WHAT WAS
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN
In this fictional toast, you seem to believe that you married a woman who had a saint for a mother,
I must say that I was impressed by your creative use of the literary technique of a fictional foil. At first your story was difficult for me to follow, even somewhat confusing. But then I realized that a man that wooed my daughter with his poetry twenty five years ago must simply be doing something I don't usually encounter. That's when I thought of one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens, and realized that your fictional mother-in-law was no different then the all-evil Ebeneezer Scrooge or his all-forgiving nephew. Such fictional people obviously don't likely exist but a talented author can use such invented characters to teach striking lessons about basic human behavior.
The lesson that popped into my mind was of Scrooge with the ghost of the future. "Can I wipe the name from the tombstone" is answered "no", reminding us all of our short time here on earth, of our mortality, and of the related importance to resolve issues and conflicts quickly to everybody's satisfaction. Also of the scene where Tiny Tim's crutch stands empty by the fireplace. "Is this future necessary or can it be changed?" asks Scrooge and he understands the answer is that changing the only person he can change (himself) is what will replace bitterness with joy in his dark and sorrowful world, literally saving a life in his instance. I guess you are in literary good company by using such a fictional character, and I certainly appreciate a little better how my daughter is at times fascinated by your story telling and other times frustrated by how your mind works, freely associating and building elaborate analogies. I'll bet Mrs Dickens had a headache or two across the years, too.
I must add the sense of urgency I felt, upon reading this broad, over-the-top fiction for us two to open up honest, non-judgmental, two-way dialogue about your personal impressions regarding your treatment at my hands (especially since I had just spent three hours in the previous five days on the telephone with your wife informing her point-by-point of my personal impressions about my treatment at your hands). Certainly, anybody reading this could sense that a man who was so passionate about his loss, so willing to share this optimized fiction of his feelings, so willing to put forth the physical and emotional effort required for such non-requited self-analysis and sharing would probably not stop at a positive fiction. Let's call your fictional toast a clarion call to me, a final begging effort from you for me to listen open heartedly to your feelings. Obviously, if I again shut down your statements; call them "wrong", "misremembered", or "dredging up the past" (after I spent three hours doing that very thing just two days previously), it would be simply logical to expect the situation between us to either escalate (or give up and drift apart). Like a warning given first as a whisper, then an aside, then a direct statement and on up in volume, sooner or later those words will be rung out louder than churchbells and fire engine sirens. I want to thank you for giving me that fictional toast to spare me what would surely come next. I accept your kind offer to help me understand YOUR feelings so that we can work together to find a compromise between them and MY OWN. I do not wish to experience what will surely come next if I were to ignore your plea and shout it down with mean spirited sarcasm. Actually, you might say if I did such an insensitive and self-centered thing, I would deserve what I got in reply from you. (Even if your next logical escalation seems mysterious and unjustified when it occurs).
someone who only cared about abiding by YOUR wishes BECAUSE THAT WAS THE ONLY WAY YOU KNEW AT AGE 17. Someone who didn't care about trying to introduce you to her family's type of celebration of a person's life, (as I was told your family often didn't even have a cake to celebrate your special day)
It would have been insulting to your parents, your family, your upbringing, your childhood if I were to insert myself into your family's culture when you were just turning age 17. That is certainly the lesson I received from you fictional work. It would be a grievous insult (like accusing you of being unable to care for your wife and family without my help) to accuse your parents of performing unsatisfactorily at raising you while tooting my own horn at my successful children. A matter of fact, if I had been so crass, it would have made me a spineless hypocrite to weep crocodile tears at their funeral, and give you one more reason to ask that I pay my respects to them the same way I showed my disrespect to them, in the privacy of my own home and on the telephone to my daughters.
At age 16, while simply dating my daughter, I certainly had no claim, no right, no privilege on your time, your behavior, or your preferences. A matter of fact, if your parents had found out that one of your 17 year old friends was trying to influence you to discard their culture, they might order you to never see that person again (until you reached emancipation on your 18th birthday). I don't even want to think about what I would have said to any grown-up that took my own 17-year-old child away and tried to brainwash her to trashing everything I considered important. I would probably call the police on them and have them arrested! Of course, any private words of sadness you might have uttered to me (at age 17) are just that, certainly not a call to action on my part. 17-year-olds are notoriously mixed-up and confused, happy and giddy one moment, sad and morose the next. Hormones, social pressures, worries about growing up and going off to college are all things that make the sharing of worries by a 17-year-old to be the greatest gift an adult might receive. To act on such passing frets would be to abuse that gift.
To invoke the false authority of being 'a concerned parent', where no actual authority over you exists (except for the only authorized adults in your childhood, your own parents), would be like poisoning a well then having to drink from it. Woe be to the grown woman that inserts herself forcefully into the lives of the children that her own children socialize with, for while such meddling might be tacitly legal (but certainly immoral) during their childhood, it is unlikely to be forgotten when those children grow up into adults. Like a slave that is whipped by the 'massa' when held in bondage; once the he is free to associate as he pleases, such abuse of authority (when the slave or the child is not free to avoid it) is hard to live down (when they are). I am not stupid. You treat children like adults, you don't treat adults like children. Then you reap the reward of a long and happy life with sincere freely given love and respect. That is certainly a lesson you taught very well in the story you wrote for me. I wanted to thank you for your effort and wisdom.
