Too Close To Home

I hung up on my mother two nights ago.

This is not a proud moment and I'm still stewing about it. In fact it is something that I feel really bad about. I do not condone this type of acting out in others, so why I think its ok for me to do it can be a complete therapy session waiting to happen.

The fact of the matter is I got completely overwhelmed, emotionally overloaded, and took things way too personally. Once I had clicked "end" on the phone I looked for something to soothe my internal rage. It was cocktail time, but turning to alcohol was not a good choice, nor was eating (although I did promptly break out the red pepper hummus), nor would exercise because I have a tendency to over do things and with a back injury still healing, I knew better. By the time my husband came through the door I had already screwed up two recipes and was slamming things around the kitchen with tear stains on my tee shirt. He calmly led me through a debriefing session which made me think that he was the better therapist and I had the insight of a rock. However, it made me feel better.

Looking back with 20/20 vision I could see that she was leading up to the bomb dropping through the whole conversation although I didn't clue in the whole time we were on the phone. She held back. She was tentative in her conversation: not offering too much, not prodding for more from me. This guarding is always a tell tale sign something is up.

She ended the conversation by saying she could see I was busy and she would let me go, but she had one request: Stop blogging about my father. What? Hello, left field! I have to say I was racking my brain for what I last wrote about my father.

She said that I portrayed him in a mean light to which I replied, "He can be a very mean man." She said that she worried about how that impacted extended family relations and that I should have more of an edit button on because there were hurt feelings. However if I couldn't respect her request then I should change my blog address so she doesn't know about it.

That last sentence pushed me over the edge.

Has she not been reading my last entries filled with angst? I think I was very clear that I had to be authentic and that was the larger message. But what really got me was that what she was really saying was, "I feel bad, but its now your problem not mine and its inconvenient to me to change, so you need to." This is a common family message that my father sends out quite a bit. I suggested that she just stop reading the blog. She suggested I kept my relationships private. Perhaps she really doesn't know me. I'm a lot like her own mother in the fact that I call a spade a spade.

The problem was I lost my cool and didn't think about what was the larger question being asked. I've written far more unfavorable things in the past about my family and have tempered my expression to a compromised place; preserving the relationships while maintaining content. Plus, my father and I have the relationship that if he was really upset, he'd let me know. I don't even think he reads the blog anyway. I think he only hears about it from her. So really, the larger question was what button was really pushed for her?

I haven't seen my family in over 6 months. Its hard to know what dynamics are really going on back there. I do know that perhaps my recent unemployment has hit a button with her as my father went/is going through a similar predicament and she's having a hard time (naturally and normally) trying to be "supportive" to him. Its been going on now for almost a decade. (One of her first questions to me was what my plan was for a job and what my husband thought.) I've suggested therapy for her countless times to find this balance, but I also know that she will only seek it out when she's ready. For being as forward thinking as she is, I also know she struggles with the concepts of women working. She owns her own highly successful business, but I think she wishes it was just more of a hobby.

One of my biggest fears is turning into my father and I've been wrestling those demons ever since I quit the high ranking job two weeks ago. I've been madly applying to jobs because I don't want to be like him or have J struggle with "supporting" me. However, hanging up on her was mean of me too. While we've always been each other's rocks, I don't know how we can support one another in this new chapter as it hits to0 close to what is raw and what is real.