the chicken or the egg

Of the many insightful lyrics to Tracy Chapman's "All That You Have Is Your Soul," the one that sprang to mind the other day was on making babies--keep your mind out of the gutter, I'm talking about the outcome, not the process:

Thought I'd made something that could be mine forever
Found out the hard way one can't possess another

I'm not sure that my mom has found this out at all.

Last weekend- actually, it was the evening mom called and figured I was asleep-- a friend and I were talking about our moms. This friend's mom's antics include trying to micromanage from the opposite coast how much dog food my friend should bring when she takes her dog on day trip.

My friend asked about my mom's relationship with her mom. I recalled the lecture mom gave me in Shanghai, about how her mom never showed affection (mom's point being, why, given all the affection she's lavished on me, do I have a complex and feel the need to always be, in her words, "superior"). My friend pointed out that this was it-- mom needed the attention.

This explains a lot, and I'm not sure why it never occurred to me before. Perhaps because I don't need, don't really like, a lot of attention, and when we try to understand other people, we tend to project or consider projecting our own traits first.

One of the starkest signs that mom needs attention is that... well, she constantly demands it, even if it's going to be bad attention. She doesn't really distinguish between good and bad attention. Picking fights, waking people up in the middle of the night, interrupting someone's yoga, etc. can only lead to bad attention, but that's not important to someone who has to have attention at any moment.

Then again, maybe mom doesn't register bad attention as such (which is another way of not distinguishing good and bad attention-- not just in terms of quality, but in terms of essence). I wish I could find an article from the Times from more than six months but less than two years ago on how people process other people's behavior compared to their own. Research shows that we tend to view our own behavior as a (reasonable) response to someone else's actions, whereas we tend to view others' behavior as standing alone. So when I ask my mother to please not interrupt me when I'm doing yoga-- particularly when I ask her for the third time within one yoga session and my tone has gotten snippier-- mom doesn't connect the snippiness to the fact that she's interrupting me during yoga; she sees it as part of my impatient, ill-mannered, selfish personality. And if you can just do that, why bother thinking about it and risk discovering something that you wouldn't want to see?

I have to take partial responsibility for this imperfect feedback loop. I, too, have taken the lazy way out-- I've chosen to let mom do her thing, rather than communicating with her about why her actions are unacceptable to me. Of course, this is largely because when I've tried to have those conversations, she accuses me of having a complex or being overly sensitive. Which would be fine if the situation ended there, but I do learn from our interactions, i.e. I adjust my behavior accordingly. But she doesn't see my new behavior as adjusted to her behavior, and she starts to concoct theories about what's wrong with me. If I don't call during the week because I'm tired and busy, and who needs to be reminded that there are no lakes around, much less asked whether she has AC or ceiling fans for the twentieth time, when she's tired and busy, mom starts to think there's something wrong with our relationship (that can be fixed by trying to coerce me into calling more frequently).

It's kind of a vicious cycle: maybe mom asks me non-stop about things to which I've just told her I don't have an answer, because she's realized that I don't tell her about things. But she doesn't realize that I don't tell her about things because I don't want to be confronted with her non-stop questions. Maybe part of her cold reaction to my getting a new job was due to a sense of betrayal from my not having told her I was looking for a job... but why in the hell would I tell her that I was looking for a job, when she'd just a) tell me to apply to Google, b) try to talk me out of it because she just didn't get it, an c) ask me at least once a day whether I'd heard about the job, when that's exactly what you don't need to hear when you're waiting on an offer.

Of course I'm not going to be especially forthcoming when mom reacts to my hopes, accomplishments, and even setbacks with dismissal or derision. When I got turned down for a Fulbright many years ago, mom opened the envelope, read it to me over the phone, and said, "and I think we all agree that this is a good thing." And not in a tone meant to make me feel better.

Given that she reacted to news of my being offered the job I'd wanted and worked my butt off to get by asking what I'd done to piss off everyone at my then-current job, creating a situation where I had no choice but to leave, do you think I'm especially inspired to share my deepest thoughts, feelings and hopes with her? Neither do I, but mom doesn't understand it.

Given that she's greeted major events in my life with a startling lack of perspective, which in turn enabled outsized demands for attention and unmoderated hissy fits at times when we as a family should have been celebrating and being nice to one another, I dread, rather than look forward to, family events of most kinds. The woman has thrown fits at both of my graduations (not during the actual ceremonies, thankfully), once over a potential potential parking ticket.

I almost owe it to her to point out the connection between her antics and my lack of sharing. Part of me thinks she'd want to know. Even if she does, though, she sure doesn't want to listen.