Mothers Be Good OR Cycles:Menstrual and Otherwise
"Fathers be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do.
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters, too."
- John Mayer, Daughters
This song came on the radio the other day and it made me stop in my tracks. I remember hearing it for the first time in the car, in 2005, when I was pregnant with my daughter. It was my first pregnancy and I was constantly on a rollercoaster ride of emotions: from excitement and exhilaration when my husband and I first found out we were going to be parents; to curiosity and anticipation as my body started changing with the baby growing inside of me; to fear and overwhelming sadness when we agreed to an amniocentesis despite the risk of miscarriage; to relief and joy when we didn't miscarry; to exhaustion and disgust as my body kept getting bigger and the numbers on the scale larger until I finally gave birth 11 days after her due date; then elation again as we became new parents which started a whole new cycle of emotions (along with fatigue) that put us back on the rollercoaster again.
In the 9+ months of driving my husband crazy, I read every pregnancy book I could get my hands on, including the bible, "What to Expect When Expecting," or as he liked to refer to it, "What to Expect As The Worst Case Scenario Handbook," I watched every episode of Baby Story on TLC and called him at work bawling every time a new baby was born (which was every episode, sometimes multiple times because they usually featured more than one birth) and I cried at commercials, whether they had babies in them or not. I was hormonal, emotional and looking back on it, probably triggered out of my mind. I was going to become a mother and I didn't have a mother to help me through it. I mean, I had a mother, but not a mother that was the kind, grandmotherly type, able to talk me off the ledge in a soothing, "everything will be alright" tone of voice. My mother informed me that she wanted her grandchildren to call her Mimi which apparently means grandmother in Cuban (we are not Cuban) and sounds exotic and young instead of "Grandma" which sounds like, well, a grandma. It was the perfect name for her because in her world it was all about "Me Me Me" so her naming herself Mimi made perfect sense. If becoming a mother isn't a time when you most want your mother to be there and help teach you how to be a mother, I don't know when is…but fresh off her divorce and traveling with the man she left my stepfather for, Mimi was in Disney World when her first grandchild made it into this world.
Now, 12 years later, while I didn't have the physical or hormonal changes of a baby onboard, my mind has been on a rollercoaster of emotions and a swirl of activity starting from when I finally agreed to get the dog, to the process of deciding on the kind of dog we wanted to have; to researching breeders; to putting a deposit down; to anticipation of the birth of our litter; to picking our pup; to excitedly sharing photos of our "newborn pup" with everyone we know; to asking a million questions of the breeder and friends with dogs; to checking our inbox every week for the latest photo of our growing pup, and so on. I like to be prepared so before the dog even arrived, I booked a trainer, bought dog treats, food and toys and made vet appointments, all for a dog we hadn't even met yet. It's been even worse since she's been here because once you enter the world of becoming a dog owner, it's like a Pandora's box of things you didn't even know existed. It's an entire industry of doggy day care facilities, dog walkers, and "dog people." The first trainer we met sent us volumes of training advice and said, "Dog people are a little crazy." Well at least this is a group I have a shot at fitting into then. I've been reading every dog whisperer/dog psychology book I can get my hands on and I'm still driving my husband crazy. One book I picked up is called "How to Talk to Your Dog," by Jean Craighead George. According to Jean, seven or eight weeks is the ideal age to take a puppy home, "it's then the dog will replace its love for its mother with love for you. Do as she did," Jean says, "Feed him, pick him up, hug him, pet him, and whimper into his fur. That's mother-dog talk." My husband told me mama dogs pop their pups on the nose when they're out of line and pick them up by the nape of their neck to carry them around which looks uncomfortable to me but I guess nature is like that.
