2003
January-April 2004
May-December 2004
January through May 2005
June to July 2005
On Typepad with posts archived from July 2005 to present.
January 26, 2003: Another estrangement begins.
January 27, 2003: My family: A history.
January 28-31, 2003: Humor & Estrangement
February 18, 2003: Mental Illness
March 9, 2003: The behaviors that cause estrangement.
April 27, 2003: Specifics & Generalities.
May 1, 2003: The Sopranos, Mother's Day, & LeBey suggestions
August 19, 2003: Another Birthday Gone By. Coping with lack of response. Thinking of coping with my mother.
October 25, 2003: Pat Conroy Interview - Thoughts on associations between feelings and words like "father" and "mother".
December 26, 2003: Not much to add at the almost end of the year.
January 26, 2003 Another estrangement begins.
It's a new year and this is the first I've written on estrangement in months. If this 
is your first visit, I recommend that you read the blog from 2001-2002 first rather than draw immediate conclusions from whatever I write here in 2003. As I've stated previously, we bring so much baggage from our own histories that it is hard to be objective about why someone else says this or that about mothers, fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. It helps to know as much as possible about each other so that we might be able to know what it feels like to walk in someone else's shoes. If we can be more objective about each other, we're more likely to hear each other, less likely to be judgmental, more likely to communicate. The Musings archive isn't terribly long. I didn't write every day or even every month. (I counted. It's only seven entries in 2002!) It won't kill you. I promise! (Note added in December 2005: That is me on the right at six years old. My daughter at four or five years old is on the left.)
So it is a new year. My enfant terrible, the Estrangement, is still alive and well and has a sibling. We are still estranged, me and my daughter. She is 36 now. I am 56. I hear she is unemployed at the moment and looking for a job. I spy on her website. Or lurk. Or stalk. Silently. I think of writing her but I am convinced I will only piss her off. So I wait, believing in my heart that there will come a day when she's ready to resume a relationship with me. When she is ready to cope with whatever it was that caused her to decide not to talk to me. I have to change that – what I said about believing in my heart. No, I don't believe in my heart that she will talk to me again. I do believe in my heart that I can't push the matter and that if I did, she surely wouldn't talk to me again. I am willing to wait it out, to see what happens.
I am not speaking to my mother now. Again. This was due to receiving a very insulting letter from her. Out of the blue! It would have been easier to take if there had been a good reason to insult me but there wasn't. I have mixed feelings about estranging myself once again from my soon-to-be eighty year old mother. I feel guilty at the thought of her pain over my not speaking to her. Yet I wouldn't let anyone else talk to me that way and I won't let her, even if she is my mother. If I thought a sincere apology was possible from her, I'd ask for one and be done with it and go on. But my mother treats apologies like flimsy bandaids that excuse anything that she does. If she gives one, it is just to mitigate the anger of someone she's stomped on and then she goes on and does the same thing again. That is what she did last year. Acted horribly and then made an insincere apology. I hadn't recovered from last year when she insulted me this year. She had been restraining herself for months but I had felt some rumblings in comments that she made during the year but which she managed to retract before I had a chance
to respond to them. It was as though she was stifling herself until September and then she couldn't restrain herself any longer.
As much as I feel guilty, I also notice how good I feel. I have been able to get so many things done and enjoy them so much more than usual. I believe there is a connection here! Yet I know the irony of this. That I am estranging myself from my mother while at the same time wishing that my daughter was not estranging herself from me. Some might accuse me of having no empathy for my mother. Yet I do! I do have empathy for her but I am not willing to let her insult me just because I want my daughter to talk to me. Letting her insult me won't bring my daughter back into my life. It WILL cause me pain and stress. The price of having a relationship can be too high.
My mother and I have been estranged before. The difference this time is that I made an active decision, not a passive one, to stop talking to my mother. In 1978 when we were estranged, it was because my mother said she didn't want to hear from me anymore. I let it happen and let it go on for 3 years. I was happy that she instigated it. I didn't have to take action on my own.
This time I am the one making an active decision not to talk to her. I take responsibility for it. I am comfortable with my decision even though I am not thrilled with the thought of her feeling pain. I know there is no way around that. I have to get used to the idea that sometimes I have to do things for my own best interests that make someone else unhappy. I was raised to be SUCH a people pleaser!
I've had a lot of other thoughts about estrangement lately that I thought I'd be writing about today but none of them are occurring to me. I needed to get this decision about my mother out there on the table where it can glare at us all in its simple unattractiveness! I guess its attractiveness or lack of it depends on your point of view. Some days it seems damned ugly. Most days it just feels so good to be able to do things without having my mother tell me how lucky she is to have the most stupid daughter in the world. Maybe if I had more of a sense of humor about that it would be easier. I mean REALLY! The most stupid daughter in THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD? What is the likelihood of THAT? No other daughter in the ENTIRE WORLD is more stupid than ME? THAT is QUITE an interesting achievement on my part. Something that might make me ........ almost proud!
In case you haven't figured out who the pictures are, I'll list them here from top to bottom: Me at about age 6, my daughter at 4, my mother in 1999, my mother in 1940 (reflected in a mirror as she is learning to use a new camera.)
Just wanted to add a couple of photos to my Estranged Family Album. 
The first is of my mother's mother circa 1941. My grandmother Sofia who came to America from Finland in her twenties. She had twelve brothers and sisters. Five died young. She was the only one of the surviving eight to come here. The story goes that her passage on the ship was paid for by the eggman (as he was known in the city in New England where he lived). The eggman delivered eggs and she was going to come to the U.S. and marry the eggman who she had never met but had corresponded with. She arrived in this country, met the eggman, and didn't marry him. She married another immigrant from Finland. Her first child was my mother who disappointed her by being a girl. The story was pretty neat up till that point.
