly, he led the conversation toward finances, right there in front of everyone (well, the adults; the children were well playing). He said as soon as they were married (within a few weeks), the two of them would be closing on a house, for which he would be footing the capital, but placing in both their names. He also detailed he is a recipient of a sizeable trust-fund. He explained his Parents had left him millions decades ago, and aside from living off of his inheritance, he also had a reasonably lucrative career, so immediately, my Mother would be accessing a good amount of cash flow.

I began to gather, My Mother’s Fiancé was once again of that same mold….years older than she was; well over a decade older, and in possession of means. He looked wonderful for his age. With any luck, the two of them could live a very comfortable, nice retirement together. ….but why his concrete focus on funds? Especially funds my Mother would be immediately clearing fair and square? I also noticed my Mother was imposing odd, supposedly Hungarian cultural behaviors on her new Fiancé, demanding he say this or that in request of her participation, or some other “jump through this hoop” type thing in the name of seeing if he’d comply. These were not difficult, degrading nor demeaning tasks, more on par with demanding one’s date open the car door or offer up the last muffin, but it was all just so extra. Theatrics. Where was my Mother getting these “a Hungarian gentleman would behave [so-and-so] way” items to demand of him at every turn? Why were these things not keenly important to her before? I was both bewildered and annoyed. I could tell I was distracting her with my confused looks and comments, on the heels of the most random items I had never heard of from Hungarian customs; soon, she was telling me I didn’t understand Hungarian culture.

By the end of this whirlwind introductory night, I was puzzled….probably even bumfuzzeled, but my best Friend’s Husband had a solid lock on the situation he believed; he’d soon be on pins and needles to share. After my Mother and her Fiancé left for the night, my Best Friend’s Husband came out with his observation: this man was buying a nurse maid, not so much marrying an energetic, beautiful woman about whom he was head-over-heels. Damnit. Could Best Friend’s Husband be right?! I simply couldn’t think in those terms, but he simply couldn’t shake it! He went on to defend his impression and expand upon the financial dialogue, right down to annual figures. It was both fascinating and devastating. I was desperately rooting for my Mother. I was ready for her to find contentment, to find rest in her constant grasping. As 2011 was winding down, neither of us knew what was awaiting us in 2012. Unbeknownst to either of us, we were in competition for whose story would turn the most strange and embarrassing, but for a moment in December 2011, things looked good on paper for both of us.

On the day of her third marriage, my Mother looked both beautiful and happy. She was in one of her many signature knee-lenth, fitted sheath dresses, this one dove grey, with a very high heeled pump, and her Husband wore a red polo shirt. He was much too casual for the occasion at the Court House, but she was beaming. It wasn’t too many months later I learned though….they went from “I do!” to permanently sleeping in two separate bedrooms. His request, with eerie timing, and according to my Mother, out of the blue. Apparently, my Mother had attempted to bring some of the first-time Bride elements to their wedding day, not sharing living-quarters and, although too much information for me at the time she recalled this, not actively engaging in a physical relationship with her Husband-to-be. The day they were married however, she geared up for the foregone conclusion of a pending wedding night, but he informed her that’s not how their married relationship would go. He asked my Mother to take up residence, not in their home Owner’s Suite, but in a second bedroom, she later told me. My Mother was devastated. There was no hiding it; he had his own activities during the day, and at some point in the evening, he’d retire to his bedroom suite, watching TV and reading from there. He didn’t ask what she would be doing for the rest of the evening; she would often tell me he’d just go to be by himself. This was a massive bait-and-switch as far as my Mother was concerned, especially as she would be faithfully preparing his meals every day, clean their house, and do all of the caretaking by herself. He could not be counted on; he’d make sure she didn’t find it worthwhile to ask him to do anything more than once.

I now invite you to sit with this for a moment. Not sit in judgment because that’s not what this writing is about, but sit in reflection. Picture that little Hungarian girl whose sweet Father and ally had vanished from her life at age four. Picture her fending for herself in her household of Siblings with much more fight than flight in them, with nowhere to turn, but to freeze in the moments, moment by moment.