When I became a mother myself, the first time, one recurring pattern that kept coming up was my constant need to seek my mother's approval but always falling short, just like in childhood. The image we eventually came up with in trauma therapy was that of an umbilical cord between her and I that had to be metaphorically cut in order to be free of her voice in my head: "A tuna casserole? That's not really cooking!" Snip. "Haven't you mastered the 10 minute mommy shower yet, what's the matter with you?" Snip. "You obviously lack the common sense gene!" Snip. "You are a woman-child!" Snip, snip. I think we all want some validation from our parents to some degree but our nature when we are younger is to rebel against their wishes and become our own people. But like Rapunzel in Tangled (I've clearly watched way too many Disney movies in my lifetime,) I wanted her to like me and be proud of me but instead, she was always disappointed. As an adult, when I'm really triggered, I usually default to that little girl who feels like she lets everyone down instead of the woman who has the attitude that she occasionally makes a few mistakes, it happens. I really try to be that blasé woman but my little girl runs the show when I'm triggered. It's a physiological fact that your prefrontal cortex goes offline when you're triggered which is why when people shut down or yell things they don't mean they are literally out of their mind. It's also known in layman terms as "Fight, flight or freeze syndrome."
In an article about the neurobiology of stress on ScienceDirect.com, the author states "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition affecting soldiers, veterans and civilians alike, often leading to substance abuse, loss of work and erosion of family life. Trauma during childhood can be particularly devastating, and can have life-long debilitating consequences. Over the last 25 years, studies in animals have begun to reveal how stress alters brain physiology, providing new strategies for treatment. Exposure to stress markedly impairs the executive functions of the highly evolved prefrontal association cortex (PFC), while simultaneously strengthening the primitive emotional responses of the amygdala and the tonic firing of the noradrenergic (NE) locus coeruleus (LC), three brain regions that are intimately interconnected. Understanding the effects of stress on these brain circuits has led to successful medications for stress-related disorders in humans." Thank God for my meds to deal with fight, flight or freeze when my PFC goes offline. Now back to the less cerebral and clearly more animated, Tangled. Mother Gothel "knows best" (but not really) because she claimed to want to keep Rapunzel safe but what she really wanted was to keep Rapunzel under her thumb so she was easier to control. (And let's face it, it kept her from having to spend thousands on wrinkle creams and hair dyes because Rapunzel's magic hair kept Mother Gothel young.) My mother kept us in line with her verbal threats because it was inconvenient to do the hard work of watching her tongue and actually caring about our feelings. It was much easier for her to unleash the fury and then pretend that it never happened. Maybe in her mind it didn't...her prefrontal cortex was probably offline quite a bit.
Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford's daughter and author of "Mommie Dearest" wrote: "She was furious with me and demanded to know just what in the world I thought I was doing and where I was going. Scared to death...I sat there listening to her and I wanted to run away...somehow she turned the reports of my good behavior into a condemnation of me. I didn't know how she did it but I knew I COULDN'T WIN. I spent more than 25 years trying to make sure my Mommie loved me, trying to win her acceptance and approval so she wouldn't get mad." While my mom didn't scream at me for not using wire hangers, it was pretty damn close and it certainly felt like it because the sentiment was there. When you spend your life trying to stay out of trouble but get to the point of saying "what's the point" because you knew you couldn't win anyway, you totally get where Mommie Dearest's daughter is coming from. Scared to death. If you were to ask my mom, I was a naughty and rebellious child but in my own head I was too afraid of her to become my own person. I knew my boundaries and even when I crossed them, I would triple-cover my tracks so I wouldn't get caught because the cost was too great. Even as an adult with my own children to raise, she is quick to point out when I still get it wrong and she has no problem attacking my already uncertain parenting style. It's her M.O...instead of lifting people up with praise, she mocks or annihilates those who don't do things the way she would do them or those who make her feel threatened. My aunts would say I'm being melodramatic, that my mom did the best she could, and why can't I just get over it? The science on depression is still evolving but at its core, it has been described as deep-rooted rage turned inward. A child that feels unloved becomes angry and their unresolved feelings, more than fact, are what children remember from their childhood. That anger and those unresolved feelings manifest into chronic depression that can linger into adulthood and throughout one's life. One time my husband found me curled up in a ball, in a fetal position silently crying by myself after one of her harsher criticisms (about my father as usual) when my daughter was maybe 2 years old and it took weeks for me to recover and feel normal again. It was years before we invited her back for another visit, it was just too emotionally exhausting.
