Basketball

1/20/06

Awwwwww, Shiiiiiiit. Gary just mentioned in passing that he’s going to “call my mom” to “remind” her of Connor’s basketball game tomorrow. It’s his first game…it’s right over near her house, so I suppose there’s no way to not ask her. I just experience the thought of seeing her tomorrow with a feeling of aversion, like a dark cloud. And we’ve got weeks of this, since the season’s going on through March, I think. I hope she goes to the beach a whole lot.

This is how I experience the prospect of seeing her. A gynecological exam—although the exam is more pleasant. At least I like the dr.

1/21/06

Back from the game. As often happens it was a bit easier actually to be there and talking to her than the sense of dread beforehand implies. There were a couple of discomforts for me, though. One is that it’s very difficult to watch a game and watch Scott. So I’m not sure I’m ever going to get to see a game all the way through, because eventually Scott has to go outside, or needs me to be bouncing a ball for him. It also sort of bothered me when we left when Gary and his mother got way ahead of me and Scott, because Scott is just so slow and can’t be hurried. So I’m going to ask Gary if its possible that he and I switch off with managing Scott at these games, and to please wait for Scott and me.

The real blow was that Gary wanted to take the boys to a hamburger stand, and she said she wasn’t going to come. Gary & I had come in separate cars, so I followed him there—only to find her car there, too. SHIT! I’d been feeling the relief that I often feel after a visit with her is done, and there she was. She said she “wanted a coke”. It was a moderately uncomfortable time, too, with the boys fighting over the video machines. I simply told Connor that I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t going to let them play, but then she took that prerogative away by saying she had money. I think at the time I thought that if she wanted to pay for it it was ok with me, but now it occurs to me that she didn’t ask me if it was ok for them to play, if she paid for it. She just assumed that she had the prerogative in that situation…I also noticed that she stepped in with being directive with them about things like when they would eat and when they could play, as if I wasn’t there. As if SHE were the mom, or the primary caregiver in that moment. Then, as Connor was playing a car racing game, she was standing really close to him and TALKING to him, and telling him he was in the wrong lane!!! He kept saying, nearly shouting really, “So! SOOOO!!!!! She really was annoying. She didn’t register that he’d just been quite disrespectful to her; neither did she get the message that this wasn’t the best time to be talking to him either. It seemed very weird to me that he could talk to her this way, with his annoyance and tone escalating, and she just kept at it, as if he weren’t talking to her that way. She’s usually so sensitive to any hints of criticism—makes me wonder if HIS opinion of her doesn’t matter to her, because he’s a child? I don’t know how she could have missed his tone. I spoke with him later about it in the car. I couldn’t bring myself to call him on it right then and there; for one thing, she WAS being annoying and was persistent in it, for another it seemed like just adding more strife to a stressful situation, where he’s trying to play a game, his way, and people are yammering at him.

I had an insight the other day when I was writing about the difficulty of my position with Gary—me having the skills needed for emotional intimacy, as well as conflict-negotiation in relationship, and he not. Thinking about the things required in general to be successful in communication and in relationship gave me an idea. What about in the specific, as well as in the general? What if I were to name what is needed in a situation where there’s a rift with Gary—what if I were to NAME what is required to negotiate it successfully—that is where we have understanding, and therefore head off a negative spiral of increasing conflict. It gave me a solid feeling inside, to think about that. What brought me to it was thinking about being “stuck”. That it’s unrealistic to want or expect him to change, but also unrealistic to expect me to just absorb the maladaptive things he does as a result of not having basic skills. At the time it seemed either/or—either he needed to somehow see what he does and develop the self-awareness to change it so he can communicate functionally—or I needed to be a perfect absorber of the weird things that happen when people have no self-awareness and poor boundaries. Either he needs to quit doing the things he does, or I have to quit being bothered by it, was what it seemed to boil down to. One doesn’t seem realistic, the other doesn’t seem remotely palatable. But an idea crept in of another way: what if, in these conflicts, I were able to say, “You know what this situation needs in order to not descend into warfare is xyz”—and name it. Like this morning when I got home from the store Gary said that he’d talked with Leva, and that she was going to be in town from the 21st through the 30th. At the time my head was in the refrigerator and the motor was running, and I didn’t hear him. I thought he said the 21st through the 30th, so I asked, “She’ll be here about a week?” And he said, with just a hint of an edge: “From the 21st to the 30th.” He meant to show me he was annoyed, and I felt that annoyance as a barb. I experienced it that way, and there’s no getting around that. I can’t just not feel stung, when someone means to sting. But it occurred to me to say what was needed, and I said, “You could have just said yes. It (the way he’d said it) wasn’t necessary.” Something similar had happened just before where he said something that had a sting to it, when just the answer “yes” was sufficient. At that time I also said, “You know, you could have answered the question just by saying yes”(or maybe no) “and that would have been sufficient.”

So, I named what was needed in that situation. If it had deteriorated, I could have gone on naming what the situation needed—a respectful acknowledgment of what I said, maybe an acknowledgement that he had been feeling annoyed and communicating that through his tone.

~ by kaleidoscoperefractions on August 21, 2008.