Of course, it is a wise adult that finds time to listen to children, then share their experiences with them. Such patient and caring adults, like the fictional one you outlined in your toast, will harvest a life long bumper crop of respect and love. It is the cynical, overbearing adult, the one that shoves her own vision down the throat of the defenseless child (even when it is first sugar coated, before being shoved) that will earn a lifetime of distance, of distrust, of indifference. Like when you beat a dog with a stick (because you can) then wonder why it doesn't want to lie on your bed at night, there is a correlation between cause and affect, the adult (not the child) must be careful in that arena.
and it seemed to me that, at the time, Lyn was shocked at such an uncaring attitude toward you and I so wanted to show you how much we cared for you, in our way and in what is mostly the conventual way of most families
It has been quite a lesson to me to watch my daughter grow up and become an adult. It is hard for a mother to let loose the reigns that are the natural part of raising a newborn, then baby, then toddler, a school kid and adolescent. Upon her wedded union with you, it has been a constant strain to my resolve, and a source of wonder to watch her evolve. It is not my place to be judgmental of a twenty, thirty, and now forty year old woman's evolution, and I am certain that the people that interacted with you when you were a baby and a schoolkid are equally disconcerted by your growing up. The changing relationship you have as a dependant child becomes an emancipated adult is a wondrous and wonderful thing, if you can accept and enjoy that growth. No farmer or gardener would try to shove the plant back into it's seed pod or curse the sun and rain for causing the seed to change. No, they praise the earth, the sun, and the passage of time that creates the living miracle that is around us everyday. I am not going to sit here and fight tooth and nail to have you guys act as you did more than twenty years ago when my daughter was both my responsibility and my charge. Those days are loooooonng gone now. Let me add that I'm personally sorry for anything I've said or done to curse or hate your growth and maturation, especially anything since the day I agreed to the pledge 'what God has put together, let no man put asunder'. I was raised in a religion that to break that oath, once given, is a sin requiring that I answer to it in the afterlife. I know my own mother surely had a lot to answer about 'putting asunder' and I'm not going to break an oath as sacred as that one with my grown children.
I sincerely felt sorry for you that you had been denied your own "special day" of celebration of your life as a family member.
It is certainly not my place nor any of my business to shove my reality, my preferences, or even my hopes down your throat. Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun having a contest to get a man to remove his coat is well illustrated in your fictional story. A small tear welled in my eye as I watched your fictional son-in-law character transform into the very thing his mother-in-law wanted, not by being beaten into submission, but by being 'sculpted' with a 'gentle hand'. I cannot help but ask you, like the ghost of Christmas future, can such a thing still occur? I long for you to appreciate the things that I have come to expect, but cannot help but marvel, like the poet in you, at the contradiction in basic human nature at work here. Your grasp, and your teaching of that lesson, is inspired like Aesop. Such studies of contradictions in human nature must fascinate a man who has professed to the watching and learning from others behavior as I have often heard you say about yourself.
It is wise insight that by me applying less pressure to encourage you to change, it would allow you to first acclimate to a different environment in a non-judgmental, non-authoritarian way. Like the contrary cow, or the stubborn burro, the harder I try to "make" you do something, the less success I have. I learn so much from you when we open our hearts this way, and you are a great study of human behavior.
In fact after reading your autobiographical writing of "CRYING IN MY PLAYPEN", I cried and felt as bad for you again as I did when I would hear of how you were ignored as a child.
I was sad to read some of the other stories you have written about various events in your life. Of course, you know that if YOU WANT me to take an action in your behalf YOU need only mention one word about YOUR DESIRE and I will be there to support you. (Of course, you have said hundreds of times that you would ask for help when you need it, and have done so from time to time to prove your word). My offer is meant as a comfort to your bruised heart, not some new information or some commandment that you must take my advice or face some sort of consequence.
If you wanted my help, you would have asked me for it. But I am sad and hurt to learn of your pain. I had hoped that, after decades of being together, I might be a source of comfort in your life during difficult times, through encouragement, empathy, and interest in the very unusual things that make you uniquely you. I consider your writing that childhood story to be another clarion call, the result of unresolved torment between yourself and another. At what point does personal torment rise so high as to require public disclosure to soothe and salve it. Certainly, publishing those stories was not your first resort, but must represent your last resort action, some sad personal admission of hopelessness that no matter what effort you make to share your own feelings to reach compromise and understanding would you receive anything but "You are wrong", "That didn't happen", "You made that up" or "You don't remember correctly". The presence of those very private stories are an indictment, not of you for feeling them and having no outlet to resolve them except for public disclosure, but of the people to whom you first whispered, then spoke, then raised your voice. Surely, publishing such a story on the Internet is the churchbell or fire engine siren again. It would have been so much more curing to you and to your situation if those others had only been able to say, at the critical time when you shared your personal feelings and opinions, that they could accept your opinion (be it the same or different as theirs) without ridicule or efforts to aggressively subvert it. How sad that your life has even one person so callously self-centered that they might drive you to publish such a story (as 'crying in my playpen') since no other avenue for open loving acceptance was provided to you. I am so sad for you and so mad at them for their greedy self-centered heartlessness.
Apparently you still have scars on your soul from some of your early disappointments to have written a heartwrenching depiction of some early experiences as you did.