Miss Crawford also wrote a follow-up to Mommie Dearest, a self-help book about her experience as a traumatized child titled, “No Safe Place.” She was interviewed by Larry King shortly after its release:
KING: Do we know why adults take it out on children and animals?
C. CRAWFORD: I think we do.
KING: The least defensive.
C. CRAWFORD: I think we do, because it's a complete lack of self-esteem. It's a feeling of powerlessness. It is rage, probably, over perceived abuse, whether it's true or not. And unfortunately, it is taken out on the least able to defend themselves. So until we get a handle on that, on self-esteem, on empowering people in healthy ways, it's going to go on. It's going to go on and go on.
I've always had a soft spot for animals for this reason: they are the most vulnerable to trauma, like little children, because they don't have the power. It recalls the advice possibly around since early Revolutionary times that was also used by Teddy Roosevelt and more recently by Peter Parker's Uncle Ben in a Stan Lee Spiderman comic: "With great power there must also come great responsibility." My mom abused her power but maybe it's because it was the only way she felt she could deal with the awesome responsibility of raising a human being. In reading about training dogs and in observing Maddie in some of our interactions with other dogs, it's interesting to learn that as pack animals, dogs need to know who is the leader (master) and also which dogs are dominant and which ones are submissive. Maddie usually splays out on her back and chooses the submissive position in these doggie interactions until she's comfortable or feels she could be their equal or superior. When dogs dominate her or bully her with a growl she yelps (if they bite her) cowers low in the grass and shivers which is hard to watch. It feels like every time your child is bullied or betrayed by a supposed friend and you have to let them work it out by themselves even though your Mama Bear instinct is to tear that "friend" a new asshole. You hear about some rescue dogs (or any animal) that has issues because it was abused by a previous owner who couldn't get it to behave (control it) or it was traumatized by abandonment. So imagine how I'm feeling as her "master" and the one who is supposed to protect her, as also the one responsible for training her every day on the invisible fence with a shock collar. She ran into it today during training while chasing a bird and got zapped then she yelped, cowered and shivered. Yes, we're teaching her boundaries and yes, we're keeping her safe but it's for our peace of mind, not hers. I know I'm sensitive to it because of my own issues and I know it's the best thing for her but I can't help but feel selfish and abusive like my mom. So much for ending the cycle of abuse...Calgon take me away!
So back to 2005, when John Mayer crooned, "Girls become lovers who turn into mothers," I sobbed as a pregnant-daughter-about-to-become-a-mother-who-was-scared-shitless-but-determined-to-be-the-best-mother-she-could-be-to-this-child would. Also, in my gut, I thought I was going to have a girl which made the song even more relevant since it's about daughters but when he followed with "So mothers be good to your daughters," I wept uncontrollably behind my steering wheel and had to pull over. You're damn right I'm going to be good to my daughter! But why couldn't my mom be good to me? What was wrong with me that she hated me so much? To this day, she still says I was "awful" as a child in the same breath she gloats about how my siblings were "gifted." If you read between the lines, she's saying she punished me because I'm my dad's kid. She wasn't pleasant to any of us 95% of the time but she was especially keen to twist the knife in my direction to get back at my dad, even though it was really me that was getting cut. Even the best mother-daughter relationships are complicated by nature but the one with my mom is FUBAR.(Look it up if you don't know what FUBAR means.)