My grandmother has been described as cold by her children. She was physically abusive to two of them and the third can't remember anything before the age of nine when he was hit by a car. My mother describes her as a bitch. I never liked Sofia. She was cold, stern, unfriendly, stringent, and withdrawn. Mrs. Personality she was not. She was fond of drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I never had a conversation with her. She didn't talk. She sat, drank, smoked, existed. My mother's childhood was not a nice one and she escaped it at age 17 by eloping with my father who was 10 years older.
Grandma Sofia was in a psychiatric ward for a while after her husband died. While they fought frequently when he was alive, she had a breakdown when he died. Family legend has it that prior to going into the hospital she was reporting visits from the King of England and Frank Sinatra. No one in my family ever learned what her official psychiatric diagnosis was.
Years later my mother had her own stint for two and a half years in a psychiatric hospital. Followed by occasional revisits to psychiatric wards. My mother has had over 50 years of psychiatric treatment which continues to this day. The treatment that helped the most was not a treatment but a program. When she began to go to twelve step groups, she showed a significant improvement in her attitude towards life and other people. As her ability to get out and go to meetings has decreased due to health and lack of transportation, her attitude has regressed to what it was prior to the twelve step groups. Since I'm 350 miles away, I can't help get her to the meetings.
One way to describe my mother's attitude towards life is what she said on the day JFK was assassinated. After I walked around our city seeing the shock on people's faces and hearing the announcement over the loudspeaker in the bank, I came home and my mother said, in reference to the news, "But what a day I've had!" She was not referring to JFK's death. I can't recall what it was that she was referring to but it was not momentous by most people's standards. Chances are it was something akin to her being upset that her tenant looked at her the wrong way while hanging laundry outside on the shared clothesline.
It's hard to know whether my mom has regressed due to the lack of the 12 step program or whether she's suffering from dementia (a possibility) or whether she's just lost her memory so much that she's forgotten that we had a pretty good relationship for a few years and she's acting as though we didn't. She does have 2 brothers who live within driving distance. Two of my cousins have tried to help her on occasion. Unfortunately, she has a bad habit of attacking people who help her whenever they aren't available to help, no matter how much they have helped her previously and no matter how unreasonable her request. I've noticed that she gets fewer invitations to go to relatives' on holidays than she did years ago. She can be hard to take. When she visited me here a few years ago, I got the only migraine I've had in a very long time. A reminder of what it was like to live near her. Did I tell you how much I love answering machines? They are great buffers!
Later in the day on January 27:
Well, as long as I'm telling you about some of my family I might as well tell you about more of them. Just to be fair.
The other grandmother anyway. I am putting her picture in here somewhere in this paragraph. My father's mother. I liked her. Her name was Christine. She was Swedish. I stayed with her a few times when I was very young. That was several years after this photograph was taken. I wasn't born till 1946.
Christine made me toast on a flip sided toaster. The toast was put in on a metal side that flipped down and then flipped up to bring the toast closer to the heating elements. When it was toasted dark enough for you, you manually flipped the side back down and took the toast out. She had a clock that ticked loudly during the night. Tick tock tick tock. You don't get that these days with electric digital clocks. Tick tock tick tock. A warm sound. I associate her with the warm smell of toasted bread and the sound of a ticking clock at night.
My mother didn't like my father's mother. They didn't get along. There was no love lost between them. I understated it. My mother hated her. I think that my father loved his mother. He was upset when she died. But he professed to me that he didn't like his parents. However, he would tell me that when I hadn't talked to him in a while. He would say that he didn't like his parents but he would talk to them anyway. Apparently, he thought I didn't like him and he wanted to point out to me that one should call one's parents even if they didn't like them. As far as him calling his father, that was a moot point since his father had died when my father was fifteen years old, resulting in my father having to leave school so he could help make money so his mother would survive financially. I do think my father liked his mother. Although my mother indicated that Christine could be a major pain. It's hard to say how much of a pain my grandmother was. My mother didn't get along with a lot of people.
Writing about my family makes me realize how many of my relatives dislike each other. My mother disliked her mother and sometimes her father (she liked her father a lot more than her mother or disliked him less) and my father's mother and sometimes me and sometimes my daughter and sometimes my cousins who helped her and often her brothers even though they have helped her too. My mother dislikes everyone at one time or another. She hated her husband of 28 years. They fought throughout their marriage and then for another 20 years after they divorced. Probably not too differently from how her mother fought with her father. Lately I've wondered if my mother has stuck me into my father's role as the one to blame for all things.
My father's mother disliked my mother. My daughter dislikes me and then decided that she disliked my mother too after my mother tried to get her to call me. My daughter has said she dislikes her father although she may have changed her mind since she said that. My mother's brothers disliked their mother. I don't know if my mother's mother liked anyone. I couldn't tell. I think that one of my mother's sisters-in-law dislikes my mother.
My cousins may dislike me when they are on good terms with my mother although I don't know that for sure. Since guilt and paranoia comes so naturally to me, I just assume that people don't like me for all sorts of illogical reasons. Maybe this is genetic! :-) I don't like my mother much although I won't say I don't love her. My mother has been more like a daughter, a very difficult badly behaved daughter, than a mother for most of my life. I wish she were happier. I love my real daughter but not as much as I used to love her. Her father, my ex-husband, had "issues" (my word, not his) with his parents. Like me with my parents, I think he had a love/hate relationship with them. In his case it came out as anger towards his mother when he hit his mid-thirties. I left him at that time so don't know if he ever got over it.