At times I like to consider it my business to know from you your most private sentiments. Your published stories are 'grist for the mill' to somebody wishing that. Of course, you would expect me to take no action, change no opinion, make no personal decision based on your publication of them. For me to decide to act unilaterally, without your direct request, would be to 'put my nose where it doesn't belong'. That, too, can be poisonous to a tenuous relationship between mother-in-law and son-in-law.
I know how sad you were as your parents would never come out to visit you even though they were not very far off in Las Vegas.
It would be poisonous of me to act upon a verbal aside that you may have stated during temporary contemplative moments. Such a gift, like a fine crystal, is quickly crushed by overbearing actions. It is ABSOLUTELY NONE OF MY BUSINESS about how you feel about your parents, unless I SPECIFICALLY ask for your opinion and you SPECIFICALLY tell me. Otherwise, I will consider you sharing of your private tentative thoughts to be a gift from you to me, and I thank-you for your kind openness. Of course for me to probe you verbally about your most private and intimate feelings would make me a busy-body, the LAST person on earth you would want to share such intimacies with. Let me warn you this: BEWARE the person that probes you for such information when you don't wish to share it, and never share a second time any information with a person that takes unilateral action upon hearing something a first time. It is a wise adage that goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Cross the street when you see such a busy-body approaching, and you will be protecting yourself and the ones you love from unnecessary heartache.
You yourself told us of your feelings. I wanted to hug you and let you know that we could love you enough for everyone!
I am not your mother, I am your mother-in-law. When I give of myself, it is not as your mother, or your wife, or your beer-buddy. There have to be lines between our relationship, and your fictional story highlighted a relationship of people, close enough to give and share love, but far enough to maintain comfort and privacy. That was a wonderful thing but, alas, usually limited to fictional stories. I am not your mother, it would insult your mother (when she was alive) and your mother's memory (since she has passed away) that I might try, might hope, might even so much as consider it my business, your feelings on those other interpersonal relationships. It would be the grossest form of self-flattery for a person to feel that they might first believe then take it upon themselves to compensate for a perceived or invented shortcoming or inability of another mother to that mother's child. It would be hard for any child to hear such an intrusive offer, (even if it was made in naive, sincere kindness and compassion), as anything but a smirch upon the character of the one person held dearest in each person's heart, their own mother. Apply to yourself the wisdom that every outdoorsman knows: Never step between a mother Grizzly Bear and her Cub. Apply this adage to your own life no matter how old the cub and even if the mother Grizzly Bear is dead.
Each of us get one mother, and no matter how we feel from time to time about her, or what we might say in passing over a glass of wine or in front of a fireplace, I am not so stupid as to put any weight on any feeling stated by you about those very private, very distinct relationships that are, simply put, NONE OF MY BUSINESS. To insert myself there would be poisonous. Just like no one would ever try to proclaim themselves as more important to a wife than her husband, nobody would make any comment on how a son was raised by his mother. It would be much more productive to cut off your own hand with a rusty knife than to say that an adult son carries scars from how he was raised by his (now deceased) mother, even if the words originally came from his own mouth. I am not THAT STUPID!
Somehow things have fallen apart and the more I tried to show you how we cared for you in the only way I knew how, the more you resented it. You must admit that the accepted conventional way of special occasions is to celebrate them in some way. I only know the way that I was brought up with and also the way Dad was brought up with as were all of our friends and neighbors. Your unconventional way was very strange to me and I felt it was so cold to ignore you personally by not doing something special for you.
You must try to not hold against me the fact that the only way I know how to show that I care is to force and coerce others to do what I consider to be best for them, regardless of their own stated wishes for me to do otherwise. I was raised by a mother that did not allow her children to have and act upon personal desires or differing opinions without her intervention, often venomous and usually representing a blatant double standard. This was even when I was grown with grown children and even grandchildren of my own. While it might be logical that my regularly professing to bitterly resent her actions toward me (knowing first hand how hurtful one-sided accusations poison an otherwise loving relationship) might lead me to adopt a different approach toward you two, human nature is what it is. I am sure that you yourself honor your parents through behaviors that people from outside your own family find strange (like the way you celebrate birthdays exactly the same way your dad does and both you and he neglected to thank me for that picture I took). Sometimes it is fate that a child shall mimic their parents and outsiders would do well to do their best to resign their own opinions to themselves and accept them as they are, rather than trying to intervene to change them. Why can't you be more understanding of things about me that you don't like? I know that I try to do that with you.
We tried the donations to charity in your name but were told that you didn't even want to know they were made...didn't send you anything but a card for a birthday and didn't get an acknowledgement that you even received it we also have been monthly doing what we feel is something very special for a boy Jesse's age in a very blighted country for years now always feeling that you would have liked this but you probably don't want to hear that we remember you in this way because we do love you and try to respect your wishes of "no gifts" of any kind, any time.
I must admit that I am frustrated and vexed by your ever changing reactions when I try to buy presents for you. First, you must know that I have never known anybody that didn't want to receive a present. Actually, human nature is such that anybody would enjoy receiving 'something for nothing', would find pleasure in the 'individual attention' paid to them by another, and would be pleased by the effort of another made directly in their behalf. I have spent a great amount of effort trying to comprehend, then expounding to everyone (including yourself) about my various hypotheses about your motivation (including my current unverified guess that you want 'no gifts' whatsoever). It is hard for me not to state my guesses in a manner that brings ill light upon your character and fibre.
