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...and you’re expected to give fake pat answers.
How are you? (“Fine” is the expected blurt even if you’re not.)
What are you doing for the weekend/holidays/summer? (And its past tense variation, How WAS your W/H/S?)
But then you get the awkward one: So, how’s your daughter doing?
Even before this weekend, I tended internally to Dipped if I know, because I largely don’t. But, like the first one, you’re expected to blurt a rote version of Fine and not get into why things might not be, or why you’re dipped not to know.
The child in question graduated from RIT in 2014, had not lived under our roof for a couple years before that and left New York a few years later. Neither Eleanor or I have ever visited their new home 500 miles away, and she has been back in ours for hours, not weeks or even days, since then.
Mostly, life has gone on for us, and probably for her. My communications with her have been occasional, short and mostly random- and positive, if anything. Something one of us saw or read. A question about something tech. A fandom we share(d). Until this past weekend, I probably would have sent something about Thirteen’s final series of Doctor Who beginning this week.
For some more traditional families, this is unusual. Even within mine, my mother and late sister, who had their differences, still managed to talk almost every day and see each other almost every week. But it’s how I am- with most of my even less immediate remaining family and with most friends except those who are very local and tied into specific things like work or music or animals.
The mother-daughter relationship here has long been more complicated. Most of the grievances go back to Emily’s teenage years up through her time back here during and after college. There were unkind words and unkind silences. Finally, a few Decembers ago, a potent mixture of Christmastime stress, repressed memories and alcohol led to a Very Bad Night in which Eleanor screamed at her daughter to get out of our house.
She meant it, if she meant anything in that state, as GET OUT OF THE HOUSE THEN AND THERE. Emily took it, and I believe still takes it, as GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK. Years of attempts at explanation, reconciliation, and on my part mediation have gotten a whole bunch of nowhere. It’s gotten so weird for me that I’ve let them both know that I cannot play peacemaker or messenger between them. I’d been doing that with other family members almost all my life before she came along; it never worked for them and was an enormous source of stress and depress for me.
Making it even weirder is that, some years earlier, her longtime (and still) boyfriend’s mother and stepfather DID throw him out of their house. He showed up at our door while Emily was still in school 70 miles away. We welcomed him as the loved part of our family that he had become and remains. His Mom and Stepdad went further to kick him out of their lives. They canceled the insurance on the car his grandmother had left him. I believe they took him off their cell phone account, or at least tried to. Yet he, somehow, has managed to forgive, if not forget, all of that pettiness and abuse, while being even more steadfast in refusing to forgive Eleanor for the words of that one night and the issues between her and her daughter that led up to them.
They moved out of state a little more than 3½ years ago. That has both helped and hindered. Eleanor and I have gone through many changes in that time, most of them positive, so all Emily has had to go on is what we tell her, not what she can see. There’s some reluctance to believe everything you hear, so to some extent her skepticism is understandable. What’s more troubling is how that skepticism can quickly tumble into anger and arrogance.
Neither Eleanor or I grew up with natural inclinations to being assertive. We were both the youngest of three siblings and had to shout pretty loud to be heard in homes where shouting was all too common in a bad way. We can’t say where Emily’s inclination came from, but from a very early age she was known among her friends as “Mom” on account of her readiness to point out faults or tell them (and even us at times) what we should or shouldn’t be doing or saying. Four years in a college environment and the almost eight years since have not changed that, and that is what led to the strife we are now faced with.
After some time with little communication amongst any of us and virtually none between mother and daughter, Eleanor reached out by email early last week. I read through it after shit had been cleared from fan. It was perhaps half the length of what I’ve already written here; it was the type of “letter” you would have sent, or email I still sometimes send, to a friend or more distant relative in need of catching up with. It talked about the home renovations, about her time off from paid work and pain troubles she’s had, about us working some of our own issues out including the things we’ve both been learning while I’ve been taking over more of the cooking around the house. Days went by without a reply. I would eventually learn it was sent to one of two addresses Emily uses and does not check very often.
Saturday morning I headed out on errands, but first Eleanor asked me to shoot Emily’s phone number over to her. She’d deleted the contact, mainly to help ensure that she would not reach out or even lash out in a moment of weakness or stress. I did not know that Eleanor used it soon after I left, to send a text inquiring about whether she’d gotten the email.
I’ll let Eleanor take the story from there, from a post she managed to get out later that day:
I texted her, saying, “I figured I didn’t hear back from you because you’re busy, but I hope it didn’t end up in your spam folder. Please say hi when you get a chance. I miss you.”
She called me around 11:30 this morning. I was chanting. I asked if I might have a moment to turn off a timer, and she said okay. When I came back, I asked, “How are you?” in a cheerful way. I was happy to hear from her. That mood didn’t last. She spoke with an all-too-familiar tone, a combination of preachy, stern, and condescending. She told me that she did get my email, but that yes, she was very busy. She said she was seeing her therapist, as she had been for a while, and that they and she had concluded that she really needed to work on herself, that she is almost thirty and it was important to do so. She explained that she hadn’t reached out to me recently, because of that decision. She said she enjoyed the little texts [I used to send], the funny stuff we [used to share]. She said she didn’t have time for the kind of email I sent her, with paragraphs (yes, that’s what she said, and she called it an “info-dump”) and she couldn’t give me the validation I evidently sought, by sending it. It’s hard, now, to believe, to recall the coldness with which she spoke, the anger I heard in her voice.
