I've not been here for awhile. My intent for this blog was to share my thoughts and discoveries about my visit with my mother with my sisters. Content was to be mostly informative with little dollops of my opinion, my new understandings of my relations with Mom and simple reports of activities. That ain't happening. So instead, for my benefit, I'll use this blog to collect and arrange my head AND my heart streams.
I have come to understand that neither of my sisters want to communicate this way. Communicating in a digital (written word?) isn't their choice. I'm still shocked that both of them are such Luddites about technology. Ok, so I struggle with how to create and keep an orderly loop of information between us.
My sisters and mother are Luddites about digital communication and relationships. Barbie just has no time for it so it is not important to know how to use it. Simple order is necessary.
Bevie is a Miss Daisy, she needs tech for many things, but wants her mode(s) of movement provided by someone else. She exhibits anger when transportation is not provided.
Mom is just plain scared of what she perceives as the power of technology....she doesn't know about it so it has more power than she does. She chooses victim hood by technology as protection.
I embrace digital relationships because they provide distance from people, something I need to control. Digital communications insulates and connects me at the same time. Digital relationships have rules and frames that allow me to create different stories about everything as I need to. (some people consider that activity as lying), It also makes it very easy to disappear when I need to.
The plus for me is that Greg and I connected in the realm of cyberspace and remain close using digital communication modes.
And then there is the family dynamic of real time personal communication, we pass info around, shrouded in personal filters. I am getting the feeling that maybe lack of knowledge about a situation is also a way to create distance from some issues. Some "information" is difficult to encounter because it is just...data. Yes, sharing of our feelings is important and we need to know about each other, but in this case I think the three of us might gain information to help make choices. (My judgement is flipping its skirts, big time)
We are like planets that orbit around Mom. I am Jupiter, most distant and fast moving. Keeping distance so that I don't have to slow down enough to be in direct relationship to Mom. Barbie is Mars, close enough to make her anger known. She is red and at war with her feelings about Mom. Bevie is the Moon. She shines light on mother's life and is sensitive to the tides of mothers life. She feels responsible for the rhythm. (More skirt flipping)
Mom holds deep old feelings about herself. It seems that a great deal of it is about her relations with men; her brothers, her father, my father and the other men who were connected to her.
Mom's words about men weave the biggest love/hate relationship I have ever heard!
She was a tomboy, Ginny loved being a part of her brothers lives and felt like she had some worth participating in their world. Then, she was ejected from this important part of her life because she is a girl - female person.
Ginny's Mother Francis loved brother Tom best and most of all her children. Mother Francis showered all her love on Tom, leaving little or nothing for Mom to receive. (Message: Male persons are better, more deserving, more, just more?). I think my sister Barbie may have the deepest understanding of this type of abandonment.....
As Ginny's brothers began to regard the world thru the single eye of their penises, she saw that her femaleness did have some value of a sort. She explored her discovery, but found again that there was another type of abandonment at the core of these sexual oriented relationships. Ginny is very proud that she was "wanted by lots of young men, but did not give herself sexually to them.
Here I wonder two things; did she actually refuse to have sex and is her story about how she gained and wielded some power and worth in the world of penises?
In telling her stories, she infers "you can't trust them, but they are more important and worth more than I am!!" She really struggles with my opinion that men of her generation and a good number of men in my generation are just assholes.
Moving on, Mom values her insular self highly. There is self-worth in needing no-one, there is safety in needing no one, in holding as much control over all things in her life as possible. She perceives any offer or insinuation of help as a threat to her worth and her safe cocoon of control. Lack of control, release of her insular self equals worthlessness. It is important to support this belief and behavior with stories of her "victimhood".
I think and feel this story may have been effectively passed down to me, but I have lived in another time, but there are echos of her words lurking in MY story. I often express my abhorrence of being perceived in any way as a victim. In my mind I feel some pride that I am NOT a victim. My fears and judgement of victim hood most often controls my behavior. And yet a reality of victimization lurks inside me.
Oh! the grand paradox, wild incongruity. I struggle to string it all together in a way that I can hear and see it without judgement. I am making some progress in hearing and seeing with less and less judgement.
Being here with Mom, working from a predetermined script has been more healing than anything else I have done to reconcile my feelings and reactions to my mother. Standing just far enough away to be out of range of the arrows shot from the past is a good place to be. Removing myself from the deepest currents of long held reactions provides a flow, a different type of relationship. She and I are still in the same ocean, are necessary to fill the needs, but different. I am beginning to feel some acceptance, without needing to understand.