I loved his parents. Even though they were a bit "stagatz" or however you spell the word that means crazy in Italian. They weren't crazy the way my family was crazy. They were a different kind of crazy. The kind that you see in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding or in the Godfather. The kind where they wave pot lids at flies in the kitchen that are dive bombing the "gravy" (tomato sauce) on the stove. The kind where the uncle had to dress up in a monk's tunic for a year when he was a child because God answered his mother's prayers and he was spared from catching tuberculosis. The kind where my mother-in-law wanted to slap the people coming out of a New York theatre because they were "piggies" because they had liked the risqué play. A different kind of crazy from my blood relatives.
I saw this tin on my counter and it seemed appropriate to include it here as representative of my family.
I wonder if it is possible for parental dislike to be a genetic trait? It seems to run in my family. However, my cousins do seem to have loved their parents. I have a love/hate feeling for mine. I love them and hate some of the things that they did. I started out loving them. I hate that they weren't happier, that they didn't make more of their lives. I hate that we couldn't be closer, more honest, that we didn't have fun together. But them's the cards we were dealt. It could have been worse. It always could be worse. I was lucky in lots of ways. I've met any number of people who I would have truly hated to have had as parents.
I think that my daughter dislikes me because she would prefer someone quite different to be her mother. Someone less analytical. More fun. More playful on her terms. Someone who was more conservative politically and personally. Someone who would bake more. My daughter could make good chocolate chip cookies by the way. I just remembered that! While cooking challenged, she could bake cookies! I think she wanted a different kind of mother. I guess a lot of us have that wish. Maybe she wanted a mother who got along with her father? I don't know. My daughter is full of contradictions. She disliked her father and apparently liked me and now she apparently likes her father and doesn't like me. It is almost as though she can't love both of us at the same time. It's not permissible! I don't know. I speculate endlessly.
Here's another speculation. While my mother is very mixed up and has a personality disorder that will never be cured and that is the basic problem in how she thinks and behaves, I think she considers me to be her mother and is mad that I won't take care of her the way she wants someone to take care of her. Which is strange considering she would never do what anyone wanted her to do. I expect that if she ever went into a nursing home that they would throw her out promptly.
One more story about my mother and then I am quitting writing for the day. This is my mother's idea of funny. She lived in housing for the elderly and the maintenance people there often spoke Spanish. That irritated her. She feared that they may be talking about her. So one day she saw two of them in the hall. They were walking down the hall and talking in Spanish. She yelled after them, speaking in Finnish, "Go to hell!" In Finnish. They turned to look at her. She smiled and waved her hand in the air. She repeated it, smiled, and waved her hand again. She thought this was hysterical!
Maybe Bill Maher would get it?
Bye till later. I may have written as much already in 2003 as I did in ALL of 2002. (And I do come back and edit it some so you aren't crazy if you think you read some different things here before. You probably did.)
I found this quote by Mark Twain:
"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."
I don't know about heaven, never having been there, but I can agree with the rest of it.
BTW, this is Wingnut. Sometimes he doesn't much like me either!
January 31, 2003 Friday
One thing this site doesn't have (yet!) is a mug or a t-shirt! I don't expect this will change anytime soon!
Estrangement is such an unpleasant topic. I set up a site on Yahoo two years ago so that people could discuss it but there was never any substantial interest. A few people joined it but no one ever went beyond describing the estrangement in their life. No one stuck around to talk about estrangement. I had belonged to another group online for a year or more that had been set up by someone else to discuss estrangements from children, specifically estrangements due to Parental Alienation Syndrome between mothers and children. That group had sporadic bursts of discussion followed by months of silence.
Groups set up elsewhere for discussion of loss of family members through death or divorce appear to be relatively active but estrangement seems to be a kind of loss that doesn't attract discussion. Maybe it's the stigma. The sense of guilt and shame by either side that someone has estranged us or that we have decided to become estranged from someone else? The sense of sides? The feeling that someone must be right and someone wrong? That we have failed? That we have lost another through failure? That it is either our fault or that we weren't strong enough to deal with our formerly loved person?
People don't talk about their estrangements much, even though loss through estrangement is still loss and still excruciatingly painful. I know people who don't tell anyone about the loss of their relatives through estrangement. They say that the person has died. They just don't mention the person. They grieve and express their hurt and fury privately, if at all. I know people who lie about what caused the estrangement, making up falsehoods rather than give explanations that might be hard for others to understand.
People don't like to talk about estrangement. Generally. I know when I first experienced estrangement I didn't talk about it to hardly anyone. When I experienced it again, more painfully, I couldn't bring myself to talk about it much to anyone other than my husband. Years later I put up this website and try to talk about it to complete strangers! Less painful estrangements, from former friends, were easier to talk about but still unpleasant. Estrangement has a stigma of failure to some of us. Others may take it as no big deal. Sometimes I wish I was one of those others.
I have gotten to the point where I can joke about some aspects of it. I hope you, dear Reader, don't misinterpret my attempts at humor and think that I am being callous. My ability to make light of anything to do with estrangements comes after years of grief, tears, anguish, depression, angst, guilt, self criticism, more grief.
If you haven't gotten through the worst of it yet, you might not be able to feel humorous about anything to do with estrangement. A few years ago I wasn't feeling anything remotely humorous about it. Not that I have gotten to the point where I think it is funny. I'll never get to that point. It's just a point where after doing all the crying and the handringing and the fury, all there is left to do sometimes is to find something to laugh about. Anything. Like people who have cancer who go to support groups of fellow cancer patients and make jokes about having cancer. I am at that point where I would like to make jokes about being estranged, not because I think it's funny. But just to lighten the load.