The hardest holiday for me is Mother's Day because it's so conflicting. I absolutely adore being a mother to my kids and fur babies but I struggle with praising the very woman that gave me life. Every year on Facebook, my friends give glorious tributes to their mothers, praising them for "being there for them every step of the way" or calling them their "best friend." It hurts my heart. I would so desperately love to have a mother I could call in a pinch to help me work out a problem or share details of my day or even just track down a beloved recipe. Sometimes even the thought of calling my mom makes me nauseous from the anxiety. My sister and I once commiserated about how difficult it is to pick out a card for her on Mother's Day because there's not one that says, "Thanks for feeding me and keeping me alive while simultaneously crushing my soul on a daily basis for 18 years. Thanks for that!" The next hardest is my birthday because she always reminds me that it's really her "birth" day because she's the one that gave birth. My daughter's birthday was the day after Mother's Day this year and she wished me a happy birthday, too. I guess it's meant to be a joke but when she turns my birthday into a reason to celebrate her, it makes me feel icky and it didn't feel any less icky when she did it on my daughter's birthday. It's all about her.
While I'm thankful that she didn't abort me as a scared 19 year old girl could have easily done (I guess I can thank her Catholic faith for that one), there have been many times in my life when I wished she had. It's very painful to be rejected by your own mother. Your mother is the one person in the world who is supposed to love you no matter what. In the wild, sometimes babies are rejected by their mothers but again that's nature, not normal human behavior. There is truth to the saying that there is a thin line between love and hate and while she says she's always loved me, her words and actions screamed otherwise. I was the embarrassing "bump" in her shotgun-wedding gown at the 8th month of her pregnancy; I am the reason she didn't get her college degree; I am a constant reminder of her first failed marriage and the man she once loved and now despised. And I favored that man over her. There were a lot of reasons to resent me early on and because of this I don't think she was able to really bond with me, maybe even as early as when I was a baby. And I'm not sure I really bonded with her...I have memories of her trying to snuggle with me and me recoiling. She never made me feel safe.
I sometimes struggle with disciplining my kids, especially my daughter, because I'm always keeping in mind the kind of relationship I want to have with them. Do I want them to remember me as a bitch who is inaccessible and constantly yelling or as the kind soul that lets them walk all over her? The answer is Neither so I have to find a happy medium. While I'm doing my best to stop perpetuating the cycle of abuse, I don't want my kids to become spoiled brats and later entitled adults. I struggle with harsh discipline because it still triggers me to my own childhood but I worry that I'm too permissive as a parent, creating creampuff-snowflake children. And now I'm training and disciplining a puppy, a GIRL puppy at that. Another daughter. Submissive, gentle, mellow. Not the alpha doggie. Vulnerable and easily hurt...ok now I'm just projecting. The vet has recommended letting Maddie go through her first heat before spaying her. This entails letting her bleed for 20 days and keeping her away from male dogs while wearing a doggie sanitary pad. Sounds like a nightmare to me. Maybe she and my daughter will get their periods together and all of our menstrual cycles will synchronize...good times! (Insert Edvard Munch's Scream emoji here...)
There's a saying that goes something like "once you finally realize your mother was right, you have a daughter who will tell you you're wrong," or something like that. It's the cycle of life. But in this cycle, I will be good to my daughter, as best I can because if I can't have the mother-daughter relationship I want with my own mom, I want to have it with my own daughter. Now, at 12 years old, my own daughter is embarking on adolescence with the attitude to match it. The carefully placed eye-roll, the attitude at the breakfast table for no reason whatsoever other than asking her to cut back on the Nutella she's slathering on her bagel, the secretive texts behind closed doors...it's payback time. Sixth grade is somewhat of a sweetheart year but it's also a time of transition; she still hangs out with us though we are starting to feel the pull of her wanting to spend more time with friends and she is prone to break out in tears when she doesn't get her way. Hormones. Drama. Normal.
But like John Mayer sings, "she puts the curl inside of my world," and I'm smitten with my curly-haired girl just like this floppy-eared puppy we've brought into our family. I've even taken to adding my own line to the song: "Daughters be good to your mothers, mothers will love all you do!" And I do. I really, really do!