As my Mother would speak with me about her marriage in the early 2010s, I could see her world was shrinking day-by-day. I could clearly see she was in a classical “Every Form of Refuge has its Price” situation, and she was painfully operating from a scarcity mindset. I felt her core-shaking mass confusion growing angrier by the year. This told me she had been genuinely doing her best, doing what she, without a shadow of a doubt, believed was her life objective to achieve: to marry a Provider, a Husband with ample means to support her, in a manner well-recognized by society at large. That four-year old watching her Mother scramble for survival in Communist Hungary without my Grandfather had hard-coded within her: worth and survivability would hinge on her marrying well. From that point on, she subconsciously carried her life objective with her, making marrying into wealth her overriding purpose, without really understanding its depth. Her insistence to never mention the past, to disallow me to bring it up, to keep her unanalyzed Sister closest to her, all led to her fearfully maintaining her mantra. Marry a Provider. This beautiful, capable, hard-working, innovative, educated woman was making her decisions for what should be the best part of her life, still on the unprocessed trauma of the four-year old within her. Is it as straightforward as I make it seem? Nothing is straightforward where humans are concerned, but those who are credentialed in this area are reasonably united on bringing attention to the impact of one’s early childhood environment, one’s original caretakers. It is not so much the individual circumstances, but the overriding emotions that matter in one’s upbringing. Impoverished Families can still thrive in shared love and compassion, but when even those nurturing emotions are absent, the damage of poverty is much more scarring. Money also doesn’t mean a trouble-free upbringing if boundaries and accountability to one-another are absent. It’s those early childhood attachments (or lack of) that imprint on our psyche; left to our own devices, none of us can understand our default reactions and what we bring to our own realities.

Psychotherapists and Early Childhood Development professionals are less decided on the most successful path to emotionally grow beyond our formative years, but it generally involves seeking out perspectives aside from our own and cultivating self-awareness and compassion. What a deceptively tall order!

Despite having passed six decades of life, I could see my Mother was seriously stuck between her lifelong pursuit of a Husband with means and her own anger about how he, now that she had found him and married him, was treating her. On good days, she could be cool as a cucumber, relishing in her newfound spending money and coming and going as if single, but underneath it all, my Mother was growing steadily frustrated with her Husband’s lack of regard for anything having to do with her and the things important to her. Unfortunately, I was of no help. Rather than deeply realizing and having compassion for my Mother’s paralysis about her marital circumstances, I was too blunt about what I saw and impatient instead. When my Mother would retell the same time-consuming complaints over and over, I stopped listening to the minor differences in the details of her stories, and I would simply point out she was once again on repeat. I would highlight for my Mother how the circumstances of her stories may have changed (which is why she thought she was telling a new story), but the underlying dynamic between she and her Husband was consistent: My Mother would try to get her Husband to do what she wanted him to do, and he made sure to make that a very unproductive experience for her. I was desperate to show her she could step out of her circumstances, but coming from me, she received it as me pressuring her too much to take responsibility for herself. 

Each time my visit with my Mother was monopolized by her complaints about her Husband, I tried to explain it was time to take a very objective look at her Husband and her marriage overall, and make decisions based on how things actually were day in and day out, and not based on how she had wished they were. I did not know the correct answer for her, whether to stay in her marriage or not, and I said so.  I did however, keenly understand her pain she was now inflicting upon herself by not believing her Husband’s actions…by not accepting them…by not accepting him. I explained to her she had, in fact, worked herself into a classic power-struggle.  “A power struggle refers to an evident or subtle competition in a relationship for control and influence.” Michael Hovde

https://psychcentral.com/relationships/power-struggle-relationships

The good news about power-struggles is that either party has the choice to end it at any time. In my Mother’s case, I explained to her if it was overall worth it to her to stay married to her third Husband, she could healthily do so, if she accepted, based on his well-demonstrated actions, he would never lift a finger in care of her and their shared household. This, I explained to her, is a perfectly traditional contract between certain Husbands and Wives, and it all comes down to acceptance of the dynamic. Supported and supporting. Each side has its distinct role, no complaining. Alternatively, she could cut her losses, divorce him and move on, knowing what she does for herself she can count on, and she has no resentments around serving someone else. Of course, this would come with financial and societal consequences. “…I guess every form of refuge has its price!” would sing the Eagles. I told her I could not make any recommendations to her, but I knew one thing: it was keenly unhealthy for her to remain in her status quo of trying hard to change her Husband’s behavior and incessantly complaining about his resistance to her.

