reading this post by melissa it’s a review of a self help book on teaching wives how to fix their marriage and it reminded me of a mother i knew
good woman. good mother pregnant very young but only by our standards of today And it was with twins
when i spent time with her family, one of the things i noticed, and tried to bring to her attention was that she put so much unnecessary pressure on herself to be an excellent mum
in my head, i used my mum as reference for her because she is a version of my mum just 2 decades before
the issue was at the time, while i could see the contradictions in her behaviour, i couldn’t adequately express it to her
with simplicity
so i could make her see and so i could help her see herself
she was a person always under so much stress. this is something i still think about. i still regret not being able to put into words
because i saw her i saw what she was truly going through
and even worse for me, what i read in her was somebody who wanted to make changes, which i very rarely see
she was stubborn, though even when, i, as a neutral outside observer to her family was the perfect person to judge her for what she truly is
it’s a situation i’ve found myself in many times recently where i see the person’s issue, try to carefully and tactfully reverse engineer it so they understand it, but they deny it. they lash out; they make it hostile. we’re in trying times in this world but this i’m sure is what increases my loneliness
it was a night where we were talking about new years resolutions. from there, a big conversation started
mothers grapple with intertwining their self-worth with specific standards for home and childrear, leading to a creation of rigid rules, driven by desire to appear excellent to other women mothers, and their own mother, and to feel validated by their approval. Shame and inadequacy eats them up if things aren’t done their way. their way is very specific and the only “correct” way it is not about actually getting something done, it is about the image they have of being a mother doing what they deem to be excellent things. husbands bear the brunt of this. this discrepancy in expectations and emotional investment creates a cycle where mothers micromanage and find fault with how their husbands contribute, because men don’t feel equal shame and pressure to appear excellent in every possible way, and so the father will have an easygoing attitude to raising their child, that is equally effective. and in the case of the mother i knew, her children bore the brunt, even when they so desired to be involved. This led her to covertly monitor and judge her children, to resent them because she wouldn’t relinquish her authority and her feeling of being the most important, vital thing to the family. She Sabotages herself, reinforcing a dynamic where she feels overburdened and unheard, while stifling the progress of her children because she won’t give up control, and so they never learn to do shit themselves. hers was more complex because they could do a lot of things themselves, so she had plausible deniability, yet she still wanted time to herself, and was denying it to herself. worse, as a “young mother” who she was as mother was a triple ego hit because it was her life’s project - her purpose. and this situation she was in it was entirely her fault. but no one got what i was getting at because they’re too young, and nearly all of them lambasted me. Not her, though. not the mother.
she had lots of smart reasonings. for example, she didn’t believe in snacking. she’d prepare consistent meals through the day, all 3. and you were meant to eat properly. it sounds simple and easy but i never snacked those days. because of her rigid but smart principles. these were her motherly wisdoms and efficiencies.
now i remember, i did have an explanation for it at the time. i called it wishing someone else would captain the ship while refusing to give control of the steering wheel
there were so many things i saw in this family that if i just read into it, i could see a complex, an issue, not something inhuman or weird, just very human. and part of me does wish they could have opened up to me. we all would have benefited from it
i used to go through life seeing the truth in people when they were hiding and it always conflicted me is it my place to tell them i see them?
i do realise now it’s always up to me to create these moments where people feel seen it’s not a reluctant duty but a beautiful thing
and i still believe that rather than individually coaching mums and dads to deal with these problems my goal of cultivating a good life from the root makes more sense. because a lot of these problems are in effect personality problems that some couples’ therapist is meant to go and deeg deep into in order to change how people operate on a fundamental level, of which a majority of an entire gender will be doing as default.
so to create literature and cope to fix people who’ve been socially designed to behave this way after the fact is inefficient, retarded, takes a lot of time, and frankly, a lot of people are too mentally slow to be able to take the hotfix, so families just suffer in the process.
But these are ways to fix the problems that currently exist, while we wait for me. after all, for most us, in this life, we’re almost done, we’re almost finished we don’t get to start over; that chance is for our children
you know what? i’ve decided i will reach out to her to speak to her.