First, I suggested that it was the result of your embarrassment, and was therefore unnecessary. Then I guessed that it was because your own parents had done a poor job at giving you opportunities to shine in the center of limelight, due to their not knowing how to love their own children. Then I proposed to everybody that you were 'mad at the world', and therefore not to be trusted. Later, I announced that it was because you were unschooled in social graces, using such motivating phrases as "Rude" and "Stupid". You can see how such guesses on my part might shed unfavorable light on you, raising the question why you remained steadfast in your refusal in the direct face of my escalating efforts otherwise. That's when I suggested to most everybody that it was caused by you being immaturely stubborn and later yet, so emotionally broken as to be unable to accept love from others. I must admit, I had expected that somewhere during one of this decades long series of guesses and accusations that you would have simply caved in and decided that doing things 'my way' instead of 'your way' would have encouraged me to shed a favorable light on you instead of such a poor one. I've done my best to let everybody know that I consider your desires strange, perplexing, somewhat hostile and maladjusted.
I wonder why you've been so adamantly inflexible in the face of my ongoing escalating pressure to have you abandon your own desires and adopt mine, especially on YOUR 'special day'. Aren't you motivated to alter your behavior because I told you how many people consider you strange upon hearing me describe my impression of your behavior? Aren't you motivated to give up the thing that is YOU and become the thing that is ME, when I tell you how I consider what is YOU to be different? While thoughts and suggestions like I am making here must seem ridiculous, bizarre and ludicrous on the surface (and even more so after additional study), you must realize that I personally, people of my generation, and the people that I deal with day in and day out are all very conscious of what others think of them, and regularly exchange their own personality to adopt a different one that avoids their being a target for negative gossip. That spineless fear of not being accepted, motivating self-abandonment and self-immolation, is the heart of everybody I know except you. It is a behavior and reaction that I count on in others (so that when I point out where they will not be accepted by me they will jump to change themselves to be more as I wish). Yet, while everybody else quickly surrenders when I orchestrate such social pressure, you do not. That makes you very, very strange to me and to society in general. I have certainly raised my own children to be hyper-sensitive to my pointing out where their behavior is unacceptable, yet you remain immune to my efforts (across now a quarter century and right up to this very day).
It is weird how my desire to give you things has become a point of contention between us, and I cannot help but conclude that it is something that requires patient effort, and active non-judgmental listening on my part. Honey, I get it. You aren't going to change by my verbal browbeating of you. It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER for me to continue a policy that has blatantly failed me for twenty-five years. I have tried every which way to tell you what I want, what I expect, how you are different, how you restrict my ability to do what I want on 'your special day' and have recently escalated my aggressive attacks of you to include bold accusations that you are 'not like ANYBODY I know' and are flat out 'rude' and that you have also confounded your father-in-law (in case you were just being contrary to oppose me). I have even resorted to making these vulgar accusation to your wife, father-in-law, and sisters-in-law, but you will not cave in and surrender the part of you that makes you unique to adopt an aspect that would make me happy and make you the same as everybody else. I had even begun using your despondent, traumatized, aged, widowed father in my attempt to paint your actions as unacceptably to add his pressure to the vice I'm trying to squeeze you with. Surely your respect and fear of him would paint you into a corner where you had no choice but to give up that which is you to finally passively accept that which I want you to be instead, I mean everybody wants you to be. But leveraging your widowed dad, your father-in-law, your son, your wife, your sisters-in-law has not worked! Surely that proves my point even more. Any normal person would have caved in long ago to such aggressive, direct, unrelenting social pressure to alter that thing that is you to become what everybody else wants you to be on 'your special day'.
So I want to say, pure and simple, 'I surrender'. I give up. I will officially right here and right now give up on my efforts to verbally harass and browbeat you into submissive conformance to my desires on 'your special day'. The story you wrote in the fictional toast spent a very long time on this subject, so it must obviously be a derisive point of contention between us.
So I propose a new approach on my part. You have claimed to have tried in the past to explain your outlook and desires (and you claim that each time you did, I shouted your ideas and opinions down with the obvious fact that they are different than everybody else and what I want). So I ask you, I beg you, to please help me learn about you. Help me understand you so that I can learn to love and appreciate the unique man that has loved, honored, and supported my daughter for over twenty years. Let me come to understand you.
Here is my proposal: we can talk on the telephone or you can write me an E-Mail, I will you do nothing to internalize your opinion onto myself. I will listen patiently to your opinion and only say back that "YOU FEEL" such and so. I will not say "YOU SHOULDN'T FEEL", that "SO-AND-SO SAYS YOU SHOULDN'T FEEL", that "SO-AND-SO FEELS", or that "I WANT YOU TO FEEL" a certain way. If you promise to slowly try to trust me again, I will try to earn your trust. The deal is this. If you hear me say or write anything in reply that is denying your explanation of opinion or your beliefs, you should immediately end that conversation for that day. You may say "you shut me down" and I will accept your admonition and try slowly to learn the skill of non-judgmental active listening. It would be a delight to me to understand this mystery, as I an certainly convinced that no effort on my part is going to get you to surrender that thing that makes you uniquely you. And I know that you want me to understand the subtlety of it, since you put forth such efforts to explain yourself in writing your 'fictional toast'.
I'm so sorry that we have upset your life so terribly and Lyn's also, apparently,
as all a mother really wants is for her children to be happy and content
It is very hard for me to separate my pleasure from your pleasure. I have warned you that you yourself will do this with your own child, but you two have dismissed my prediction out of hand. I cannot help but long to know, has your dismissal proved true? What can you tell me about your attitude toward children, toward their growth to independence, to that mysteriously exhilarating and scary feeling of watching them slowly developed distance and independence from you?
