Epiphanies

Man, girlfriend can whine. It's impressive, actually. Her knack for it rivals that of getting in my way in direct proportion to how efficiently I need to get done whatever I'm doing.

She started whining when I chased her in from inside, and proceeded to whine as I put things away and cleaned the kitchen. I was getting eaten alive by bugs outside, and I don't like for her to be out there without adult supervision. Then she whined all the way through my phone call with my parents--first time I talked to mom in a month or so. She had (passively) refused to talk to me since the New Yorker password fight, but she happened to pick up the phone when I called, so we talked. I'd forgotten how combative she could be over little things--this time, that combativeness was directed at my father. He'd say something uncontroversial, and she'd take on an aggressive tone:

A.: So, you're headed to the Cape on Friday?
Mom: Yeah. And??
A.: Nothing, just asking.
Mom: It should be pretty good. Except there are sharks there.
Dad: That's not the part of the Cape where the sharks were sighted...
Mom: No! There were sharks sighted on the Cape!

Afterward, mom asked me for the website through which she'd given away her old TV--was it Craigslist? No, I said; it was freecycle. She had me spell both. Spelling for my mother over the phone is always a painful exercise.

A.: C-R-A...
Mom: What?
A.: C-R-A-I-G..
Mom: Got it: craiglist.
A.: No--C-R-A-I-G-S, then "list."
Mom: What??
A.: C-R-A-I-G-S-"list."
Mom: Okay. And how do you spell "freecycle"? Is that with an "s" or a "c"
A.: A "c."
Mom: Okay. And then a "k" or a "c"?
A.: A "c."
Mom: Two "c"s??
A.: Yes.

Oh, and mom reiterated a film recommendation that dad had related a couple of weeks ago. She said, "it won't be in a regular cinema. Surely there must be something like West Newton in your area? You could google something..."

I think it's really funny that mom's assumption is that I haven't found the independent movie theatres in the area.

Overall, it was a civil conversation. I've recently taken a magnanimous approach to the harsher aspects of my mother's personality, partly because it's easier to be magnanimous toward someone when you don't have to deal with them, but also partly because I've had an epiphany about people who say rude things--I think I've told you about it--that it's always about them, and never about you. It's so obvious, yet it's so intuitive to react personally when someone insults you. I'm quite used to being insulted by my mother, but it took being insulted by other people--to whom I didn't react at all emotionally--for it to hit me.

I thought about two mom offenses in particular: doubting my social skills, and doubting my competence. Now you know I've never claimed to have the most stellar social skills in the world, but I get by. Nonetheless, mom consistently feels the need to interrupt me, apologize for me, and later, tell me that I talk too much and that I'm overbearing. That kind of hurt when I took it personally, thought, "what must mom think of me?" The same went through my mind when mom accused me of wanting to leave my old job because I'd pissed everyone there off to the point where I didn't feel comfortable working there anymore. And it's so obvious: the question isn't, "what must mom think of me?" It's "how insecure must mom be of her own social skills? she must be aware of how overbearing she is."

The projection of incompetence is a somewhat different phenomenon: it's not what mom dislikes about herself; it's what my competence/independence means for her. I think it started out as genuine perception of incompetence--at some point in my life (like, when I was a teenager), I wasn't skilled at making decisions for myself or making things happen, and mom found a niche for herself in helping me. It's kind of what moms do. And then I grew up, but she never got the memo. For a long time, it either amused or irked me that mom didn't think that without her guidance, I was capable of, oh, I don't know, making career choices, making housing choices, making nutritional choices, etc. Only recently, when I thought, "it really is about time that mom reassess the evidence and determine that I can function in society more ably than a six-year-old," that I realized that (a) mom doesn't really do evidence-based assessments, but more importantly, (b) my ability to manage my own life infringes on her niche. And mom's of the "better feared than loved" persuasion, so if I no longer need her for practical things, what's to keep me in her life? Which just backfires, because if she could back off the insults, I'd want to spend more time with her.

***
Last weekend, RM had told me that he thought my parents were standoffish--they said hello but didn't pay much attention to him. If you'll recall, they were here when he first came to see the house.

I think that's really funny. What did he expect? For them to drop everything and give him a warm welcome? They'd driven down from Boston two days before, and they'd be driving back up that afternoon. We were busy getting things fixed around the house. And besides, I'm not sure why a warm welcome would be warranted--he was just some guy coming to look at the house. Expectations, I tell you.