February 18, 2003 Tuesday Mental Illness
For the last two weekends I have received threatening and insulting messages on my answering machine from my mother. When I listen to the messages, I feel very angry. Later I feel sad. I'm disappointed that my mother's attitude towards me has returned to what it was for most of my adult life. There was a ten year hiatus after I confronted my uncle and aunt about abuse I received while living in their house. My mother, for the first time, decided to back me up and come over to my "side". That was followed by ten years of being nice to me. Now she has regressed back to her previous attitude towards me – hostility, denigration, criticism, rage.
Mental illness is such a confusing illness. Where does the personality stop and the illness begin? When someone acts mean to others, how much is illness and how much is them?
I've met others besides my mother who struggle with mental illness. I know a man who has some serious problems with his mental functioning to the point that he needs to be hospitalized for months at a time. He has an entertaining side and socially he is capable of being fun. He has functioned well in his profession in years past and has been highly regarded for his knowledge in his field. He is intelligent. But he has a vicious critical side to him that comes out in racial epithets and merciless judgments of others. How much is his illness and how much is just who he is? I've never known him to be entirely free of that negative side.
Over the years I complained about my mother's behavior to relatives and therapists and anyone who would listen. I was looking for someone to tell me that I was right. She was crazy. I was the wronged one. She was wrong and I was right. As though it matters who is wrong and who is right. Who is crazy and who is sane. As though I needed verification from someone else that it wasn't me. I kept thinking that this was up for debate. Of course it wasn't. Being right or wrong wasn't the issue. I was trying to understand why what was so clear to me wasn't clear to my mother. I was trying to understand why logic didn't work for her. It scared me.
I wanted someone to say, "Well, of course she says that and does those things because she has a disorder, a mental illness." She was going for treatment to professionals so this wasn't a secret to the rest of the family. But still no one admitted that sometimes she didn't make sense and that she wasn't behaving normally or wisely or kindly. I don't know if they thought admitting it would be rude or unseemly. I know for me it would have been such a relief if someone just said it! Finally a therapist did say that to me, that she suffered from a disorder and he put a name to it.
To this day my mother seems to have no awareness that she is mentally ill. This is one of the things about mental illness that can be so different from physical illnesses. If you have a cold, you know you have a cold. You admit that you are suffering from a cold. But with some mental illnesses, the sufferer is the last one to acknowledge the truth. And maybe that is what keeps some people from getting better?
Mental illness frightens me. What kind of world is it when the people who are mothers and fathers and leaders of countries suffer from mental illness? This was something that no one talked to me about when I was growing up. While I lived under the care of a mentally ill person and have had a lifelong relationship with her, I swear I probably understand mental illness much less than a psychiatric nurse does. I keep expecting that only sane people are the ones who get to be in charge. I keep expecting the world to be a sane place where those with mental illnesses never get the combination to the vault, the code for the red button, the wherewithall to fire nuclear weapons.
There is a certain naivity or idealism on my part to wish that the world were different and that the insane never got the keys to the asylum. Intellectually I know that the world doesn't operate as sanely as I would like but I have a hard time accepting that. It looks to me as though evil exists. What is the difference between evil and certain mental illnesses? I think that there is no difference, that some mental illnesses equate to evil. Illnesses where the person has lost the ability to empathize with others and consequently does whatever they want without regard for how others feel.
No matter how much progress that civilization has made evil still exists. I have a theory that mental illness (and evil) is one of the inevitable go-withs of being human. Along with our amazing brains we have an amazing capacity for things to go wrong with it. We have evolved to be creatures who are capable of changing with the conditions of our habitat. The ability to change is one of our remarkable characteristics. A tremendous survival tool. So we have such a range of possible behaviors, feelings, learning abilities, reactions.
Worldwide we have such varied customs. From creatures who put carved bones through our noses to creatures who design skyscrapers. Our range is enormous. So must be our range of possible malfunctions. It goes with the territory of being human. In some cases a malfunction is an attribute. It can be good to be obsessive when you are designing a safe spacecraft but it can be annoying if you are so obsessive that you can't get out of your driveway without going back to recheck your door lock twenty times.
So we have psychopaths and schizophrenics and catatonics and paranoid depressives and psychotics as well as geniuses in music, art, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and engineering. We have warriors and we have practitioners of meditation. Sometimes they are the same person. We have those who are quiet and withdrawn and those who are out there in everyone's faces. We have people who fit well into their culture and people who will never be at peace anywhere.
There is no one way of being human. Looked at this way, insanity is a normal consequence of being human. It is the curse of being the recipient of such a large complicated arrangement of neurons that run our personal shows. Insanity is one end of the range of human possibility.
It is a miracle if we manage to go through life without something never going wrong in the brain department. Some fling with depression, some struggle with bipolar illness, some temporary or longer lasting abuse of alcohol or other substance, possibly an eating disorder or a brief violent rage that seems out of proportion to whatever triggered it. Some impulse to destroy ourselves or someone else. Some personal angst that we go to therapists to try to resolve. Most, if not all, of us suffer some bout, major or minor, with a mental malfunction in the course of our lifetime.
However, no matter how normal insanity may be for the human condition and how much I rationalize that mental illness may be part of the human condition, I still don't cope well with abusive behaviors perpetrated by people with significant mental illness. I wish I knew what to do and say and how to be a better person when confronted with the actions of someone who is suffering from a disordered mind. I wish I knew how to have a harmonious relationship with my mother while she rages at me and tells me how terrible I am.