Daughters will love like you do.
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers be good to your daughters, too."
- John Mayer, Daughters
This song came on the radio the other day and it made me stop in my tracks. I remember hearing it for the first time in the car, in 2005, when I was pregnant with my daughter. It was my first pregnancy and I was constantly on a rollercoaster ride of emotions: from excitement and exhilaration when my husband and I first found out we were going to be parents; to curiosity and anticipation as my body started changing with the baby growing inside of me; to fear and overwhelming sadness when we agreed to an amniocentesis despite the risk of miscarriage; to relief and joy when we didn't miscarry; to exhaustion and disgust as my body kept getting bigger and the numbers on the scale larger until I finally gave birth 11 days after her due date; then elation again as we became new parents which started a whole new cycle of emotions (along with fatigue) that put us back on the rollercoaster again.
In the 9+ months of driving my husband crazy, I read every pregnancy book I could get my hands on, including the bible, "What to Expect When Expecting," or as he liked to refer to it, "What to Expect As The Worst Case Scenario Handbook," I watched every episode of Baby Story on TLC and called him at work bawling every time a new baby was born (which was every episode, sometimes multiple times because they usually featured more than one birth) and I cried at commercials, whether they had babies in them or not. I was hormonal, emotional and looking back on it, probably triggered out of my mind. I was going to become a mother and I didn't have a mother to help me through it. I mean, I had a mother, but not a mother that was the kind, grandmotherly type, able to talk me off the ledge in a soothing, "everything will be alright" tone of voice. My mother informed me that she wanted her grandchildren to call her Mimi which apparently means grandmother in Cuban (we are not Cuban) and sounds exotic and young instead of "Grandma" which sounds like, well, a grandma. It was the perfect name for her because in her world it was all about "Me Me Me" so her naming herself Mimi made perfect sense. If becoming a mother isn't a time when you most want your mother to be there and help teach you how to be a mother, I don't know when is…but fresh off her divorce and traveling with the man she left my stepfather for, Mimi was in Disney World when her first grandchild made it into this world.
Now, 12 years later, while I didn't have the physical or hormonal changes of a baby onboard, my mind has been on a rollercoaster of emotions and a swirl of activity starting from when I finally agreed to get the dog, to the process of deciding on the kind of dog we wanted to have; to researching breeders; to putting a deposit down; to anticipation of the birth of our litter; to picking our pup; to excitedly sharing photos of our "newborn pup" with everyone we know; to asking a million questions of the breeder and friends with dogs; to checking our inbox every week for the latest photo of our growing pup, and so on. I like to be prepared so before the dog even arrived, I booked a trainer, bought dog treats, food and toys and made vet appointments, all for a dog we hadn't even met yet. It's been even worse since she's been here because once you enter the world of becoming a dog owner, it's like a Pandora's box of things you didn't even know existed. It's an entire industry of doggy day care facilities, dog walkers, and "dog people." The first trainer we met sent us volumes of training advice and said, "Dog people are a little crazy." Well at least this is a group I have a shot at fitting into then. I've been reading every dog whisperer/dog psychology book I can get my hands on and I'm still driving my husband crazy. One book I picked up is called "How to Talk to Your Dog," by Jean Craighead George. According to Jean, seven or eight weeks is the ideal age to take a puppy home, "it's then the dog will replace its love for its mother with love for you. Do as she did," Jean says, "Feed him, pick him up, hug him, pet him, and whimper into his fur. That's mother-dog talk." My husband told me mama dogs pop their pups on the nose when they're out of line and pick them up by the nape of their neck to carry them around which looks uncomfortable to me but I guess nature is like that.