I was also seeing how my Mother’s Husband was relating to the rest of us, and that actually allowed me to understand the lack of engagement my Mother was describing. Here was a man in his seventies who had no children of his own, but who inherited two adult Children and four Grandchildren via marriage, take next to no interest in them. Visiting with him was like volunteering in a nursing home; you are there to listen to long-ago stories over and over and be good company for a while, but don’t expect to get a word in edge-wise or to talk about anything in your life. After a while, these visits yielded nothing more than a one-sided experience, with no substance, no connection. My Mother’s Husband was contently disconnected, and it was plain to see.  For me, not materially tied to him, not even living nearby, it was easy to accept. His best effort was to allow the Grandchildren to ramble on; his lack of follow-up questions seemed to signal unconditional listening to the kids, but I didn’t see it the same way.

In just a handful of years, my Mother and her Husband’s power-struggle had turned to a stalemate. As a consequence, my Mother’s days consisted of small interactions loaded with a lot of accumulated frustration. She had neither the decompression skill nor the interest in obtaining it from hard work in psychotherapy, so she was like a pressure-cooker releasing just enough steam by complaining to make it through another day. The few times I spent a little time around my Mother and her Friends, their common currency was complaining. They bonded in what I saw as gossip. I even had flashbacks to my Mother’s Mother, the personal producer of her highrise Page Six. Reflexively, I was uncomfortable around them; and I could sense their threat, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was the gravely odd one; no fertile ground there. The only way they would possibly process me was to discredit me.

My Mother’s best days were when she could spend time with her fourth (and youngest) Grandchild, and spend lots of money on her Twin Sister. My Mother’s Twin was visiting very often in the mid-2010s and staying for months at a time, fed, clothed and entertained at my Mother’s expense. It was a cash-abundant environment, and my Aunt certainly played her part, allowing my Mother to take care of her, too. The cumulative value of the clothes and cash that flowed into my Mother’s relatives’ pockets by this time, was significant. I was frequently having to decline my Mother’s gifts, settling on just a dishwasher and a washing machine, and not reimbursing her when she hosted my children for a week or two a year at her home, between 2013 and 2019. Unfortunately, I was also not quiet about the monies she was distributing away from her own household. I often told her she should maximize her own savings; save for when she and her Husband are in need of more medical care, or an ADA-compliant upgrade to their home. As if blindly following a script of doom, I resumed expressing she was sending her own retirement funds to those with socialized medicine and guaranteed retirement in Hungary. While I tried very hard not to know how much money my Mother was funneling to my Sister and to her (OK, our) extended Family in Florida, it was my Mother who, while many years later trying to talk me into accepting a diamond ring, said: “You should take it; I have given a lot more to your Sister so this is nothing, really!”

To summarize, in the name of being what I saw as supportive and loyal – encouraging my Mother to make the decisions she needed to lead herself toward peace and savings – I only built more antibodies toward me. When I said “Accept your Husband as he presents himself and decide independently what you wish to do about your marriage,” to my Mother meant I was uncaring about her grievances, and when I said “Save for yourself, not spend on others!” I was selfish and anti-Family. In other words, all was as it always was; I was still managing to assist my Mother in diverting all things stressful in her life to be attributable to me, exactly as I had my entire life. Or so I thought. What an arrogant idiot I was; I thought I was maintaining. Little did I realize, I was now facilitating and fueling a much larger dynamic between my Mother and me.

