Complicated relationships
11/06/06 Monday
Met Darlene for lunch. At the very end of it she said she wanted to get together more often with me. She said she wanted to be in our lives more “because we’re family”. She said she wanted us to be ‘more like friends.’ She said she wanted to make herself available more to help us with the kids. At that point I told her that I hadn’t asked, even though she’d offered, because it would be asking favors…I told her she can see the boys anytime she wants.
She wanted to know how I ‘feel’. I couldn’t answer her. I said that it was clear that she was asking for more connection and she agreed. Then again she wanted to know how I felt about it. I couldn’t answer, because it would require much more than what could have been said as we were picking up the bill to leave. She waited until then to bring it up.
I’d had a bit of a feeling that something like this would come up in the lunch today, because there had been an underlying insistence—there wasn’t any way that I could have dodged this lunch.
It’s going to take me a while of quiet time to process all that this brings up. I’m not sure of what I feel even, it’s all stuck together in a big blob: revulsion, fear. I don’t think anger. It did flash in my mind to tell her that I’m fine as things are; but something held back, again the feeling that this wasn’t something that could be said just as we’re standing up to leave. She asked me how I felt, and my feeling was that she wanted the answer NOW. So I could only look her in the eyes, because I didn’t know what answer to give that would stay true to myself yet still negotiate the sticky mine-filled ground between us. Especially with the constraints on it that are necessary for her—when it gets down to herself and her behavior, she does not want to hear that and that is truly explosive ground. As the seconds went by and I hadn’t answered her yet she put her hand across the table and said, “This is stressing you, D” or “Is this stressing you D? Because I don’t want to stress you.” I said, “It seemed like you wanted an answer now” and she said it didn’t have to be now. I said I needed to ‘sit with it’ for a while and she said ok. Not being able to answer her immediately, and needing time with what she said was probably a a bit of an answer in itself. I wonder if she can see that—if there wasn’t unspoken something that alienated me I wouldn’t have had any hesitation in answering. To basically tell her that I needed to ‘think about it” is a pretty big clue that there’s been intention behind my not seeing her socially or any time for just the sake of seeing her. Family obligation only. I think that that fact was tacitly stated by my hesitation.
It did occur to me very briefly when it was clear which way she was turning the conversation (as she’s picking up the check) to merely nod, agree, and make vague promises (to get together with her) that I’d just never find time to do. Just handle it that way, with non-committal agreement that implies a promise but then doesn’t follow through. I wonder if that was what she was really looking for. I started to do it, but it felt so wrong and so false to avoid the bigger issue by making promises I had no intention of keeping that I couldn’t keep it up. That just short-circuited me and kind of stopped me so I couldn’t answer her because I didn’t know how to give her an honest answer. I didn’t think of it in this many words at the time; I just knew I felt kind of paralyzed, and so uncomfortable as a result. It appeared she was waiting for an answer and I didn’t have one I felt was appropriate to give.
As I’ve said before somewhere in this journal, it really would be a lot easier if we were friends. It’d be nice to feel free to use her beach house without internal conflict. It would be nice to have an easy feel about dropping the boys off. It would be nice to not have to make an act of will to see her, or dread times that make it obligatory to be in her presence. It would be nice to look forward to family times rather than anticipate just getting through them. It is definitely attractive, and would make things much more comfortable if we really could be a warm family unit. It would certainly make for a more relaxed atmosphere.
Interesting she approached me. Unless she’s approached Gary and he just hasn’t told me. This gives me the sense that I’m key to the direction to how our relationship and family dynamics go, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. Which is why I hesitated before giving an answer: because to say what first came to me: That I’d prefer things to be as they are, at least for now, seemed tightly associated with continuing an uneasy relationship with her, and affecting the family dynamic of my boys. That I would be choosing to keep us all in a strange world where there is an unspoken wish that she be treated ‘like a REAL grandmother’, of the type where we easily just drop in on each other, and I call for favors, and any activity we do it seems natural to invite her along. Act like REAL families do. The tension between that and the reality on the ground which is so because I don’t have the feelings for her that would be required in order to have that sort of relationship with her—the reality on the ground that we don’t see her very often, we don’t invite her to go with us to places on the spur and then acting as if this is normal family behavior.
So she’s asking me if we can change that. Start acting like ‘real families’.
This request to me seems to indicate to me that I’m key in changing the dynamics and practice of this whole extended family relationship.
