I realised something this week. I made a connection that was a revelation, a watershed: my mother is an appeaser, she propitiates. She doesn’t cope well when I question my childhood experiences, so she denies any negative feelings I might have (my family probably believe they’re the only sort I have). She does the same with her eldest sister. To my mother, her mother, it seems, was a saint and could do no wrong. To my aunt, my nan did plenty wrong, but my mother flatly denies this could even be possible: “She never has a good word to say about Mum, she’s always running her down.” (That’s a euphemism, obviously, she didn’t get into a truck and try running her down that way!) I knew these things, but I never made the connection that her denial of other people’s feelings is an expression of her need to make things ‘steady’, to not rock the boat. The eureka moment came for me during a recent phone call. I had an argument with my sister a month or so ago and my mother stated “I hate it when you kids don’t get on, can’t you send her an email or phone her or something?” Then she said that my step-dad “thinks he’s done something to upset you”, and I could detect the tone in her voice that needed me to say, no he hasn’t, every thing’s fine. The fact that I’ve called him my step-dad here, and not my dad, will upset her desire for everything to be ‘happy’, stable and picture perfect. But it’s only in my family’s presence that I call him Dad and only because I was told to when they got married. In my mind, and when I talk about him to others he’s always my step-dad. Step-dad to me is not a negative thing, but I think that perhaps to my mother and her generation it’s somehow inferior to ‘Dad’. Maybe that’s because it would mean she’d have to admit that her first marriage went wrong? Who knows. I know that at my core I feel fatherless. My natural father wasn’t around much post the age of 6 and not at all post 7 (and I remember virtually nothing about him); my step-father was there from about the age of 8, but he wasn’t a father figure – and I don’t think he wanted to be either. The fact is, he is my step-father. It’s a fact and cannot be denied. But in order to appease my mother, I’ve been playing her game and have acquiesced to her vehement views of my childhood, my behaviour, my personality.
And that was the revelation: I don’t need to capitulate with her need to make things okay. They are her needs and she should own them. It doesn’t bother me any more that things aren’t okay; that’s life, it’s not a bunch of roses. It was such a weight off my shoulders to realise that this is not my stuff and that I can just let it go. I feel that suddenly I have a much deeper understanding of some aspect of her behaviour that will enable me to draw a line in the sand and say keep your stuff that side of it please, ‘cos I have enough of my own crap on this side to deal with!
Right, time’s up, I’m off the couch and away to bed.