A mother wants her children to be happy, but some mothers use that as a catch phrase to shield their real meaning: that they want or desperately need to receive the perception that their children are happy (or for that matter 'responsible' or 'normal' or 'smart' or 'athletic' or whatever it is that decide that they want to receive from their children) When a parent uses a phrase like 'a mother wants their children to be ...' , it is a secret code that means really that 'a mother wants happiness for herself' and in the mother's mind it is the child's job to deliver it to the parent. It is a double perversion when boisterous compulsive public selflessness actually becomes cynical selfishness dumped by the parent upon the child. This is a danger that all parents must endure and beware. I wish to help you understand what I mean so that both you and your children will benefit from my life's learning.
When a parent puts pressure on a child to excel, whether it is in sports, scholastics, business, or art, it is a greedy grab for self-glory. Every person sees through the thinly transparent falsehood for the father shouting 'Get in there and play, Jimmy, YOU LOVE BASEBALL'. That poor kid is told what to love, what to hate, what to be, what not to be. It is his job to satisfy is empty father, by either being the thing that his father wants (to fulfill the father's emptiness) or even to simply fake it (destroying his own childness to fulfill the father's emptiness). It is no different than the command to "Get in there and BE HAPPY". Just like the reluctant little leaguer might be browbeat to profess a false love of a game (that he will disown at the very moment his independence permits him to express his own opinion), another child might be harped upon to profess a state of 'happiness' (where none exists) if the parent internalizes the absence of the child professing to be in that state, and makes its professing to be a part of parental self-image. Incredible pressure would be mounted upon the child, the little leaguer to profess a 'love' for baseball, and the other to profess that the parent 'makes them happy'. A parent has an arsenal of weapons that would make a military man blush, and can turn guilt, shame, withholding of love, not to mention yelling and screaming, browbeating, social pressure through telling negative stories to third parties. These destructive actions, against the one being in the world that the parent should protect beyond all others, is unspeakable. The thing between the father and his son is not about baseball, or athletics, or excelling. It is between the father and his own empty soul, his own fears of failure, about unresolved pain and emptiness. The best gift that father could give that son is to take HIMSELF into therapy, and find out what within himself would cause him to project onto himself whether or not his son plays, enjoys, or excels at baseball. When the father is satisfied with his own soul, he can distance himself from his son, allow his son to succeed or fail, choose to go on or quit. And that father can receive the greatest gift of all, a child that freely chooses to please him (like your fictional toast), instead of the result of hurtful manipulation. Whether the child fights against baseball (fighting against his hurtful father), plays at it through his hate (waiting for the very moment he can escape such servitude) or destroys himself to become the thing that his father wants (and therefore creates a hole in his own soul that he might pass onto the grandson at a decades future little league game), none of the options are healthy. To force, coerce, or browbeat a child into submission, regardless of the desirableness of the result, is to destroy the child. Every parent must avoid this at all costs.
I know that 'bad parents' can easily slip-slide from being selfless providers to being selfish dictators, and as that father might punish any delight in baseball from a son, a mother might punish her own to express happiness like a robot or tape player. "I must be a terrible mother" if you wont profess you happiness, might motivate a child to profess, but certainly not experience a true feeling of happiness. "What's wrong with YOU that you say you are unhappy", might cause a child to hide and subvert a feeling, but certainly not be cheered up. The evil coach, and the browbeating dictator both share the same predilection to receive self-image from their children professing a thing that they want. When a parent lacks the confidence to let the child just be themselves (whether that is to be unhappy, to be unsatisfied, to be disdainful of an elder, or to wish for an unusual celebration of their 'special day'), a parent lacking in self-esteem will harm that child in the name of helping them. I wish so badly to teach you this lesson in parenting to help you avoid what I learned at the hand of my own mother.
and all I have heard lately is everything I have every done to upset the two of you for the past 20 years
TOO BAD you have no good memories of any KINDNESS I may have shown to the two of you that would have wiped out all the BAD things.
Dave, I'm a very simple woman who endured a really TOUGH childhood, became a wife and mother when I was only a child of 17 and did the best I could with the education and love and respect of family that I imagined and learned from Dad's family as I didn't feel that my mother was a very good example of a caring mother.
She was so attuned to her own feelings rather then others. I'm sorry to say this, but I feel also that you, too, care deeply about how you feel about issues and refuse to bend to anyone else's feelings even though they are your elders, which we were taught was the utmost thing to remember in the way of respect as we were growing up.
You see we were brought up in two different worlds and you refuse to mesh into ours and we have really tried our best to mesh into yours, doing things for you that your parents would not do for you, but you apparently resent me for trying to do that also.
You must know that I was never prepared for the way you have planned and executed a lifetime plan that has amply provided for yourself, my daughter, and now my grandson. As you well know, the logical progression from age to age was mangled in my own life by untimely tragedies during my childhood, poisonous interactions from my bitter and self-centered mother, bad luck and bad choices I have made and for which I can only hold myself responsible. Be consoled that everything, no matter how difficult during its time, will work out for the best in the end when you allow your heart, your head, and your hands to work in concert. This has been true for me, and I freely and lovingly share my experience with you here.
