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presentjoy It can be really rather scary to break that exterior sweetness. Sometimes I forget how much or how little people know of who I really am. My best friend and I were talking the other day about this girl I loathed as a teenager, and he was like, "She was terrified of you! She called me once because you were in the same mall and she didn't know what to do." I laughed and said, "Me? But I'm little and squishy." And he gave me this look and said, "Yeah, and much more imposing when you're angry." I was sort of shocked to remember that he knew what I was like when I was truly angry, that that was something with real power I could put out.
This is a real issue I have with my parents. A big part of me wants them to fear me, just to prove that I do have some power. But then another part of me just wants to be cared for--my childhood was full of me being what my family calls the "mini matriarch." If my mother held a gavel in her right hand and scales in her left, I was her left hand. I kept the balance and the peace, the order and the mercy.
It upsets me to think that my mother and I are probably "close" the way my brother and I were "close." He and I weren't really close. He controlled me. I was a pet, a well-trained dog.
I woke up thinking today about that popular song, "I'm a bitch/I'm a mother/I'm a child/I'm a lover." I wondered if I asked my mother, "Do you realize you're a controlling person?" How she might answer. I don't think she would admit that. She would probably twist it somehow. This pains me because how can we form real relationships with others if we can't accept ourselves? Our shortcomings and graces and all of it?
I'm not shy to say I'm lots of things. I can be very manipulative, passive-aggressive, underhanded. I can work to rid myself of these tendencies, but not if I can't accept them. It took me a while to really admit that I was passive-aggressive, not passive, but now that I see the patterns of behavior in myself for what they are, I can work on stopping them.
My mother would vehemently tell anyone, should the issue come up, that she is assertive. She would proudly go on and on. No. She's not. She's mostly likely somewhere between passive-aggressive and aggressive. She may have moments of assertiveness--we all fall somewhere on the spectrum sometimes. But at her core is not assertiveness. I only know one person who is really assertive all the time, and you can SEE it. It's plainly obvious in everything she does. My mother knows this person. She should be able to tell the difference.
My father... I don't even know. The two of them come from this culture of under-the-rugness. They talk about forgiveness, not holding grudges, but they do none of the work most of the time. So really they're just shoving skeletons in the closet.
I know it's not up to me to "fix" them, but I want to. I'd like to be able to accept them. One of my great fears is that they'll die before we have a really solid relationship of understanding between us. My allies in my generation are not much help. My sister seems to have adopted their culture of accept and move on--they're not going to change and there's nothing wrong with who they are, how they handle things. She gets defensive about it, like them. My cousins are indebted to them for my parents taking care of them when their parents were no-shows.
I don't know. Maybe I should go spend some time with my aunt across the country, my father's sister. Somehow she seems to have escaped all of this. Maybe she has some answers about how my parents became these people who seem to treat denial as a friend.