When I became a mother myself, the first time, one recurring pattern that kept coming up was my constant need to seek my mother's approval but always falling short, just like in childhood. The image we eventually came up with in trauma therapy was that of an umbilical cord between her and I that had to be metaphorically cut in order to be free of her voice in my head: "A tuna casserole? That's not really cooking!" Snip. "Haven't you mastered the 10 minute mommy shower yet, what's the matter with you?" Snip. "You obviously lack the common sense gene!" Snip. "You are a woman-child!" Snip, snip. I think we all want some validation from our parents to some degree but our nature when we are younger is to rebel against their wishes and become our own people. But like Rapunzel in Tangled (I've clearly watched way too many Disney movies in my lifetime,) I wanted her to like me and be proud of me but instead, she was always disappointed. As an adult, when I'm really triggered, I usually default to that little girl who feels like she lets everyone down instead of the woman who has the attitude that she occasionally makes a few mistakes, it happens. I really try to be that blasé woman but my little girl runs the show when I'm triggered. It's a physiological fact that your prefrontal cortex goes offline when you're triggered which is why when people shut down or yell things they don't mean they are literally out of their mind. It's also known in layman terms as "Fight, flight or freeze syndrome."
In an article about the neurobiology of stress on ScienceDirect.com, the author states "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition affecting soldiers, veterans and civilians alike, often leading to substance abuse, loss of work and erosion of family life. Trauma during childhood can be particularly devastating, and can have life-long debilitating consequences. Over the last 25 years, studies in animals have begun to reveal how stress alters brain physiology, providing new strategies for treatment. Exposure to stress markedly impairs the executive functions of the highly evolved prefrontal association cortex (PFC), while simultaneously strengthening the primitive emotional responses of the amygdala and the tonic firing of the noradrenergic (NE) locus coeruleus (LC), three brain regions that are intimately interconnected. Understanding the effects of stress on these brain circuits has led to successful medications for stress-related disorders in humans." Thank God for my meds to deal with fight, flight or freeze when my PFC goes offline. Now back to the less cerebral and clearly more animated, Tangled. Mother Gothel "knows best" (but not really) because she claimed to want to keep Rapunzel safe but what she really wanted was to keep Rapunzel under her thumb so she was easier to control. (And let's face it, it kept her from having to spend thousands on wrinkle creams and hair dyes because Rapunzel's magic hair kept Mother Gothel young.) My mother kept us in line with her verbal threats because it was inconvenient to do the hard work of watching her tongue and actually caring about our feelings. It was much easier for her to unleash the fury and then pretend that it never happened. Maybe in her mind it didn't...her prefrontal cortex was probably offline quite a bit.
Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford's daughter and author of "Mommie Dearest" wrote: "She was furious with me and demanded to know just what in the world I thought I was doing and where I was going. Scared to death...I sat there listening to her and I wanted to run away...somehow she turned the reports of my good behavior into a condemnation of me. I didn't know how she did it but I knew I COULDN'T WIN. I spent more than 25 years trying to make sure my Mommie loved me, trying to win her acceptance and approval so she wouldn't get mad." While my mom didn't scream at me for not using wire hangers, it was pretty damn close and it certainly felt like it because the sentiment was there. When you spend your life trying to stay out of trouble but get to the point of saying "what's the point" because you knew you couldn't win anyway, you totally get where Mommie Dearest's daughter is coming from. Scared to death. If you were to ask my mom, I was a naughty and rebellious child but in my own head I was too afraid of her to become my own person. I knew my boundaries and even when I crossed them, I would triple-cover my tracks so I wouldn't get caught because the cost was too great. Even as an adult with my own children to raise, she is quick to point out when I still get it wrong and she has no problem attacking my already uncertain parenting style. It's her M.O...instead of lifting people up with praise, she mocks or annihilates those who don't do things the way she would do them or those who make her feel threatened. My aunts would say I'm being melodramatic, that my mom did the best she could, and why can't I just get over it? The science on depression is still evolving but at its core, it has been described as deep-rooted rage turned inward. A child that feels unloved becomes angry and their unresolved feelings, more than fact, are what children remember from their childhood. That anger and those unresolved feelings manifest into chronic depression that can linger into adulthood and throughout one's life. One time my husband found me curled up in a ball, in a fetal position silently crying by myself after one of her harsher criticisms (about my father as usual) when my daughter was maybe 2 years old and it took weeks for me to recover and feel normal again. It was years before we invited her back for another visit, it was just too emotionally exhausting.