As a mother of now grown children, looooong past the days of being responsible for the daily choices that you two make in your lives, it is a source of constant delight to recognize the presence of your own gentle hand on the rudder of the lives for which you have taken personal responsibility for 22, 20 and 13 years respectively. But like I used to joke, you acted with the maturity and confidence of a 30 year old even when you were just 16 and the responsibility of your parents. They must be very proud that you have grown up to honor many of the priorities and traditions that they instilled in you during your childhood. Any parent would be proud for a child to grow up and honor their parents that way, and it would be poisonous to the child and disrespectful to the parents to encourage otherwise.
At times I have to marvel how you progressed from being the responsibility of your parents to being independently self-reliant without for even one second being my physical, emotional, or economic responsibility. I transformed from being your girlfriend's mother to being your mother-in-law, and your fictional toast laid out how a mother-in-law's consistent kindness can earn a deep respect. I wonder what was in that pocket, and regret that my behavior toward my daughter at times will deny me from knowing. While my actions towards you two have been less insulting than I was forced to endure at the hands of my own mother, I also know that they have been less than enough to earn the kind of relationship of which you wrote. Somehow things between us have been like the undesirable employee that you are forced to supervise. Somehow they are not outrageous enough to be fired but do nothing outstandingly positive that would merit promotion or raises. So they sit and grumble and blame you for their dead-end career, never asking what they might to do earn that promotion, to earn that increased trust. My mother wasn't even aware that you had to 'earn' trust from grown children, and I'm sad that I haven't taken the time I might have to better understand what you wanted, protesting loudly each time you tried to help me learn.
When you look back at my life, it is logical that my worldly experiences could have led me to never predict that each step in your growth, each decision, each turn of the calendar would have you grow into a fully loving and responsible adult, husband, and father. I never predicted the invention of Color TV, miracle medicines, personal computers or the Internet. Yet my inability to predict their appearance or comprehend the intricacies of their workings doesn't prevent me from utilizing their benefits or enjoying the unanticipated pleasures they provide. Think of the bitter people that predicted that Christopher Columbus would perish off the end of a flat earth. While they were wrong (basing their prediction on their life experiences), the wise ones quickly wised up to THEIR error, embraced the unexpected success and even celebrated (self-deprecatingly) the error of their negative foreboding. But pity instead those so bitter and self-centered among the group that failed to predict Columbus's success, that they personalized his acheivement to be an insult to their prediction of his failure and therefore considered his success an affront to their own pride, wishing for his failure, even pointing out invented failure where obviously none exists. Maybe those selfish and bitter people might have furthermore surrounded themselves with others of similar misguided belief and hurt attitude, such that the chorus of their wails about how THEY were right and the obvious success was actually a failure would echo among them but be pathetic and sad to any outside observer. Such flat-earth mentality, blind to reality and drunk in negative self-delusion would deny themselves the benefits of the unexpected and unanticipated success from uncomfortable quarters and methods, even though all they would have to do is simply disown their own incorrect negative prediction and celebrate the obvious unexpected success. That is what I have strove to do each day, and advise you to do so, too. Ignore you own bitter delusions, embrace reality. Sit back, put down your guard, and allow the ancient prayer to provide its love to you. Allow God to grant you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change and the wisdom to recognize them in your daily life. That simple advice is a gift from my heart to yours.
I really accepted you as another loving member of our family and we know that all families have problems but loving each other makes them easily forgivable.
It is an old joke and a ridiculous irony to hear the mother say to the child "I will love you unconditionally as soon as you change", but I am afraid some of that thinking is at work here. Unconditional love is a noble goal, a dream, a constant thing to stive for, but doesn't real life tell us that there is 'no such thing' as true unconditional love? People from our generation know that love is full of conditions, spelled out behaviors to 'earn' love, and spelled out consequences where love is 'withheld' as a punishment. Even you need to invoke a fictional 'saint' to possess 'unconditional love' for her son-in-law. Doesn't such impossible perfection make you want to just give up and accept that you are human? That is what I was taught, and cannot seem to convince you of the hopelessness of any other philosophy. I would love to open an honest exchange of ideas on the subject of honesty and integrity, idealism and realism, self-encouragement and self-delusion. You seem to have spent a long time contemplating and building a network of thought out and supported ideas.
I'm not sure that you really know how to give of yourself in honestly loving others or if all of your actions are predicated by what you think the other person wants to hear and not by what you really want to say.
Then when you finally blow your cool, it's a real blockbuster with no regard for my age, stature in life, feelings, respect of position, respect of what I've tried to accomplish in my life or anything but your own feelings.
Your behavior is perplexing to me, at times like an animal at the zoo. You must know that I have no role model for an intelligent, articulate, demanding and insistent male role model. My own father passed away when I was a child, and my mother filled in as a traditional strong female archetype. Dad might have stood up to her, and in that way exposed me to a role model for your temperament, but he instead honored my request and stood by quietly regardless of the audacity of her statements and impact to our marriage and children. I have the highest respect for him for doing that, based on the moral code I received from my own difficult mother. That code, "respect your elders" (even if they are causing damage or trauma to your marriage or children) is what I have done my best to pass on to my own daughters. As you know, Dad's father had a mean streak and warped sense of humor. While he was his family's patriarch, he didn't spend a lot of time enforcing discipline. Your brother-in-law is a typical college-educated laid-back relaxed guy that I am very comfortable with. He does not need to blow his stack, as far as I know, to get his way. Besides, I have a great relationship with that daughter where she freely gossips to me the ins and outs of their marriage and I freely give my advice and warnings to her. This while your own wife parrots "Its none of your business" to me when I bring up the very same subjects about your marriage.