Remember when in reference to a moment in 2011, I said both my Mother’s and my life looked good on paper? From that point on, our lives would trend very differently. By 2015, my Sister and her growing Family moved from the next suburb over to three hours away from my Mother, and my Mother was packing up her household, selling their waterfront home, leaving their Friends and routine, to follow. As far as I could tell, every aspect of my Mother’s and her Husband’s life was upended, with the singular gain of still being able to be of regular help to my Sister. This, I was wise enough to never bring up. I was somewhat relieved when my Mother found a hospital volunteer opportunity nearby, which allowed her to be more externally connected. Getting used to the new town was challenging for both my Mother and her Husband, and my Mother attempted to minimize consternation by putting a rigorous routine in her Husband’s day. As one would anticipate, this only entrenched their power-struggle. Her Husband had considerable safe walking range and amenities in their old town, allowing him to manage his day largely autonomously. In their new town, walking paths were limited, and restaurants much further, making her Husband more and more dependent on my Mother. This, over time, proved significantly more stressful and deterioration in their relationship showed up in the degree of control my Mother exercised over her Husband. One may say it was for safety, and it mostly was, but not all of it.

I thought it my Mother’s new volunteer job was a very positive step in their move to follow my Sister and her Family; she got to work a few hours with cancer patients and give her best to them. In turn, she felt her purpose again, and she felt appreciated. My Sister relied on my Mother amply, giving my Mother a nice balance and getting her out of her focus on her Husband’s conduct.

There were a lot of changes in my life in the 2010s, and eventually, I had to tell my Mother before she heard it second-hand. In 2016, I chose to take her on a quick trip to Savannah, Georgia, to have the conversation away from distractions. I made ample time for her venting and I did my best to remember my own boundaries about making suggestions to her I knew would ultimately make no difference. Once she was running out of complaints about her Husband, I, without fanfare, told my Mother I was certain I was gay. No, I didn’t have a relationship, I wasn’t dating, but I would soon be dissolving my marriage and helping everyone’s adjustment to my now well-incubated reality. In the moment, she was attentive and accepting; she asked questions that were logistical in nature, so I answered those. I revealed my years-long internal struggles, therapy and my remorse about my then-Husband, but I also explained the gentle, ramp-down manner in which I have handled his side of this, and all the ways I was accommodating his transition, at his speed, all the while ensuring continuity for the kids. I was convinced I was tapping into genuine emotion from her, as I was entrusting her with my transparency and vulnerability. I considered our Savannah trip a largely good one. When I eventually did meet someone about whom I felt serious, my Mother was among the first people to meet her. My Mother was at our wedding when we married. She even helped sew a beautiful detail onto my wedding dress. She stood, along with my new Mother-in-law, for many memorable wedding photos.

By the late 2010s, following thankfully minor vegicle incidents, my Mother had rightfully taken away her Husband’s driver license and sold his vehicle. This narrowed his autonomy and sense of control greatly, however. Compounding that were the elements of her preferences about their home upon which she insisted (sitting a certain way on the couch so it doesn’t wrinkle, disallowing his unmade bed, walking three miles daily), which made for uncomfortable days for him, and that’s where her control was especially degrading their relationship. My Mother didn’t seem to want to pick her battles, seeing her Husband’s opposition as direct disrespect and a perpetual challenge to her. The relationship between my Mother and her Husband had so far deteriorated, it became difficult to witness and know it wasn’t my place to do something about it. First, My Mother’s Husband was diagnosed with a prostate condition that required surgery and subsequent bladder care. Then, my Mother was diagnosed with an early-stage colon cancer and had a fully successful surgery removing it, allowing her to skip chemotherapy and other follow-on treatment. Their health challenges only exasperated their childlike relationship. The more disconnected from his own care he became the more controlling and bitter she turned. Her overtly displeased behavior caused him to want to comply with his healing regimen even less, and he routinely made difficult messes she then had to clean up. While she did so, it was with now fully vocal resentment. They were very difficult to be around, and in the case of one neighbor couple who spoke up, my Mother and her Husband were garnering attention around their poor coping together.  I had to very deliberately practice boundaries around what I could say and do without making matters worse, all around. My Sister was the local person, I was not.