I wish things were different and that we could have a peaceful kind relationship in her final years. I wish she didn't have to leave me this way once again and that I didn't feel it necessary to leave her. I wish I had the mother I had for ten years. I wish there was no such thing as mental illness. I wish I knew the answers and knew what to do to make it all better. I wish someone did.
I hesitated to upload that last entry into my online musings. Sometimes I fear being too frank and of hurting other's feelings or being misunderstood. I've reread that entry and I think it's worth uploading so I'm uploading it today. Since writing it I have received more answering machine messages and a letter from my mother. Some messages were hostile. Some were as sweet as sweet could be, the opposite of the hostile messages. This is pretty typical of what occurs. I rarely pick up the phone when it rings.
One day I am treated as though I am a demon. The next as though I am her favorite person in the whole wide world. I have stopped listening to some of the answering machine messages but I did listen to the last one because I caught the words, "I don't understand ...." So I listened to the rest. Apparently my mother has no memory of writing to me and telling me that I am dumb and stupid. She says in the message that she would NEVER tell me that I am dumb and stupid, that I am her only daughter and she loves me. Yeah, right! She loves me on that day. It's hard to say how she feels about me on another day.
Anyway, I made a copy of her written assertion that I am dumb and stupid and sent it to her and suggested that she talk it over with her psychiatrist if she doesn't remember writing this. I don't know if she blocks out unpleasant memories or if she is suffering from a condition that is affecting her memory. Dementia? But if so, she managed to get through a mental functioning test with flying colors given to her by someone last fall. Maybe there are different types of dementia and it isn't that easy to diagnose? Or maybe she has the same kind of convenient memory she has always had and forgets the things she does that aren't so nice?
I did ask her to stop calling me. If she would apologize and mean it, that would affect how I feel about communicating with her considerably.
Being estranged from my mother and my daughter has been on my mind a lot lately. Being estranged is a condition that, for me at least, is a situation where it feels as though something is forever unresolved. Not that the feeling makes me feel compelled to resolve these estrangements. Some things can't be changed. People can't be changed. My mother's mind is one of those things that is beyond my power to change. My daughter is someone who I don't know as well as I once thought I did. Whatever the problem is with her, she is the one who has the power to change it. I've already gone more than my half of the distance. I have decided to live with that feeling of things being unresolved. I go on with my own life.
My mother's response to my sending her a copy of her letter in which she called me dumb and stupid was to write me a letter in which she said she was still my mother. Whatever that means. I can read so many things into that. Then she sent me another letter in which she said that I should be careful what I do. That she had canceled her life insurance policy due to my past actions. And that now she was looking to buy another life insurance policy and was planning to live to be 125. So why does she need another policy? She's not going to be around to collect on it. Does she need one so she can threaten to cancel it again if I am not a good girl?
Then I received another letter in which she said she had been joking when she called me dumb and stupid. She asked if I had lost my sense of humor. She said I was rude to hang up on her. I hadn't hung up on her. My husband had hung up on her. She heard his voice when he answered the phone. But she says I hung up on her. Twice. No. I haven't hung up on her lately. But I intend to if I get the chance. I think it will be good for me. I've been far too polite in my life. I need to be rude for a change. I wonder what calling me dumb and stupid is if it is not rude?
I hadn't intended to get so specific about the details of the conflicts in my life. I've meant for the Estrangement site to be a general one rather than one on the specifics of my own estrangements. I don't know if this is good or bad or whether anyone even reads this other than an occasional online friend who I tell about the site. I've decided to include some of the specific details of this recent estrangement from my mother because maybe from these real world specific details some generalities can be drawn.
It is impossible for someone to take back words uttered in anger ........ like calling someone names or threatening someone with anything or harrassing someone with multiple telephone calls. In my mother's case, if anyone had advised her not to do those things it would not matter. She'd do them anyway. But generally those kinds of actions won't resolve an estrangement. They make things worse.
Thoughts of doing these things could occur to the most normal of people when they are angry but there is a world of difference between thinking the thoughts and doing the deeds. It also makes a difference if someone tries to make things right by apologizing rather than escalating the conflict with threats, insults, and harrassment. My mother provides an excellent example of all the things not to do if you want an estrangement to end.
I haven't described in detail what occurred between my mother and my daughter after the first year of my estrangement from my daughter. I had become depressed, clinically depressed, and was put on an antidepressant medication by the psychiatrist who diagnosed my condition. It was hard for me to make myself go to a psychiatrist because I hated the thought that I was at all like my mother. Needing to see a psychiatrist was way too much like my mother. But I was depressed enough that I needed treatment. All the joy had gone out of life.
Unfortunately, I told my mother that I was taking an antidepressant. Usually I did not share personal problems with my mother because of the kinds of things that she would do on learning of any personal details of my life. She would obsess about whatever "problem" or issue that I had and then begin to push her ideas or solutions on me to the point where I would get very annoyed. Or she would interfere more directly with actions.
I violated my own rules in this case by telling her about my depression. Not in detail. Just that I was depressed and taking medication. I'm not sure why. Maybe I wanted sympathy? Comforting? It was tiring pretending to be the one who never had anything wrong with them. I wanted to show I had my share of vulnerability. That I wasn't some Superwoman who never hurt. My telling her was a mistake.
On learning of my depression, my mother began to obsess about it. She blamed my daughter's estranging herself from me for it. She wanted to write my daughter and get her to talk to me. She asked me if she should do that. I told her that my daughter would get angry at her if she did but I didn't tell her not to do it. Not that my telling her what to do ever makes a difference in what she does. But I didn't order her not to do it. I told her that it wouldn't make my daughter talk to me.
