It's Not My Job

Awake in the night several days ago (an all too common phenomenon for me from 2 to 4 a.m.), after my  mind had run through topics like where my daughter might go to college, how I will earn a more substantial income, and whether I should just get up rather than wait to fall back asleep, I finally came around to my mother. As if that topic is always waiting.

Not just my mother but my relationship with my mother. And the words more or less rolled out of my head as if in a sentence on a page: "What it comes down to is this: when I'm with my mother, I feel like a bad person." Tears quietly spilled out of my closed eyes and ran down my cheeks until I wiped off my cheeks, blew my nose, and tried, unsuccessfully, to go back to sleep.

When I got up that sentence was still clear within me, and eventually I got around to writing about it. More or less in the following way:

When I'm with my mother, I feel like a bad person. Maybe even a terrible person. What do I mean by a terrible person? A bad daughter. A failure as a daughter.

Good daughters are supposed to "love" their mothers. By which I think I mean they are supposed to feel warmth and affection for their mothers, not simply to act lovingly toward them. Keep her happy. Be minimal bother and stress.


Those italicized lines got my attention! My adult mind knows it's not anybody's job to make someone else happy or keep them happy. Nor is it usually anyone's God-given life calling to "be minimal bother and stress" to someone else. Clearly I was tripping over those old, very tenacious beliefs that I'd absorbed early in my childhood, that I've tripped over plenty of times before (and may even have thought I'd left behind).

I can only imagine that when I was young it seemed that my life, or at least my mother's, went better when I created minimal bother and stress for her. Maybe I took it upon myself at an early age to "keep her happy"--an impossible task for one person to keep another happy, no matter what the circumstances or who the personalities! Failing at that task, I learned to do the next best thing: to be the source of minimal burden and stress, by keeping the noise down, tamping down my energy and enthusiasm, being a "good girl," not honoring my own needs.

I'm sure my mother herself never modeled directly asking for her own needs and wants. (She's one of the Queens of Indirect Communication, remember?) Maybe that's enough reason right there for me to have failed at that lesson myself. And maybe now's as good a time as any to master it!

I continued to write:

My life and her life don't seem to fit well in the same space--for me to inhabit my life in her presence--is that the rub? I've tried it both ways: bringing my life and my energy with me and withholding it. Neither seems to work. (I notice a lot of withholding, holding back, not sharing of myself when I am with my mother, especially when compared to some of my siblings.)

I go through the motions of being a caring daughter, and truly, I don't wish my mother harm. I just sometimes kinda wish my mother were dead.

There, I said it. Sometimes I wish that my mother were dead. She has already lived a long life--93 years!--and her mind is going soft and spotty on her, which she hates and finds both extremely annoying and terrifyingly confusing. Some days she lives in a fog of disorientation and discombobulation sprinkled with moments of simply looking out the window thinking of...? I will never know.

Somehow it's tempting to think life would be simpler if she were dead. In rapid succession I recognize, slightly enjoy, then am horrified at and no doubt ashamed of my feelings. But I don't banish them.

I wonder later from the safe distance of my own home: Have I felt this toward my mother from a fairly young age (a major psychological conflict for a young child!) and buried the feelings and the conflict deep, deep in my body?

And what of her? Did some part of her ever wish that I, the youngest, had never been born? I've wondered that many times, but I know she would never admit to such feelings even if she had access to them. Or did I intuit her lingering, unexpressed grief for my brother and imagine that I was at least not the "right child?" Not the one whose death had broken her heart (and my dad's too).

No wonder I end up feeling at war with myself when I'm with my mother, and no wonder the fleeting moments when I genuinely appreciate the woman in front of me are such a relief. Like the balm of a cooling breeze on a stifling hot day.

My attention is snagged once again on that line about going through the motions of being a caring daughter. Going through the motions is better than nothing, I suppose, but it doesn't feel great. But there's more to it than that.

One of my brothers told me not long ago that once, years back, when he had asked my mother how she managed to raise four children after my oldest brother, my parents' first child, died, he reported her reply as: "I went through the motions. I just did what I thought I was supposed to do."

I bounced this off of a trusted mentor who said, "The child of a mother who is going through the motions feels as good as abandoned, because the mother has abandoned herself. Just as you are abandoning yourself if you are 'going through the motions' when you are with her. You are leaving most of yourself somewhere else."

Finding a way through this pattern to something more whole and healthy feels essential but also immensely difficult. The pattern I know with my mother has been in place for so long.

But perhaps I can start by repeating to myself for as long as it takes: "It's not my job to make my mother happy. My job is to be myself, to honor myself rather than abandon myself. Or hope." (Funny, on that last visit with my mother, I even found myself musing on Dante's "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" as an invisible sign over my mother's door.)

And there's also Martha Beck's wisdom to remember: "All God really wants from us is an unshakable commitment to our own happiness." Amen to that.