There was a second timeline of events which progressed through the 2010s, but was just below my awareness, made worse so by my own blind determination to have a better relationship with my Mother; ironically, in an attempt to demonstrate the importance of Family to my own children. To tackle this, I have to rewind a bit.

In 2012, we moved from Oklahoma City to Washington DC Metro and we instantly became an interesting place for my Mother to visit. When she visited, we did our best to help her play tourist, take her pictures for her Facebook account, and include her in our day-to-day. From 2013 to 2019, with annual frequency, my Mother visited us, or the kids went to see her for a week or two.  She flew to help us when my (now former) Husband’s Father passed in 2015, but the kids couldn’t miss school.  We helped my Sister and her Family move their household three hours North one year, then my Mother and her Husband to move to my Sister’s new city, the following year.  My Mother came to my wedding to my Wife and was very participatory; she even sewed by hand a beautiful detail piece onto my wedding dress.  I was very grateful.  She flew to stay at our house with the kids when my Wife and I traveled for my Sister-in-law’s Birthday in 2018.  We flew down, kids in tow, for Thanksgiving with her 2017 through 2019.  While I knew we struggled with keeping our Mother-Daughter relationship growing toward something with elements of a healthy regard, I thought we were at least on the same page about my Children, her Grandchildren, needing to grow up with a sense of Family and belonging. I was mistakenly taking for granted my Mother and I would be reinforcing each other as part of that Family safety construct for my Children. I thought my Mother and I identifying as a Family for the betterment of the next generation was a shared value we had. I was pitifully incorrect.

What I didn’t begin to uncover until well into the 2020s was that my Mother, as early as 2013, had been freely sharing with my Children stories from my teenage years and adulthood. Now, one may say: “How sweet, my Mother spoke of my love of ice skating or that I learned English while suffering through ninth grade Biology, or perhaps, that I played volleyball for the first time on a team in the eleventh grade. She may talk about how I began working as a babysitter at age fourteen and as a photographer at Walt Disney World at age seventeen. I thought my Mother may talk about the private schools I paid for, or the gusto with which I learned how to create a gluten-free household when we learned we medically needed that.

I wasn’t entirely delusional, I knew my Mother didn’t support all of my parenting practices; she thought I was too strict in certain areas and not enough in others, but I was ill-prepared for how things really were, what she really thought and how she actually conducted herself with my children when I wasn’t around. Hindsight is 20-20, so I have to be compassionate with myself as I write this, but I trusted a person to do right by me, who had never actually demonstrated being on my side. There is a very important lesson in there. Despite my years of therapy, I allowed my childish wishful thinking to override evidence. 

I realized much too late my Mother had been using her alone time with my Children to bond with them exactly as she bonded with her adult Friends:  through negativity, complaining and ultimately, by finding a common enemy.  Rather than hold herself to adult standards and provide structure and a safe place for her Grandchildren, my Mother went for unchecked popularity and the ultimate validation.  Understanding her childhood struggles, which set the tone for her adulthood, it is not a big a-ha moment to connect these dots now.  My Mother was still seeking validation every day, even in her sixties.  That’s truly a tough existence; a very challenging internal battle just to feel OK in her own skin.  As such, she was willing to get validation, regardless of its source.  It is my belief none of this is conscious within her.  Instead, this is the scared little girl stuck in time; the lost, overwhelmed Child whose sweet Father is a political prisoner and whose Mother is doing whatever and however necessary to pull the four of them through those years awaiting his return, after the defeated 1956 Hungarian Anti-communist Revolution.

Through her experiences of fighting for her survival at different times of her life and looking for belonging from people with more power than she believed she had, my Mother had already had a long-established formula for how to seek the favor of those whom she believed would also elevate her position.  She seemed to snap into this role instinctively.  Bewildering to me, she seemed to specifically be motivated by seeking validation from those closest to me, especially if I had a fallout with them.  She bonded with my first Husband after I moved out of state and separated from him and with my third Husband after our divorce (because I had acknowledged I was gay).  My Mother even seemed to need the emotional support of my Friends, and never shied from calling them to complain about me. 