My mother wrote my daughter a letter in which she said that I was depressed and that if anything happened to me it would be my daughter's fault! Implying that if I killed myself, my daughter would be to blame! (I had never mentioned anything about suicidal thoughts to my mother or anything beyond the fact that I was depressed and was taking medication. My mother has threatened and attempted suicide so many times that I can't recall how many.) Then they spoke on the phone and my daughter screamed at her, called her sick, and hung up on her.
Until my mother wrote that letter they had been on good terms. My daughter stopped speaking to her. My mother said she didn't care if she never heard from my daughter again. My daughter wrote me a letter saying that she had been considering ending our estrangement prior to hearing from my mother but that she had changed her mind due to my mother's statements. She blamed me for my mother's actions.
At the time I wasn't able to summon up any anger at my mother for her actions as it was one of the very few times in my life that my mother had taken my side in anything. She was acting like a concerned mother at least, even if she didn't do it in a good way. Since then I have wondered many times if my daughter would have ended her estrangement from me if my mother hadn't done that or if my daughter was using my mother's behavior as a convenient excuse for not ending the estrangement. Since I had never been able to control what my mother did, there is no way that I could resolve the situation. I don't know what I could have done to make my daughter happy. I suspect that there was nothing that would have made my daughter happy.
As a reason for my daughter to continue the estrangement it works well for her as there is nothing I can do to change my mother. The odd thing is that my daughter knew what my mother was like and yet chose to spend more time with her after estranging herself from me. It was only when my mother, for the first time, took my side, even if it was in a damaging way, that my daughter rejected her. I can understand my daughter's anger at my mother and had expected it. It's harder to understand why my daughter is blaming my mother's actions on me.
As long as my mother was critical of me, my daughter spent more time with her than she had before. But as soon as my mother said something that was supportive of me, my daughter not only rejected her, she blamed me for my mother's behavior and used it as a reason for continuing the estrangement. This makes a weird kind of sense to me although I don't like the conclusions that I draw from it because those conclusions are that my daughter really wouldn't have ended our estrangement back then, even if my mother hadn't behaved like that.
My conclusion is that my daughter would use any excuse not to end our estrangement. My conclusion is that my daughter dislikes me a lot and prefers not to have a relationship with me. Any excuse will do. Even the actions of someone she knew had a history of crazy behavior and whose behavior had nothing to do with what I wanted or needed.
I'll never know for sure if the estrangement would have ended back then or not. I'll never know if my mother deserved anger for writing such a letter to my daughter or appreciation for an action that was misguided but was motivated by good intentions. I've always felt very sad about that whole thing that occurred between my mother and my daughter and wished I had never told my mother anything about my being on medication. My mother did write my daughter a letter of apology many months later when she saw how much pain I was in over the continuing estrangement from my daughter but her apology was never acknowledged or accepted.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the situation with my mother and daughter it is to be cautious of others getting involved in resolving an estrangement. It can make things worse if the intermediary is not a wise, sensible, sane, and caring person. And even if they are, they still might make things worse.
BTW I began to read another book on estrangements and reconciliation. I began with one of the later chapters which was on estrangements that can't be resolved. I found a lot to empathize with there since I am doubtful that my estrangements will be resolved.
The author is Laura Davis who was the coauthor of The Courage To Heal, a book about recovery from sexual abuse. The title of her book on reconciliation is: I Thought We'd Never Speak Again. She is an excellent writer. I haven't read a lot of her book yet but what I've read is very comforting and sounds very wise. As an author on the subject I find her to be one of the easiest to read. It is the kind of writing that leaves me feeling better for having read the words rather than worse.
The way I feel now about these 2 estrangements with people who were so important in my life is accepting. I am bothered sometimes by missing them. I miss having a mother who is easy to talk with but I never had that. I once did have a relationship with my daughter where we seemed to be able to talk but I think that the relationship had undercurrents that I was oblivious to at the time. I may have been in denial. Kind of like being in a marriage that's not working. For a time you tell yourself that everything is wonderful and you ignore the little clues, the hints, that all is not well.
Being estranged from my daughter is like that. I feel as though I fell out of love with her. All that romance that begins at the birth of a child ended with our estrangement. I love her but the being-in-love-with -my-daughter stuff, the passionate feeling of doing anything for her, is gone. I am happy to have been a mother, to have been witness to her growing up, to have had a daughter, to have been a part of her life, to have loved as a mother can love. I wouldn't change having experienced that joy. I was in love with her that way. I adored her.
In a book by Bette Davis, Bette talks about how she adored her daughter from whom she was later estranged. I have a clue how she felt. We who fall out of adoration never wanted to fall out of adoration. I thought I would love her that way forever. That she never could or would do anything that would cause me not to be madly in love with her. Then I learned that when anyone, even a daughter, does something that hurts enough, adoration ends.
It takes a while. I didn't even believe it for some time. Then eventually it sinks in. This person does not love me. I don't know why. I can continue to love her but not in the same way. Now I would love with caution and would protect myself from more hurt. I would accept that our relationship can never be what I had hoped. I would accept the discrepancies more and expect less.
The why doesn't matter any more. The hurt spots have developed callouses. I rarely cry about it now after having had years where I could cry about it daily. I am almost impatient with myself for having had those years, for having been that fragile and vulnerable, for letting myself be that hurt, for not being more realistic about what had occurred, for not recognizing that I am not 100% responsible for all that goes on in my relationships, that others have a responsibility too.
