all about my mother

tuesday i spent most of the morning going through some boxes of my stuff that have been stored here with my mom for the past 5+ years. it was a fun little trip down memory lane and i found a lot of the things i've been wondering about for some time. things like:

-the entire set (minus one) of the Empire Strikes Back collectors cards that i got piece by piece as a kid
-two bags of marbles i used to play/compete with in 4th grade on the playground in maine
-my high school yearbook
-notebooks from high school and college with many unfinished letters to lovers and women i was interested in
-lists of cassette mixes i used to make for friends (i used to make a LOT of mix tapes!)
-a print out of all the saved emails from when i first started emailing back in college, including a lot of correspondence with Chrissy, my girlfriend of 3 years back in school
-photos i took, printed and mounted in high school (most of them are *horrible*)
-tapes of old bands
-and a whole lotta junk!

i wish i had the time to read all the old short stories i used to write as there are tons of them, but that will have to wait for another day. i had forgotten how much creative writing i used to do. loads and loads of it ... notebooks filled with story ideas and brief synopsis' of stories yet to be written.

in the afternoon, i decided it was time to talk to mom some more about our relationship. i felt a lot of resistance getting into it and felt where i stood at the line between choosing to say something versus choosing to go sit behind a pile of stuff and ignore it all.

i choose to say something.

i'll start by saying that what i feel now (several hours later) is like the door has been cracked open and the ground feels very fragile. kind of like walking on hard-packed snow that collapses underneath you once in awhile and you never know when that is going to occur.

but i'd have to say it was a really good day. i aired a lot of the places where i feel like i haven't wanted to open up to her and some of the reasons behind all that. she resisted getting into it a lot at first, not wanting to expose her pain, not wanting to cry, but i kept asking questions and encouraging her to tell me how she felt and what she thought. sadness begat anger. anger begat softening. softening begat understanding.

i feel like we have a long way to go and i look forward to talking more about it tomorrow. for now, it feels good to be able to share with her, very honestly, the judgments i've had, the anger, the disappointment, the frustration ... and it's felt good to hear some of that from her.

we acknowledged that, since i began high school, we haven't really connected much and almost not at all since the divorce and my going off to college. i didn't mark the divorce as such a turning point in my life and it's hard to tell if that was more or less influential than me going off to school and living on my own for the first time. it's interesting to consider the reasons are for why our relationship is the way it is, and at the same time it doesn't really matter much - examining the past is interesting, but moving forward is what is important.

what matters is uncovering what feelings are there now and discovering where i want the relationship to be. i know that we are very different people and there have been a lot of things i have resented about her over the past 15 years. i also see where i have a lot of room to accept her for who she is, give myself the chance to get to know who she is, and not think that our relationship has to look or feel any particular way. i can see how a piece of my unconscious thought-pattern has been something like, "well, if you are not my mom who looks like a-b-c, then there's nothing there for me." perhaps that's too extreme, but something along those lines seems to land for me.

so, there's more to come and i'll write of it then. i feel a lot of mixed feelings about it all. on one hand i feel accepting of everything that has occurred and see it as what needed to happen at the time and then there is also seeing how that's not how i want to be anymore. with all of this comes the more full understanding of how much i've hurt her by being closed and unwilling to share my life with her ... co-creating the reality that she has been a mother without a son in some respects. and i can't even fully imagine what that feels like as a parent.

i still feel that some of my motivation is coming from a place of feeling like I "should" be doing this - that is, I should be open to her. i'm confused about that and it bothers me to some extent that i don't feel compelled to repair this relationship from a place of deep love. not that that is not the reason ... it may very well be, but i don't *feel* it right now. in all honesty, at this very moment, i am in this because i have some intangible belief that it will be good for me in some way .... and .... because i want to be good to my mother.


i'm not expecting any particular outcome. i see an opening and that feels great. i feel some mutual understanding and that feels great. and i still feel a lot of the disappointment, frustration and annoyances that i have felt for a long time. what is different right now is that i am not holding on to that stuff. it comes and it goes. the promise i have around this is to let go of the rigidity of how i've seen her and be more open to who she is ... all while expressing myself clearly and being honest with her about what i think and feel.

so for now ... that's where i am ... looking forward to what's next.