When it came to my Children, that fallout was presenting itself in the natural, developmentally appropriate, and expected terms of teenagers seeking ways around rules and Family structure, but that gave my Mother the synergistic way in.  Like an expert in forging bonds of deceit (and not at all in accordance with her college degree in Pedagogy), my Mother took advantage of just the right time to become a confidant to her Grandchildren, my Children.  She first began to lend her overtly expressed sympathy to my oldest at around age fourteen, then soon to his Siblings who followed three years behind him in age, and even more annoyed by Mom’s rules around studying, their medically necessary gluten-free diet and standards of behavior toward each-other.  My Mother, I was told several years later, was happy to listen to my Children’s normal teenage complaints about me, then countered it with stories of my “wrongdoings” from my teen and even adult portfolio.  Whether she intended the outcome, her stories served to discredit and undermine me and to make her the truth-teller, the hero, the one with the power to let Children see behind the parental curtain.  Imagine a Grandmother, one who is an educated school Teacher, getting on the bandwagon of her teenage Grandchildren, declaring the Grandchildren’s dislike of home rules the sign their Mother is once again being difficult and demanding, then giving to them all the ammunition to decide their Mother is a hypocrite. How wholly disserving of all involved!  My Mother created an impression for my Children in which I was a tyrant who was holding her Children to standards I, as her story would go, didn’t have for myself at their ages.  The most hurtful of all, my Mother fed a narrative in which she, and now my Children, were the victims of my demands, impatience, and anger.  With each visit with her Grandchildren, my Mother was handing over to my Children the seeds, then eventually, the license to question and ultimately, to dismiss me, while she assigned the Grandmother of refuge, the merciful Rescuer role to herself. 

How could I miss everything that was going on behind my back?  It was a complicated, perfect succession of events in which I was responsible for the players’ presence in my life, in our lives, but I gravely overestimated their willingness to respect my position as my Children’s Mother. 

“Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.” is a Sydney J Harris quote; one of many quotes that remind me to explore other people’s perspectives. Since I was a little girl, my Mother had experienced me as too stark a contrast to her personality, approach to life and relationships.  Over the years, she had concluded, based on my responses to her unwillingness to hear how I experienced my childhood, that I was an angry bully.  She considered herself just the right person to provide understanding and refuge to my obviously harshly treated Children I refused to outfit with electronics, who had curfews and whose teen world I routinely invaded with my rules and inquiries. My Mother even found herself the most opportune one to comfort my poor third Husband who would soon be thrown out of our marriage because of my selfishness in following my sexual orientation.  She appointed herself as that refuge, conveniently, and with the kind of secrecy required when the oppressed must unite against the oppressor.  …but what did my Mother know about raising three close-in-age Children, two boys and a girl, when she had two Daughters eleven years apart?  What do other Mothers truly know about the teen stage when all of their children are still in the single digits?  How well can someone with Children spaced out in years relate to someone with Children close in age?  I am left to assume none of these factors raised a question for my Mother; I am left to wonder if she ever questioned whether she had the most authoritative insight to my Children.

It was a full decade after my Children began spending time annually with my Mother that I finally got to hear accounts of what had been occurring all along behind my back.  Even my best Friend from high-school had been siphoned into my Mother’s vortex, and it all came together in the summer of 2023.  By this time, I had been bewildered by just how my relationship with my Children could turn so one-sided. 

Since I was a little girl, my Mother had made choices that left me out, left me without protection, without belonging. Sadly, I think these same underlying feelings permiated her own psyche since she was a little girl. This also meant my Mother made decisions that allowed her refuge from her own feelings and had a blindside about her impact on others. To hope she would be able to move beyond her baseline emotions or make exceptions where her Grandchildren were concerned was ultimately naive and even negligent of me.  My Mother’s inherent insecurities fuelled her need to divide and finally conquer and in that, she robbed my Children of the firm foundation I had worked to build for them.  My Mother fractured the Family foundation I worked so hard to build and had so much wanted for my Children and myself, and through us, for her.