One More Perspective

I have loved you since before your name was Baby A on a grainy ultrasound.  Twenty-three years on, I love you even more.  I was woefully ill-prepared for how to best serve you as your Mom, but my sincere intentions for you to grow your wings and my commitment to see you thrive never wavered.

When I was still pregnant with you and your (two-minutes) younger Brother, I heard Lee Ann Womack’s song I Hope You Dance.  It was by happenstance of course, since I am normally a non-fan of Country Music.  The song made me reflect on the girls and women I had known to that point, and worried if you were born with a timid personality, this world would be a much more scary place, for us both.  Since we were living in conservative Oklahoma and I was seen as such an ungodly rebel woman there, I was worried if you naturally drew to the quiet side, the culture may engulf you.  I bought a compact disc recording of this song and put it away with your baby clothes.  It’s in our attic still today but thankfully, you won’t need it.  All my fears about you being born with a shy personality were unfounded.  You were born vibrant, capable, creative, and ready to conquer.  You were born a ferocious learner.  Among your many amazing qualities, I was in awe of your intellect and creativity from very early in your life, and I am in awe of you now.  For your sake, I often wished you had been born to a university art professor or a Hollywood film producer; someone who had the wherewithal to fearlessly nurture your magnificent energy. 

The fact that I am writing this here means I have not had the opportunity to communicate in this manner with the grown-up you, and there are many reasons for that, none of which are your fault. 

Maybe one day you will find it comforting to know I am still the person who has been rooting for you since I thought you were the sole resident in my belly.  How wonderful your Brother snuck in there with you.  I felt very happy to believe that meant you’d have each-other and a big Brother for life.  I send my love to you every day and do so without reservation and expectations. 

The first evidence I had of your arrival was my Obstetrician lifting you up above the partition that shielded my c-section operation from my view.   “Where did this red hair come from?” he asked.  That particular detail of you seemed far secondary to the fact that you were here, my BeautifulGirl.  I would love your Brothers with all my heart forever, but it’s you who would become a woman in this big world, and in addition to loving you, I felt very responsible to make sure you’d never be a subordinated girl and woman.  After all, I was living the discrimination of being an assertive woman in Oklahoma every day, as an Engineer, with my foreign accent, not attending their churches, being a working Mom…the only way I could be more judged and threatening was if I had brown skin.  We didn’t have the word ‘microaggressions’ in our societal vocabulary back then, but I knew I was getting passive-aggressively beaten and bruised every day for not being a compliant, God-fearing little Wife.  I would look at you and envision a future world in which women could be their fully creative selves.  A world in which women could make independent choices for their personal viability and write their own narratives.  A world in which independent women do not intimidate the men…the men and their subservient women whom the men groom, then deploy as tools and weapons against the “hardheaded” women.  I could see me cheering you on as you far surpassed me in your freedom to be you.

By the time you were two years old, you were braver and more exploratory than your Brothers, and I was realizing my fears about you being timid and shy were wholly unfounded.  At age three, you could outclimb, outrun, and approach anything that interested you on a grander, more energetic scale than your Brothers.  You had no intention of having anyone define life’s terms for you even then, and I was beaming inside.  I was happy you were assertive, a fighter.  It’s that life spark I didn’t think I could teach to you, and if absent, may leave you vulnerable.  …but you had an abundance of it, and as a woman and especially as your Mother, I felt relieved.

Not everyone agreed with me.  For years, I sought out low-stimulus situations and activities for us, and I kept people at bay who thought you were too this or too that.  I kept going until we became a capsule, surrounded by those who could see in your brilliance what I saw.  I kept searching until you were in the right school, with Teachers who could separate your tremendous capacity for creativity from their need for a well-behaved student.

Over time, I came to realize I was struggling to parent you with the patience and understanding you deserved, and I agonized over how to balance your safety with nurturing your growth and honoring your voice.  The older you got, the more complex the equations became.  You were an incredibly talented young person, and while between private school and home we kept up with your ferocious intellectual capacity, I was falling further and further behind on supporting your emotional and social development.  You mostly experienced this as tremendous stress transferring from me to you.  …and that broke my heart every day, and still does.  Each day, I could see none of my enormous love, trust, and hope for you shined through; instead, you saw my fear and overwhelm.  Worse yet, the latter simply landed on you as anger, and angry is all that became your reality of your Mother.  Devastating.  I sought new tools, I looked for those I thought were trusted people to make sure that if my love couldn’t get in directly, at least you’d still feel supported by a community of adults in our lives.  That was woefully naive of me.  I soothed myself by accounting for all the ways I could be sure I hadn’t clipped your wings.  I had never been prescriptive about your religion, gender, sexual orientation, career choices, and other major life choices I was looking forward to you determining for yourself in due time.  I was glad that unlike my childhood experience, I had always made a big deal about the importance of our Family unit, your belonging in it, and that I taught you three to value your Sibling relationship.  I was hanging in for your high school graduation, after which I knew everything could finally change!  I was looking forward to stepping out of the ‘Warden’ role I had backed myself into over the years and to us getting to know each other as adults.  That, as it turned out, was simply my delusion. 

By the time your Senior year of High School came around, I was fighting forces I couldn’t see.  My shortcomings as your Mother would become my defining final report card.  I found most gutting that my beloved Daughter, along with whom I’ve been waiting to graduate, would decide she was entirely better off without me.  Just when I thought dawn was coming, I was slung into the depth of a lifetime of winter, wishing for your safety and happiness from afar.

Four years on, I have written many notes to you acknowledging the impact of my failures on you, as well as my many wishes that you are well.  It seems each one has served to wall you off even more.  I must and do accept that.  Whatever you do for your best life is precisely what I have always wanted for you.  While I was thinking I would be in your life when you grew up, not getting to be changes nothing about my unwavering love for you.  I want for you what you want for you.  In fact, I’m relieved the part where I had to decide things for you as a child is now well behind us.  I simply don’t have the creativity, imagination, braveness, and talents you do to foresee what’s best for you now. 

I do have one more experience I’m desperate to share with you, however.  You see, I similarly distanced myself from my own Mother at your age.  I embarked on creating my own life and Family with my Mother keenly absent from it, that time by my own choice, not hers.  Eventually, after years of Imago Therapy, I thought I would be ready to navigate a healthier relationship with her.  I was wrong.  Very wrong.  Despite well-qualified therapy, I woefully underestimated the impact of our shared, unaddressed past:  those six years in my childhood (age eight to fourteen) that my Mother and I lived apart and on two different continents, as well as the interpersonal dynamics that preceded it.  No matter how much therapy I on my own did, once I was ready to reapproach my Mother, to seek out the possibility of healing with her, I’d return to find her enduring stance of “I don’t want to talk about the past, I’ve moved beyond that!” 

What’s my point?  Only this:  I fully understand you cutting me off, but please don’t think you can put it all behind you without committed processing and decompressing from the effects of the totality of your childhood.  I’m not trying to convince you to invite me back into your life, but I am urging you to understand there is no such thing as:  “I don’t want to talk about the past, I’ve moved beyond that!”  Surgically removing me cannot be the end of your own continued self-discovery about your childhood and Family history, as well as the hard work of processing through all that was your lived experience.  My acknowledging to you and to myself every day the parts of your childhood that hurt you is my end of the equation.  You seeking to understand how your childhood hardwired you to make certain default decisions in the present time, is your end.  It’s only when you become fully cognizant of the ‘survival skills’ you acquired through your age ten that you can take the kind of holistic control of your life you have yearned for since you learned to walk.

I love You Always,

Mom