Miss Crawford also wrote a follow-up to Mommie Dearest, a self-help book about her experience as a traumatized child titled, “No Safe Place.” She was interviewed by Larry King shortly after its release:
KING: Do we know why adults take it out on children and animals?
C. CRAWFORD: I think we do.
KING: The least defensive.
C. CRAWFORD: I think we do, because it's a complete lack of self-esteem. It's a feeling of powerlessness. It is rage, probably, over perceived abuse, whether it's true or not. And unfortunately, it is taken out on the least able to defend themselves. So until we get a handle on that, on self-esteem, on empowering people in healthy ways, it's going to go on. It's going to go on and go on.
I've always had a soft spot for animals for this reason: they are the most vulnerable to trauma, like little children, because they don't have the power. It recalls the advice possibly around since early Revolutionary times that was also used by Teddy Roosevelt and more recently by Peter Parker's Uncle Ben in a Stan Lee Spiderman comic: "With great power there must also come great responsibility." My mom abused her power but maybe it's because it was the only way she felt she could deal with the awesome responsibility of raising a human being. In reading about training dogs and in observing Maddie in some of our interactions with other dogs, it's interesting to learn that as pack animals, dogs need to know who is the leader (master) and also which dogs are dominant and which ones are submissive. Maddie usually splays out on her back and chooses the submissive position in these doggie interactions until she's comfortable or feels she could be their equal or superior. When dogs dominate her or bully her with a growl she yelps (if they bite her) cowers low in the grass and shivers which is hard to watch. It feels like every time your child is bullied or betrayed by a supposed friend and you have to let them work it out by themselves even though your Mama Bear instinct is to tear that "friend" a new asshole. You hear about some rescue dogs (or any animal) that has issues because it was abused by a previous owner who couldn't get it to behave (control it) or it was traumatized by abandonment. So imagine how I'm feeling as her "master" and the one who is supposed to protect her, as also the one responsible for training her every day on the invisible fence with a shock collar. She ran into it today during training while chasing a bird and got zapped then she yelped, cowered and shivered. Yes, we're teaching her boundaries and yes, we're keeping her safe but it's for our peace of mind, not hers. I know I'm sensitive to it because of my own issues and I know it's the best thing for her but I can't help but feel selfish and abusive like my mom. So much for ending the cycle of abuse...Calgon take me away!
So back to 2005, when John Mayer crooned, "Girls become lovers who turn into mothers," I sobbed as a pregnant-daughter-about-to-become-a-mother-who-was-scared-shitless-but-determined-to-be-the-best-mother-she-could-be-to-this-child would. Also, in my gut, I thought I was going to have a girl which made the song even more relevant since it's about daughters but when he followed with "So mothers be good to your daughters," I wept uncontrollably behind my steering wheel and had to pull over. You're damn right I'm going to be good to my daughter! But why couldn't my mom be good to me? What was wrong with me that she hated me so much? To this day, she still says I was "awful" as a child in the same breath she gloats about how my siblings were "gifted." If you read between the lines, she's saying she punished me because I'm my dad's kid. She wasn't pleasant to any of us 95% of the time but she was especially keen to twist the knife in my direction to get back at my dad, even though it was really me that was getting cut. Even the best mother-daughter relationships are complicated by nature but the one with my mom is FUBAR.(Look it up if you don't know what FUBAR means.)