So there is no archetype anywhere in my life for a man like you. Naturally, I cannot understand you. You should step aside and allow 'grandmother' to run the roost (as Dad always did) or you should lay back and just 'get along' like your brother in law. We have celebrated his birthday, held holiday family dinners at his home, interacted with his children in the way that we like and are comfortable. He does not unnecessarily challenge a family tradition. He does not need to contemplate the philosophical implication of consistently applying a tenant when making a decision. He does not need to lock himself in the bathroom with the fan running to talk to his wife about making a decision. We understand him and get along with him. He makes us comfortable in a way that you are unwilling or unable to do.
When I see your passion, your need set things straight, I see only the ex-drunken husband of a failed marriage friend. You know who I mean. He drank, and yelled, and hit his wife and they lived in a trailer and he was always out of work. That is what I fear you are actually like, and that my daughter is obviously keeping that information from me, and inventing false tales of wedded bliss. When I see you two needing to talk about a decision or pondering the moral ambiguity of conflicting personal priorities, I see the nutty professor from the movies. Of course I need to step in and grab the thing out of your hands and just get it done. That is how I was raised. That is my life experiences. You make me uncomfortable and do not fit into the categories that I know and understand. And no matter how many times I tell you what I want you to be, so I will know what to expect of you, you stubbornly refuse to be that for me. I wish you would explain your obstinance to me so I might understand why you wont change in a way to enable the two of us to have a healthy relationship.
Looks as if we have come to an impasse as I asked Lyn to please have you call many weeks ago so that we may try to work this out and I have never heard from you.
I am saddened by the impasse we find ourselves. Since the day over a year ago when I handed Dad the telephone (through my tears) and had him order you to stop talking to me, you have done, well, exactly that. Getting your sister-in-law on the phone to straighten you out didn't work. Having you yell at me and hurt my feelings didn't work. And now you tell me that your wife can speak for you. I have no experience for a husband that would authorize his wife to speak for him. I mean, she might gossip or talk about her feelings about him or about the stupid things he does, but I don't know of any wife anywhere that has sat through the years of necessary discussions to enable her to confidently speak for her husband. I find it impossible to believe.
It is therefore logical that I suspect you are actually ducking me and thereby ducking your responsibilities to make our relationship work. I need to talk to you to tell you what I want you to be and to tell you all the different ways that your obstinance has brought me pain. And you won't return my calls. That is why I needed to write you about your 'fictional toast', because you have decided to not talk to me anymore. Well I want to talk, and I want to understand, but I want you to understand how much pain I have endured and how impossible it is for me to deal with you as you currently act. Communication is a two-way street, and you need to show that you are listening to me.
Silence is stronger than words so I assume that you at age 40 are sure that you rather than I at age 63 have the perfect answer for how life should be lived in a your perfect world.
Well the world is not perfect and neither are any of us human beings. We just have to try our best.
Perhaps after I die you will write something nice of me (there MUST be SOMETHING in your memories) as you did of your Mom now that she is gone.
I hope you said some of those wonderful things to her when she was here to hear them.
Remember you asked us NOT to attend her funeral as you knew what was RIGHT AND YOU APOLOGIZED TO US FOR THAT after the fact. I spent much time crying as I wished to pay my last respects as did ALL our family, but we abided by your wishes and still regret it.
The events around your mother's funeral are a source of pain and trouble for me to this day. Of course, my shouting and wailing and name calling will not shed any light on its source. Blaming you and telling you that you are less of a person because of this action will not help me understand you. Telling you how your action was responsible for pain to me will not help me learn about you. And of course, bringing up the subject of the heartache caused by your unusual request to your widowed father, on multiple occasions, would be nothing less then poisoning the relationship between you and I. I have done all I can to browbeat you on this subject, to get you to both renounce your actions of that day, and in that same way agree to never repeat them. Yet my victory over you seems hollow and I do not trust that you will not do it again if the opportunity arises. I want to affect your behavior positively but have no tool to do so except haranguing you verbally and diminishing your character with people closest to you. Yet, this approach has not worked with your birthday celebration so logically it will not work about funerals.
What can I change about myself that I might come to learn what it is that you either desire or fear about my attendance at such important milestone events in your life? How can I come to learn about you so that, like in your fictional toast, I might sculpt your soul with a gentle hand where pounding on it with a hammer has given me only failure and poisoned relations instead?
You apologized to me once about your insult to me, in passing, smack in the very middle of the trauma of your own mother's funeral, between the viewing and burial, while your closest family members melted into tears and your own father walked about in a state of total shock. Of course you, too, were in a state of shock when you apologized. It is obvious to me that on the night of your apology (the very night of your own mother's funeral) you might have opened your mouth and said anything in your state of mind. You might have very well offered to sell me your car for one dollar or announced a plan to quit your job and take one as a circus clown. Rational adults do not believe anything that is said by a person during the time of total mental breakdown and shock that surrounds the death of their parent. To recall and harp upon something said even during the first few weeks after the death of a parent would be mean spirited, and believing such statements would total self-delusion.
