Skip to main content

Sin Washing

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time trying to resolve my relationship with my mother. Issues remain where they are and time is running out. The only way forward is to accept the status quo and make the most of what is and has been good, ignore the rest. This seems for work for my mother and I but has consequences for my relationship with J. 

I see how intergenerational trauma manifests itself but don't know exactly how to break the cycle. I used to be deeply trusting and ready to share everything with my mother when I was younger - it felt like the ultimate safe space. As I grew older and suffered a series of serious setbacks in my personal life, I started to realize I was giving infinitely more than I ever received from her. My mother as a woman has always been a perfect stranger to me - I know close to nothing about her that matters because she is a deeply private person. The bar for privacy is so high that the person becomes a two-dimensional caricature of a human being. That is who she is and that is best I will ever get. 

I strove to be a very different kind of mother to J - be truly an open book where nothing is off-limits. She only has to ask and she will get a complete and truthful answer. For J's personality that is like being told to drink out of a firehose until it stops when she only ever needed a sip of water. She needs a nuanced approach to communication on things that are material and relevant to her - not my no-holds barred style. 

Coming out of decades of feeling gaslighted and betrayed by my mother who soaked up every morsel of information I gave her acting as if it were her right to have it my duty to provide, I cannot modulate my approach with J. Any filter, any calibration feels like repeating the sins of my mother - something I cannot do. For me to be at peace with myself, I have to do it my way and ironically it does not serve J at all. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...