The hardest holiday for me is Mother's Day because it's so conflicting. I absolutely adore being a mother to my kids and fur babies but I struggle with praising the very woman that gave me life. Every year on Facebook, my friends give glorious tributes to their mothers, praising them for "being there for them every step of the way" or calling them their "best friend." It hurts my heart. I would so desperately love to have a mother I could call in a pinch to help me work out a problem or share details of my day or even just track down a beloved recipe. Sometimes even the thought of calling my mom makes me nauseous from the anxiety. My sister and I once commiserated about how difficult it is to pick out a card for her on Mother's Day because there's not one that says, "Thanks for feeding me and keeping me alive while simultaneously crushing my soul on a daily basis for 18 years. Thanks for that!" The next hardest is my birthday because she always reminds me that it's really her "birth" day because she's the one that gave birth. My daughter's birthday was the day after Mother's Day this year and she wished me a happy birthday, too. I guess it's meant to be a joke but when she turns my birthday into a reason to celebrate her, it makes me feel icky and it didn't feel any less icky when she did it on my daughter's birthday. It's all about her.
While I'm thankful that she didn't abort me as a scared 19 year old girl could have easily done (I guess I can thank her Catholic faith for that one), there have been many times in my life when I wished she had. It's very painful to be rejected by your own mother. Your mother is the one person in the world who is supposed to love you no matter what. In the wild, sometimes babies are rejected by their mothers but again that's nature, not normal human behavior. There is truth to the saying that there is a thin line between love and hate and while she says she's always loved me, her words and actions screamed otherwise. I was the embarrassing "bump" in her shotgun-wedding gown at the 8th month of her pregnancy; I am the reason she didn't get her college degree; I am a constant reminder of her first failed marriage and the man she once loved and now despised. And I favored that man over her. There were a lot of reasons to resent me early on and because of this I don't think she was able to really bond with me, maybe even as early as when I was a baby. And I'm not sure I really bonded with her...I have memories of her trying to snuggle with me and me recoiling. She never made me feel safe.
I sometimes struggle with disciplining my kids, especially my daughter, because I'm always keeping in mind the kind of relationship I want to have with them. Do I want them to remember me as a bitch who is inaccessible and constantly yelling or as the kind soul that lets them walk all over her? The answer is Neither so I have to find a happy medium. While I'm doing my best to stop perpetuating the cycle of abuse, I don't want my kids to become spoiled brats and later entitled adults. I struggle with harsh discipline because it still triggers me to my own childhood but I worry that I'm too permissive as a parent, creating creampuff-snowflake children. And now I'm training and disciplining a puppy, a GIRL puppy at that. Another daughter. Submissive, gentle, mellow. Not the alpha doggie. Vulnerable and easily hurt...ok now I'm just projecting. The vet has recommended letting Maddie go through her first heat before spaying her. This entails letting her bleed for 20 days and keeping her away from male dogs while wearing a doggie sanitary pad. Sounds like a nightmare to me. Maybe she and my daughter will get their periods together and all of our menstrual cycles will synchronize...good times! (Insert Edvard Munch's Scream emoji here...)
There's a saying that goes something like "once you finally realize your mother was right, you have a daughter who will tell you you're wrong," or something like that. It's the cycle of life. But in this cycle, I will be good to my daughter, as best I can because if I can't have the mother-daughter relationship I want with my own mom, I want to have it with my own daughter. Now, at 12 years old, my own daughter is embarking on adolescence with the attitude to match it. The carefully placed eye-roll, the attitude at the breakfast table for no reason whatsoever other than asking her to cut back on the Nutella she's slathering on her bagel, the secretive texts behind closed doors...it's payback time. Sixth grade is somewhat of a sweetheart year but it's also a time of transition; she still hangs out with us though we are starting to feel the pull of her wanting to spend more time with friends and she is prone to break out in tears when she doesn't get her way. Hormones. Drama. Normal.
But like John Mayer sings, "she puts the curl inside of my world," and I'm smitten with my curly-haired girl just like this floppy-eared puppy we've brought into our family. I've even taken to adding my own line to the song: "Daughters be good to your mothers, mothers will love all you do!" And I do. I really, really do!
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