And that is weird to me and I want to be with this idea for a while, too, before I accept or assume that that is my role.
Do I dislike her because I keep telling myself I do? Is not liking her something I could change by an act of will…in other words is it illegitimate stiff-neckedness that maintains my dislike for her. Am I being cold and withholding?
I think there are other facts on the ground that would be up to me to accept, because I see them and it seems she and Gary don’t, and don’t want to. Vehemently don’t want to.
These facts on the ground have to do with their relationship which can never be acknowledged, have to do with the way she, and Gary too, handle conflict—the fact that she is to be protected from conflict by letting her have her way.
I’m trying to just write as I think. I did NOT get that hit of immediacy that comes from an encounter with someone’s true self, and I know what that feels like. I know she thinks she was talking to me from the heart…even though she reached her hand across the table toward me, I just did not feel the corresponding warmth inside that is the hallmark of a connection. It seems she wants more in our relationship, to be more of an extended family that includes her more, and it appears she thinks that I may be the key to that.
As I said, I’d had an inkling that there’d be a talk of this sort. I guess I’d imagined it a little more along the lines of her asking if there was something about HER that was an explanation for the fact that I do not make an attempt to spend time with her outside of the obligatory family times. And I never did think of a plan for what to tell her in that case. And having her approach it in that slightly different way was a little unexpected, and I didn’t know what to say.
I want to run as fast as I can in the other direction. There is something about her that gives me the creeps—that I feel a strong reaction to. Like two north poles of a magnet pushing each other away. A repulsion force, I feel that with her. And it’s a problem because she’s my mother in law and therefore an ongoing presence for a while.
I get a little sabotaged as I think because an earlier version of “The Questions” and “steps” (in The Works, and in Nonviolent communication) in my own mind seems to undermine my thinking process. The ‘Is It True’ question that Byron Katie asks, along with the assertion that the only things we can know for sure are what’s located inside us—we can only know our own feelings and thought, and not someone else’s—that seems to undermine my feeling that Darlene, and Gary, aren’t honest about themselves to themselves about who they are. That is, Darlene has a belief about herself that she wants protected and mirrored back to her; Gary refuses to engage things that are very important—the relationship with his sons, the relationship with me. “Nonviolent Communication” seems to undermine my feeling that there is something just under the surface in both of them, a slow-burn anger that they try to ignore, but surfaces very easily, in fact they sort of default to it. But they don’t let themselves acknowledge it. Both of them seem to settle for an appearance of something, rather than independently looking at it to see if it’s reasonable (like Gary’s “children should wear coats” dictum). It’s true that those are all ‘thoughts’ and mine: interpretations of them. So is it my thought: ‘they should be able to communicate more authentically’—is it THAT thought that generates my negative feelings? If I can ‘change my thought’ would that change the experience of my feelings toward them, with a special emphasis on her?
OK, there are some scenarios that come to mind, where I can be true to myself and address this honestly with her, from the authentic inside. I said that it seemed she wanted more connection (I STILL have an intuition that that came from a place that she THOUGHT it SHOULD come from, rather than a place of really true longing—that I COULD feel compassion for. I do NOT feel compassion for her, because—well I just don’t. Her behaviors are really convoluted and irritating ways of getting her needs met—very awkward and unbalanced because she’s not addressing her TRUE needs, and in facts shields herself from them. I KNOW compassion, and what it feels like when compassion flows from one person to another—it’s a connection that is unmistakable. Even as I write that I feel a doubt about it—am I setting the bar too high? Is this just an excuse to maintain my dislike for her? She wants connection, but she’s particular about what it takes for her to FEEL that connection, and the demands that places on other people. I feel hooked into a power struggle about who gets their way. I have to deal with that whenever there’s a potential conflict in our interests in weighing which choice to make. This is very uncomfortable for me, to have to deal with that subliminal competitiveness that sees us as winners and losers over her getting what she wants and I getting what I want. There is something in her that brings up this response in me and it’s uncomfortable. And it’s uncomfortable to deal with her through the fog of that in trying to decide which is the best decision for me: am I just rationalizing trying to win, or is it really best? Wow, this was a long diversion) and she said that she did. Oh yeah, back to speaking from my authentic inside: My feelings can’t be any warmer for her than what they are. Generally it is that warmth of friendship that generates the scenario you’re asking for—a family that is easy with each other, does things for each other, and includes each other and gets together more. And does things on the spur. And right now my feelings aren’t there. I’m not saying they never will. I can agree to see her more, maybe, and invite her to invite the boys more and see if those feelings grow into a deeper warmth. That’s the best I can do.