I know that if the estrangements in my life end, that I will feel a sense of peace that I don't have now. I have acceptance but not peace. There are holes there where there had been people. I know that I can love my daughter still but not as I did years ago. Maybe that is better. Maybe I loved too much?
I know that it's possible to feel affection for my mother although not trust. I am more optimistic about the estrangement with my daughter being resolved, even though it's a long shot, than I am about the one with my mother because I can never trust my mother at all and my mother seems to have gotten worse with age. It's possible that there are factors in why my daughter has estranged herself from me that I know nothing of and that may change in time. There is less to be sure of in that estrangement than in the one with my mother.
Thursday May 1, 2003 3 observations:
- Did you know that Tony Soprano's mother, Livia, on the HBO series was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder by Tony's therapist? I saw that segment this week. Livia had put out a contract on Tony. Because he had put her in a nursing home and because he was seeing a therapist. Interesting! BPD is the disorder that my nonfictional mother has. Fortunately, my mother is not Italian and not connected to any hit men! I say this in jest. Or partly in jest!
- Mother's Day is approaching. I don't like this day. I wish I could but I don't. I just want to get through it and onwards to the following Monday.
- In the current issue of AARP's magazine, there is an article by Barbara LeBey on how to resolve a family feud. She is the author of Family Estrangements, one of the books I have listed on the reference page. In her article she makes the observation that often one or both of the relatives who are estranged don't know the reason why they are estranged. I didn't realize that the cause is often unknown or forgotten.
In the case of my daughter and I, I think that my daughter took offense at things I wrote in letters and interpreted them in ways other than how I had intended. Then refused to discuss anything with me. Leaving me in the dark and making it impossible to resolve anything. If I had known or had any clue of the result, I would have said less and said things differently but then who has a crystal ball? I had no idea that my daughter's feelings towards me were so negative.
In LeBey's article she suggests having someone try to mediate. From my own experience I would add a warning to that suggestion – that the choice of mediator is important. Some intermediaries can make the estrangement worse.
Another suggestion that LeBey makes is to send cards and to continue to try to make contact to let the other person know that the door to reconciliation is open. In theory I agree with this but in practice it made me sick at heart and depressed when there was no response. After sending cards and notes for a few years, I stopped. I felt like a lovesick suitor begging for some response. I felt like a fool. I recognize that not everyone would feel this way. For me it didn't feel like a good thing.
I hope that my daughter is happy in her life and that this estrangement is doing something good for her that maybe can't be done any other way but I don't feel good about sending cards and letters. Maybe I will sometime but not regularly. It is difficult to get through those days, her birthday, Mother's Day, Christmas, with no contact from her. To send a card, a present, a letter, and then wait and wait, hoping for a response that never comes, is like poking myself in a wound with a sharp stick. It adds to and perpetuates the pain. Maybe it is a way of bringing about reconciliation as LeBey suggests but it is also a way of never letting go. I think that sometimes reconciliation can't occur until you let someone go. That they have to come back because they want to come back and that they won't do it until they're ready, regardless of how many cards, phone calls, and letters that they get. But maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe it depends on the individuals involved as to what the right approach is.
Receiving letters, phone calls, and cards from my mother doesn't bring about any resolution because she never says what I want to hear. What I want to hear is that she is sorry for her actions and that she won't do them again. Especially the "won't do them again" part. None of her greeting cards or compliments or jokes will resolve the situation. It wasn't just that one letter with the insult that is the reason. It is the final straw of many insults and threats and rude behavior that I just won't accept any more. But would Livia really apologize to Tony for putting out a hit on her son? Not likely! Why? Because Livia thinks she is justified. (But she might mouth the words.) Would my mother make a sincere apology? No. Because my mother thinks that her actions were justified. But she might mouth the words.
LeBey's suggestions might help in some cases but in others – maybe it's for the best for the estrangement to continue with fewer efforts to change its course with the hope that life and maturity will bring resolution. Sometimes less is more.
I sent flowers and a card to my daughter for her birthday a little over a week ago. After not sending anything last year and for some time before that, I decided to try it again. The lack of response in the past had been so painful that I had stopped sending things. This year I decided that I was strong enough to cope with not hearing anything.
As usual in the weeks leading up to her birthday I found myself getting more and more depressed, even before I realized what time of year it was. Last year was easier than this year for some reason. Eight years! It's been eight years since we were on "good" terms. I use quotation marks because we must not have been on as good terms as I had thought at the time.
Anyway, I did send flowers and a card and checked later with the florist to make sure that the flowers arrived. Our phone rang several times that afternoon and the caller left no message. We don't answer the phone all the time and neither of us did that afternoon as my husband was anticipating a call from a business acquaintance/friend on a business deal that he wasn't ready to respond to yet. So we let the phone ring. I've wondered since if there was any possibility that ... But the possibility is so remote. If it was from her phone, it would more likely be her husband letting me know that my flowers wouldn't be welcomed. If it had been my daughter, she would have continued to call later or could have left a message. But her husband would have only tried to call if my daughter wasn't home and he wouldn't have wanted me to call back. But it probably wasn't either of them.
I've been getting letters from my mother. They are alternately hostile and sweet. I swear she has different personalities living in her head. She has tried to convince me that calling me dumb and stupid was a joke. I don't buy that. But I would like to be able to talk to her. If I do, I have to prepare myself and accept that our relationship is just not the kind and will never be the kind of relationship that I would like to have. She just can't be that way: consistent, reasonable, sane.