When I felt there might be a gap in the lecture she was giving, I asked if I might speak. That’s how intimidating I find/found her. Her response was, “I never said you couldn’t.” I gently said that I’d come to a similar conclusion to hers, that I needed to put some mental space between us, and that was why I, too, hadn’t reached out in the past few months. I said that I don’t need her validation, and that I get that elsewhere. She asked why, then, I sent the email. I replied that I thought she might find it interesting, and that obviously, I made a mistake.
I then softly said, “Bye-bye, honey”, and hung up. I didn’t have the strength to wait for her response, so I guess hanging up was rude, but I can only take so much pain.
Then it was my turn to get a call from the kid, as I sat in my car in the rain while finishing errands. Same tone. Ostensibly it was to apologize to me, and to “warn” me that she and her mom had had a bad interaction, but our conversation quickly headed down the same hill. She repeated the part about feeling that Eleanor’s attempt at communication was really a desire to turn our daughter into her therapist. I told her I didn’t see it that way; that she has one, even I now have one I’m seeing individually (and we’re both finding each very helpful). But, I said, if there was one missing piece to why she had chosen to reach out to our daughter at this moment, it was probably because we had both just experienced the suddenness of a dear friend dropping dead the previous week and, the night before their phone conversation, we had both watched, and been incredibly moved by, that friend’s streamed memorial service. I repeated the much-spoken and implicit message from that celebration of J’s life: to be at peace with everyone in your life while you still have them, because you never know when any one of them might be taken away from you.
That got a few inches beyond nowhere. She was sorry we lost our friend, but that didn’t entitle her mom to cross her “boundaries.” We’ve heard that term before, and frankly I consider it part of the universe of psychobabble that has permeated her generation more than it ever did ours. Later on, I found myself thinking about them, and the inherent problem with them: boundaries work both ways. They may keep out pain, but they hold in anger, and hers was palpable even over the phone, even to if not at me, who she’s never had the same level of disagreement with.
At one point, she asked if she would have been better off just not responding to her mom at all, rather than engaging in the way she did. I tried to analogize it to a situation that’s different but still painful. As I’ve mentioned here (and, Yes, dad, #condescending, I read your blog and I know all about it), I’ve been estranged from my late sister’s oldest daughter, my closest-in-age living relative, for just about a year now. It’s a combination of geographic distance but with a heaping helping of Trumpernuttery that she’s become infected with through the man she married after a messy divorce. Yet, as I said here recently, none of this changes the fact that she and I are family and I would still drop everything to help her if it ever came to that.
To our own daughter, I said, Let’s say I could somehow get past the QAnon bullshit and the Jesus bullshit and all the other bullshit that has fractured our relationship, and I wrote an email to her with an offer of reconciliation.
Again she interrupted, I wouldn’t do that….
Well, neither would I, but pretend for a second. Let’s then say she ignored it and I texted her, and got a response back, not angry and rejecting but just saying, as you seem to be saying now, “Sorry, I’m too busy and have too much going on to deal with this right now, but thanks for reaching out.” I wouldn’t take that as rejecting or hurtful. I’d take it as a sign of hope.
I don’t know what she said after that. I DO know how she said it. There was about 15 seconds of screaming, followed by what I thought was her boyfriend coming on the phone. Only it wasn’t. It was some dude on the radio, which came back on my car speaker after she hung up on me.
I have not heard from her since. Eleanor has worked through this with numerous friends, and is taking the high ground on the whole business. Neither of us was as upset by it as I expected us both to be. We wear our big boy and girl panties and know how to pull them up. I spent the next day with friends, on a dog walk and at an amazing concert. Eleanor and I are going together to hear another friend perform in a café tonight.
Since Emily says she sometimes reads what I write here, I will end with just a few more words for her:
I hope you find a channel for all this anger. There’s nothing any of us can do to change what happened, only what does and will.
Do not feel a need to “warn” me about anything between the two of you. Life doesn’t come with teaser trailers. Neither does death, as we found out about J two weeks ago today. We’re both past the point of screaming at each other or throwing things when one of us has our feelings hurt, by the other or anyone else. That’s taken a lot of work, and love, and understanding. We do not seek out a “safe space” every time we feel threatened by an idea or a word. Those are just a different kind of “boundary” that may keep things out but also bottles things in.
I understand your hesitation about how Mom’s new faith fits into this. I think that might have more to do with the hypocrisy and intolerance that have become the hallmarks of the “faith” we brought you up in and which we have both left after recognizing that. It might also be a by-product of where you now live, where Republican Jesus is King and nobody listens to what the real one actually said or stood for. I have not joined hers, but I get it. Find an ounce or two to spare in your thirst for knowledge and try to at least understand it a little better before rejecting what it does for her.
