Wishing My Mother Happy Birthday

This past week my mom had a birthday.

A couple of years ago this day was cause for an extended conversation in therapy about how to recognize it.  At the time I was struggling with how to authentically be a daughter and go about the niceties of life with my parents while being true to myself.  I didn’t want to wish her happy birthday because I needed to fulfill my role as primary giver of assurance to my mother or because I was scared that if I didn’t have some illusion of relationship with my parents that I would be swallowed up by the earth and die.

It was tricky.

What I came to was that I could authentically feel some gratitude for my mom because without her, there was no way in the world there could have been a me.  That was all the genuineness that I could muster.  And it was enough.  So I sent her an e-mail wishing her a happy birthday.

Last year I did nothing.  I said nothing.  In the year prior I had made some efforts at communicating what was happening with me, and I had set some boundaries.  However, my parents weren’t able to respect the boundaries, and they responded in predictable ways to my communication efforts.  It was incredibly painful for me to realize that they would continue to treat me the way that they always had, and that they wouldn’t and couldn’t ever change.  I was in the process of struggling to accept this when my mother’s birthday rolled around.

So I decided to ignore it.  I ignored Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and my father’s birthday, too.  I’m glad I did.  I was too undone by my feelings about my parents.

But I’m also glad that I e-mailed my mother this year and wished her a happy birthday.  I prefaced my note by saying – “I still need to limit my communication, but…”  And I simply wished her a happy birthday.

This is a really important thing to me.  I’m proud of myself because I’ve managed to do better than my mother ever did with her own mother.  My mother holds a grudge against her mother to this day.  Her mother has even been dead for years.

I used to think that somehow if I was a good daughter and worked really hard at my relationship with my mother that we would avoid the mess that my mother and grandmother had in their relationship.  I wanted to save my mother that pain and anguish.  Eventually, though, as I was more myself, I began to see that I would disappoint my mother just by unselfconsciously being me.  She would feel scared and threatened and signal to me that I should not feel so free to be me so that she could feel safe with me.  It took a lot of support from Andrea to allow myself to see this clearly.  Each time I caught a glimpse of this I would be out of it for days.  It was that scary to recognize that my mom didn’t and couldn’t let me be myself with her.  I would have to be myself without her blessing.

Also devastating was that I had to recognize that I couldn’t make my mom feel better about her relationship with her mom by pretending that we had a good relationship.  She played a role in the mess with her mother, and she was playing a role in the emerging mess with me.

So what to do about how to be in relationship going forward.  Well, I hope a year from now that I’ll have more of a feel for that.  It’s hard, if not impossible, to be in a real relationship if you have to pretend for there to be peace.  So our relationship will be limited out of necessity.  For right now what I have said to them is that I need space because there are things I need to learn that are hard to learn if I am in communication with them.  Or something like that.  I think I’ve been a tad more diplomatic.  Sadly, I have come to accept that they will not be able to be parental toward me.  Their needs and their anxieties will always be in the forefront.

I also know that I can’t set boundaries and expect that they will respect them.  I would not be in this predicament if they could respect my boundaries.  When I e-mailed my mother wishing her a happy birthday this year, I knew I had to assert the boundary right up front.  In the past I would have feared offending her.  Until just now that thought never even crossed my mind.  I’m glad I could assert my boundaries so unselfconsciously.

There’s this family systems theory well articulated by Harriet Lerner in her book The Dance with Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships that cautions against “cutting off” from one’s family.  Cut off’s are when you get so angry that you decide you just can’t handle the family member any more and refuse to talk to them.  And refuse to process the upset at least within yourself.  Cut offs are so harmful because if the underlying issues are not addressed they will pop up somewhere else within the family system.

Of course, cut offs are completely necessary when physical or emotional abuse is so intense that your well being is threatened.  Even within those circumstances, the victim still needs to come to some kind of mature, adult internal reconciliation of the relationship or else the unfinished business of that relationship will pop up in other areas of their family life, most likely unconsciously in their relationship with their children.

This is exactly what happened for my mom.  She cut off from her mom, never got at the heart of her anger with her mother, and was unequipped to have a real relationship with me.  She lost out.  I lost out.

So I think about this really seriously for my own future and the relationships I hope to have with future children of mine.  In the coming year I don’t know how I will make real the feelings that seem to be reconciling themselves within me about my mom and parents, but I’m glad that I could genuinely wish my mom a happy birthday.  I will never purchase her a card that extolls the virtues of her amazing mothering, but I am not pre-occupied, consciously or unconsciously, by her failings either.  This is enough.

It will probably be too hard for my mother to find peace with her mother or with me, but I KNOW that if she could find the words that she would not want me to suffer as she has.  I suppose this is what I am celebrating in wishing her a happy birthday.  Ironically, I must reject her, even the frail wounded child self of hers, in order not to suffer and to be able to celebrate her.