In one of my mother's letters she informed me that her family (nieces, brother, sister-in-law) had a "meeting" about her. She had been so difficult that they had a meeting to discuss her. My mother told me that one of my cousins, a woman in her forties who has been very kind to her, told her that she was mean. My mother didn't say what she had done that brought that on. That cousin had lost her first husband to suicide, an event that was horrendously difficult on my cousin, her children, and her husband's family. My mother's reaction to my cousin's statement about her "meanness" was the following. My mother said: "Was that what you said to your husband before he killed himself?" My mother wrote this to me in a letter as though this was a reasonable thing to have said to my cousin.
I had been expecting something like this to happen for a long time. Two of my cousins had been so nice to her for so long. It was almost overdue for this to happen. My mother acts like this to people who have been nice to her. She's consistent in that regard.
My mother has an odd attitude about her meanness. She seems to think it is funny. If you have watched the Sopranos and seen Livia in action, you would have some idea of how my mother is.
Yet Tony Soprano was talking to Livia at the time she died. In the TV program friends and family gathered at the house and then they all said something about how they remembered Livia. I like the statement the best that said, "She had no interlocuter between her brain and her tongue." Describes my mother too. In fact in one of my mother's recent letters to me in which she is trying to make me feel better, she says that she took a class in a college years ago and the teacher called her Mrs. Malaprop!
She does have a weird sense of humor. However, she doesn't seem to know the difference between what is really funny and what is cruel and abusive. But she can't take a joke herself. She easily gets angry and impatient if someone is joking with her.
I may try to be on speaking terms with her again soon. I'm not sure. I am working on talking myself into it. If I do, I need to prepare myself. Not so much for the initial communications but for the disappointments later.
Years ago I had a therapist advise me to ignore whatever she did that I didn't like and to praise whatever I liked. That worked for years ...... worked in the sense that it kept stress levels down and kept my sanity and kept us communicating in a limited sense. Then in the last 3 years she's gotten worse and I lost my ability to ignore so much and I allowed myself to react. If I want to be in a relationship with her, I have to make myself ignore things again. Maybe I can.
By the way, several months ago I met an artist at an exhibit of her work. Her images were shown in conjunction with her poetry. I read one of her poems and recognized immediately that it was a poem about estrangement. A very strong poem that evoked the pain, the longing, the feelings of love and sadness and grief, the desire for reconciliation. I asked permission to include it here on the Estrangement site as I am sure it will touch many hearts as it touched mine. I am adding the link to the page with the poem here and will put the link in elsewhere on the site so that it can be found. I offer my appreciation and thanks to Paula for writing her poem and giving me permission to include it here.
I haven't resolved the estrangement with my mother. The letters that I've received from her have alternated between being insultng and sweet. On that she's dependable - the switching back and forth. I get a nasty letter, then a sweet one, then another nasty one. On and on it goes.
I've seriously considered attempting to have a relationship with her but I am convinced that if I did, I would have to be prepared to accept her as she is because she is not going to change. If I could laugh about it, I'm sure it would be possible. Unfortunately, I still can't laugh about it. I can see how some people would find some of it funny in a black humor sort of way. It might be easier to laugh if she wasn't my mother. Like laughing at Archie Bunker. I can laugh at racism and offensive remarks if it's Archie Bunker and it's not my father or mother.
I received a note from her recently. It had no salutation and it was unsigned. Enclosed with it was a newspaper clipping about how a study showed that jaundice in newborn babies is associated with brain damage. My mother's note read as follows, "You had jaundice as a baby!" That's all she wrote. That could be taken any number of ways. I can't think of any that are positive. However, if I am suffering from brain damage, apparently it is not the kind that prevents me from creating websites!
Recently I was listening to an interview on the radio with Pat Conroy. I haven't read any of his books although I'd like to someday. I always enjoy listening to interviews with him. While his family was VERY different from mine, I still relate to what he says. While my family was dysfunctional, they were dysfunctional in a different way.
Conroy was talking about his father .... as he always does. He mentioned something that rang a bell with me. He mentioned how his father had told him that he, Pat, would always think of him whenever he heard the word "father". It would bring his father's face to his mind and color his feelings and thoughts about the word "father" forever. Pat Conroy agrees that this is true.
I empathize with that experience. I am aware of very negative associations in my mind with that word "mother". These feelings come up at inappropriate times such as when I am looking at a painting of a mother holding a child. I don't find images of mothers holding children comforting and serene. I find them a bit scary and threatening. Intellectually, I know that they are lovely pictures but emotionally it is a different story.
For me the concept of "mother" is tied forever to the woman who is my mother and colors my feelings about the word "mother" in ways that have only to do with my experience of having had a mother with a mental illness. I have wondered about why I react the way that I do to some scenes of mothering. I was struck by Don Conroy's statement to his son and how Don Conroy understood the impact he had had on his son. I don't think my mother is capable of understanding that she had that kind of impact on me.
Did you know that there is a word for web journals? I recently learned that there is an internet word for web journals. They are called "blogs". I'm not sure if there are other requirements for a journal to be called a blog but I think this may be a blog.
2003 is drawing to a close. I haven't been in the mood to add anything to my blog for a couple of months. I haven't felt as though I had anything wise or wonderful to say. I have no answers. I repeat the Serenity Prayer when I remember how wise it is. I have had other issues in my life to take care of, issues far removed from the estrangements in my life. My life takes up enough of my time that I haven't had the luxury of mulling over the whys and wherefores of being estranged.
I've had a hard holiday season this year. I've been very depressed. I've thought about taking medication again but I'm resisting it. Why? Because I am sure that the depression will pass on its own and I don't like the side effects of the medications.
I feel a little better just with the passing of Christmas. Last year it was easier. This year not so good.