To attach my heart to words said on the very night of your mothers funeral, to bring them up time and again for years to come must seem to you to be hurtful on my part. The time is long past due for me to apologize to you for doing that and to swear to never again attempt to hold you to any thing you said during that time. Certainly since your so-called apology was so weak, said in passing, discordant from everything you had said before it and later said in the weeks, months, and years after. A matter of fact, it is hard to talk about this subject without being a little embarrassed that, in the thousands of words you have spoken on the subject of your mother's funeral, I would latch onto three or four words said on the very funeral night and try to tell you that THOSE are the ones you REALLY MEAN and all the other ones you spoke on that subject (the one that I don't like) are actually what you DON'T FEEL.
But I need to understand what you felt, what you feel. I want to know if you disown your actions of that time. This especially in light of the fact that I have again done everything I can to verbally beat you into compliance, this time including my work at escalating the situation to include using the authority of your own aged and widowed father's feelings against you. I want to know if you can tell me honestly that you will not repeat your hurtful actions in the future.
I do not have any confidence that you have changed your opinion. Except for a couple words on the night of the funeral, you have not apologized or expressed remorse. I have harped and harped about my hurt, but you have not caved in about your insistence that I stay away. This is just like your birthday, you are being TOTALLY SELF-CENTERED. How dare you ignore my feelings, my desires, my wants during your Mother's funeral? That is something that you JUST DON'T DO. And you act like you would do it again, if you could go back in time, and would do it again if the situation arises in the future. I want so badly to avoid that, to resolve my own pain, but I don't have any tool besides telling you how you hurt my feelings and expecting you to change your ways upon hearing that news.
You see you are NOT always RIGHT.
Life is a lot of give and take. Where in the world will this lead?
I am so frustrated, so sad, at how things have evolved between us over the last twenty-five years. I have been consistent in telling you what I want of you, how I expect you to behave, and of invoking people within your life to sing as a chorus of agreement to my demands upon you. Yet you have slowly eroded our relationship. In the beginning, you would tell me how you disagreed with my ideas, so that I might better tell you how you were wrong to disagree. Back then you would recklessly open a small part of your heart and share your small worries and passing desires, such that I might throw them back in your face as a justification for an unrequested action I took against your later directly stated wishes. Back then you would tell me what you wanted, so that I could tell you that 'you don't understand' why your request was unreasonable or would simply never be met. I have been consistent across decades. I have respected your wishes by throwing them back at you to prove that you should follow my opinion over your own or by acting unilaterally upon them against your later stated wishes. I have tried to be true to myself, but you have refused to honor me likewise. You keep trying to ignore the things I tell you to do, to feel, to remember, and instead keep being disagreeable and making up other facts against my wishes. Who should know what you think on a given subject on a given day and, more importantly, who SHOULD know what you SHOULD think about a given thing? I was taught that you trusted your elders, and relied upon their long lives of experiences, and not to trust your own judgment and experiences when it hurts your 'elders' feelings. I am consistent in pointing out where you have hurt my feelings, through commission and omission, and what you should change to be more agreeable and palatable to me. Why are you so self-centered that you cannot change yourself to be what I want?
I have apologized for sending you a gift of a book we all thought you would love because of your love of baseball and it was the home field of your childhood,
I am so frustrated, so perplexed that I cannot understand your feelings, your desires. I seem to be jumping from shadows, stabbing into the dark, guessing what it is that you want me to be. Somehow, the thing that is uniquely you eludes my understanding while the things that I understand are not what makes you unique. I consider your efforts at writing the 'fictional toast' to be an olive branch, a trial balloon, a whisper campaign to see if I am interested in learning about the real you or just continuing on my quarter century search for ammunition to shoot back in your face.
I know that you have stopped sharing with me. An entire year elapsed from the time I told Dad (through my wails and tears) to tell you to stop telling me about your feelings -- because they were so rude -- until today. An entire year has passed, and I do not have too many more years left, without any effort on my part to listen without talking, to learn about you for the sole purpose of knowing you better, not to find different ways to coerce you into changing to suit my desires. You have actually stopped telling me what you think and feel (as I asked) and I am starting to realize what a dangerous request I made.
It is sad that I find myself either begging for your silence or crying out my hurt at your words. I have never learned how to just listen and say 'Good for You'. It is a difficult thing for a parent to just accept a child, or a son-in-law, when that child will not cave-in and change to be the thing the 'elder' wants. We called such blind obedience 'respect' in my day, and my own mother was a zealot in considering such totalitarian 'respect' from her daughter and son-in-law to be a birthright. Nobody has taught me differently, and I may be too old to learn. I'm not even certain that I want to learn how to listen without judgement, without needing to shout down a memory with a version that I prefer, without blowing a request out of proportion with language that is poisonous and bitter, without invoking and manipulating every other person in your life to pressure you to conform. That is asking a lot of a person past the age of sixty that has spent a lifetime as first the victim of such outrage, then the orchestrator.
but perhaps it is your childhood that reflects to your future.
Still love you and pray for you daily,
I pray for the wisdom, courage, and serenity required to resolve this situation for all parties. But as a parent, I must admit that my own needs and wants always have and always will take a back seat to those of my children and their generation. That is something that you learn after sixty years. My years are numbered, maybe my very months, but your life and you son's life lay ahead. I don't wish to destroy myself if not necessary, but I have come to understand that my own legacy is the success of the generations that follow me, not any lockstep parroting of "respect" from them to me. If my own mother had known this, my job of listening and caring for you (without needing to force you to change) would have been much easier, or at least possible for me to acheive.
May God help us both fulfill His will.