That’s the best I can do right now.
She wants the things that come as by-products to a warm mutual relationship and I don’t have feelings associated with that for her now. I’m really content to leave things as they are.
I wonder if she has a plan for if I say ‘no’? Just no, we’re going to leave things just as they are because I can’t deal with pretending a warm relationship with you and acting ‘as if’ for the rest of our lives.
Gary’s and her relationship is complicated, and far more complicated than each other is willing to acknowledge, and they can’t acknowledge it because they think it makes them repulsive people. That’s what I meant earlier when I wrote that doing what I thought she was asking for was going to mean take the whole issue that they have a complicated relationship off the table. It’s agreeing somewhere in myself to not do something that brings this to their attention, and just deal with it on my own. Live with it, essentially.
I remember her therapist asking me: “Where is Gary in this?” He’s out somewhere hoping it’ll fix itself and disappear. He doesn’t know the feelings that signal to him that his boundaries are being entangled with his mothers…they’re unpleasant (the signaling feelings) and so he sheds them. So he’s doesn’t have enough information to know where he needs to stand and to claim it back from Mom.
It’s a sort of crux: I thought of it this way: My needs are to have a husband in a certain way of husbandness that I sense is interfered with by her wants and needs, which are for something from Gary—she needs something from him, perhaps that Venn diagram of intersection really in order to feel her needs and wants are being met. And to do what she was asking means to just accept this as a given.
She and I have a complicated relationship too. My inability to just answer her directly and immediately at the table is an acknowledgment of that fact. And I think that on some level my failure to answer her pointed that out to her too. She’s made it clear to me that she doesn’t want to talk about what has complicated our relationship, but the direct result of them is that I don’t have the kind of feelings for her right now that would facilitate me having a friendship with her. I’m not sure if the relationship she wants with our family is one that she can get to through a door of friendship with me. That’s the truth. I just don’t know if I can be that door.
There are other doors. She can see the kids whenever she wants. If as a result of that there are feelings appropriate to inviting her along more, than we will do it, and willingly.
I need to give Darlene credit for bringing this issue up. And I give her credit for catching herself and saying that I didn’t have to give her an answer right then, or ever if I didn’t want to.
A little later:
Think I’ll just leave it at that for a while. Take a breather and transcribe my 1977 diary.
A thought comes to me as I transcribe: as I revisit the dynamics between Jeff and me. I was intimidated by him. And I valued his good opinion of me, and his presence, more than he valued mine. Is that correspondent to Alpha and Beta animals? One dominant and another submissive. I feel troubled as I reread about Jeff, because I can see how much more vulnerable I was to him than he was to me. And the thought that came to me: What makes the Beta submissive is more vulnerability than Alpha; Alpha is less sensitive, therefore less sensitive to their need for another. That’s it; the Beta NEEDS more. Needs connection, and needs reassurances of connection.
Something about Darlene craving connection, yet insisting on it in a form that’s very difficult to tolerate providing.
One thing that was happening with me and Jeff was that I felt that he was seeing me in the worst of lights. I thought he could see through my outside to my nervous and insecure inside, or saw me as looking ridiculous. That’s what it was. In his presence much of the time I always felt an unease, because I was certain I was visible to him as someone pathetic, and that he thought so. It occurs to me that he maybe could have been kinder; perhaps I’d have felt safer around him. I could sense standards from him that were way too high for me to reach. And I felt like I was looking foolish trying.
It occurred to me as I wrote that that what may have broken it up would have been a heartfelt cry from me—just let it burst through vehemently: say, “for crying out loud…Why do you hang around me if you think I’m so stupid! When I’m with you I often feeling like I have to apologize for being stupid. I WANT to grow; I want to be stronger, to see better! You should see what I write in my diaries. It’s like you offer a challenge of what I COULD be, but feel a little contemptuous of me because I’m not there yet.” It seems his best times for hearing me and feeling connected were at times like that—when something burst out from my heart. The authentic place. He always responded to that. Why couldn’t I have just keep that channel of authenticity open. In other words, I wish I may have known how to do that.
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