That story about your mom is creepy Cedar...........our mothers were cruel. Was it vulnerability they saw in their daughters to bring out that cruelty?
I very much want to believe that with me, the 'buck stops here.'
the views which I can't change and which in some manner harm me.
I'm not sure you can choose to have a different perspective if you haven't felt your own pain.........perhaps then it would simply be denial.
With speech we can do that with our languaging. We can learn to choose to not suffer. We can change the way we define a thing..........
I think it's a good practice to quiet the mind, to allow space between all of those thoughts.........peace seems to live there.
I don't know how to think about my mother, Recovering. I have heard her described as a narcissist. My sister and I liken her to the scorpion, in that story about the fox and the scorpion. In case you don't know it, I will tell it, here. I will tell that story, and the story about the frog and the poisoned pond, too.
I think it is crucially important that we have a witness, that we be able to share, and to validate, the wrongness in our childhoods with someone who was there, or with someone, like a good therapist, who has been trained to take, and take us back from there, safely. Without a witness, the things we remember seem too impossibly wrong to have happened. Or, because we have been treated like someone such things can, do, and should happen to, we **** ourselves more thoroughly every time we relive the memory. Without the witness there to defend and stand for us until we are strong enough, until we can see beyond the only truths we knew, we cannot refute them, and heal. I agree, Recovering, that we need to walk through the pain of what was
believing our own truths, before we can begin to understand the mother-wounds. (That is greenreen's phrase ~ I like that!)
My sister and I made a pact that we would try to create family from what we had left. We are doing our best. There are pitfalls and times my mother purposefully stirs the pot to isolate one or another family member, to this day. My mother is not finished weaving destruction into her family. She is spiteful, hate-filled, and cruel beyond belief. And yet, she is so out of the ballpark that I feel protective of her. This is a vulnerability, and does not protect me, or my children, from her.
husband did not believe me, during the early years of our marriage. He felt that our children should, of course, see their grandparents. Now, having been stung more than once himself, he understands the what, but not the why. Like the frog in the story I am about to tell, he refuses to go anywhere near her, and has her in our home only reluctantly. She is very bright, my mother. Very subtle, as she goes about destroying something, and is savagely triumphant, when she wins.
She has tried to destroy my marriage, and has destroyed my sister's marriage. My sister is remarried, now....
My mother hated/worshiped her family of origin. We do not know them well. But our paternal grandmother (whom my mother hates passionately to this day) loved us unconditionally. And so, because we were loved, we know how to love, and how to be loved; and that has made all the difference.
Whenever we have the option of loving, of acceptance, of smiling at someone ~ any opportunity to make the world a brighter, gentler place, we need to do that ~ especially those of us who have somehow come through whatever happened to our mothers with our capacities to love, to see and believe in the best, intact. We may, like my grandmother's love did, for us, be the one real, hopeful thing in someone's life.
We may be the thing, as my grandmother's love for us was, that makes the difference between someone who chooses to love and someone who chooses to hate.
I know this to be absolutely true.
One person can make that difference.
Anyway, here are the stories.
:O)
A fox and a scorpion standing on the bank of a raging river. The scorpion convinces the fox she will not sting him if he carries her across to the opposite bank. The fox refuses, stating that he KNOWS the scorpion will sting him, because that is what scorpions do. Over the course of the afternoon, the scorpion convinces the fox to carry her across the river. As they reach the other bank, she stings the fox and leaps to safety. Dying, the fox pants, "But you promised!"
"Stupid fox!", the scorpion replied. "You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me across the river."
And that is what it is like to interact with my mother. We both know it. The venom is long-acting stuff. Often, it takes putting things together to realize she has stung, again. But she always does. It is in her nature.
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You may have heard this one. I will repeat it, anyway.
Once up on a time, there lived a family of frogs in a poisoned pond. There came a day when a beautiful, brilliantly green frog from a large, healthy pond happened onto the poisoned pond. Powerful throat swelling, he sang his song for the beautiful maiden frog he knew lived there, in the poisoned pond.
And she came away with him.
And oh, she grew strong and healthy herself, in the clear waters of the beautiful pond he took her to, so far away from the toxic waters of the poisoned pond where she had grown up and come into her maturity. And one day, she gave birth to a beautiful daughter of her own. And the child grew strong and healthy in that sunshiny place where they all lived together, listening to the powerful song of the father. But, one day, the young mother began to wonder about her own family.
She wanted to see them, to help them, to teach them about the pond where she now lived, where the water was sweet and good, and the sun shone every day.
She wanted them to see her baby.
Her mate, the strong male frog with the beautiful song, cautioned her not to go. He forbid her to bring their daughter there.
But one dark night, the young frog took her daughter, and slipped away.
In the night, the pond looked just as she remembered it, and she was so happy to be home! As she entered the water with her baby daughter in her arms, she felt a weakness, a kind of vertigo. But, determined to help her family, to teach them a better way, she went on, fully entering the pond.
By morning, the toxins in the pond, unseen, untasted, so subtly corrupting, had made it so that she was not sure, anymore, just where she had entered the pond. By noon, she was too weak to have left the pond anyway, even if she could have remembered how to get out.
She raised her daughter, there in the poisoned pond.
And she told her daughter a story the mother herself no longer had the capacity truly to believe. It was a story about a strong, healthy male, beautifully green, who had sung of a pond where the water was clear and the sun shone, every day.
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This is what husband says, about my mother: It's as though I have a bottle of sealed poison. The bottle is sealed in wax and covered in dust. There are times, to this day, when I still believe there is a mystery in the bottle valuable enough that I risk opening that wax seal. I read the warnings printed everywhere, in that place where I keep that bottle of poison. Without fail, the day will come that I retrieve the bottle, and open it.
I am poisoned by it, every time.
The bottle is poison. However I wish it, however certain I am that this time, I will be strong enough to heal it, to change the poison in the bottle...I will never be able to change it into something that is not poison.
I will never become immune.
I need to acknowledge the bottle, acknowledge the poison...but every time I open it, I will be poisoned, so I need to beware and be aware.
Poison is poison.
***************
husband was born in Italy. His mother mothered me, taught me how to mother, how to hold and cherish my babies.
I think I love his mother more than husband does. There again, is the truth that we never know who we are helping, or how. Always, always choose to be a little bigger, to make a little more room at your table, to be kind, if you can do it.
So, that's my story, which I told to this degree for the sake of greenreen.
Cedar