Most of all, I will say again what I have already said: just as you are not either’s therapist, I am not mediator for either of you. I spent more than your lifetime carrying back messages, spoken and unspoken, between parents and siblings. I have less than your lifetime left on this rock and I am not going to spend another minute doing it. If that means we cut off our own communication out of anger on your part, so be it. I’ll be here when one of us needs the other. And we will.
How are you? (“Fine” is the expected blurt even if you’re not.)
What are you doing for the weekend/holidays/summer? (And its past tense variation, How WAS your W/H/S?)
But then you get the awkward one: So, how’s your daughter doing?
Even before this weekend, I tended internally to Dipped if I know, because I largely don’t. But, like the first one, you’re expected to blurt a rote version of Fine and not get into why things might not be, or why you’re dipped not to know.
The child in question graduated from RIT in 2014, had not lived under our roof for a couple years before that and left New York a few years later. Neither Eleanor or I have ever visited their new home 500 miles away, and she has been back in ours for hours, not weeks or even days, since then.
Mostly, life has gone on for us, and probably for her. My communications with her have been occasional, short and mostly random- and positive, if anything. Something one of us saw or read. A question about something tech. A fandom we share(d). Until this past weekend, I probably would have sent something about Thirteen’s final series of Doctor Who beginning this week.
For some more traditional families, this is unusual. Even within mine, my mother and late sister, who had their differences, still managed to talk almost every day and see each other almost every week. But it’s how I am- with most of my even less immediate remaining family and with most friends except those who are very local and tied into specific things like work or music or animals.
The mother-daughter relationship here has long been more complicated. Most of the grievances go back to Emily’s teenage years up through her time back here during and after college. There were unkind words and unkind silences. Finally, a few Decembers ago, a potent mixture of Christmastime stress, repressed memories and alcohol led to a Very Bad Night in which Eleanor screamed at her daughter to get out of our house.
She meant it, if she meant anything in that state, as GET OUT OF THE HOUSE THEN AND THERE. Emily took it, and I believe still takes it, as GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK. Years of attempts at explanation, reconciliation, and on my part mediation have gotten a whole bunch of nowhere. It’s gotten so weird for me that I’ve let them both know that I cannot play peacemaker or messenger between them. I’d been doing that with other family members almost all my life before she came along; it never worked for them and was an enormous source of stress and depress for me.
Making it even weirder is that, some years earlier, her longtime (and still) boyfriend’s mother and stepfather DID throw him out of their house. He showed up at our door while Emily was still in school 70 miles away. We welcomed him as the loved part of our family that he had become and remains. His Mom and Stepdad went further to kick him out of their lives. They canceled the insurance on the car his grandmother had left him. I believe they took him off their cell phone account, or at least tried to. Yet he, somehow, has managed to forgive, if not forget, all of that pettiness and abuse, while being even more steadfast in refusing to forgive Eleanor for the words of that one night and the issues between her and her daughter that led up to them.
They moved out of state a little more than 3½ years ago. That has both helped and hindered. Eleanor and I have gone through many changes in that time, most of them positive, so all Emily has had to go on is what we tell her, not what she can see. There’s some reluctance to believe everything you hear, so to some extent her skepticism is understandable. What’s more troubling is how that skepticism can quickly tumble into anger and arrogance.
Neither Eleanor or I grew up with natural inclinations to being assertive. We were both the youngest of three siblings and had to shout pretty loud to be heard in homes where shouting was all too common in a bad way. We can’t say where Emily’s inclination came from, but from a very early age she was known among her friends as “Mom” on account of her readiness to point out faults or tell them (and even us at times) what we should or shouldn’t be doing or saying. Four years in a college environment and the almost eight years since have not changed that, and that is what led to the strife we are now faced with.
After some time with little communication amongst any of us and virtually none between mother and daughter, Eleanor reached out by email early last week. I read through it after shit had been cleared from fan. It was perhaps half the length of what I’ve already written here; it was the type of “letter” you would have sent, or email I still sometimes send, to a friend or more distant relative in need of catching up with. It talked about the home renovations, about her time off from paid work and pain troubles she’s had, about us working some of our own issues out including the things we’ve both been learning while I’ve been taking over more of the cooking around the house. Days went by without a reply. I would eventually learn it was sent to one of two addresses Emily uses and does not check very often.
Saturday morning I headed out on errands, but first Eleanor asked me to shoot Emily’s phone number over to her. She’d deleted the contact, mainly to help ensure that she would not reach out or even lash out in a moment of weakness or stress. I did not know that Eleanor used it soon after I left, to send a text inquiring about whether she’d gotten the email.
I’ll let Eleanor take the story from there, from a post she managed to get out later that day:
I texted her, saying, “I figured I didn’t hear back from you because you’re busy, but I hope it didn’t end up in your spam folder. Please say hi when you get a chance. I miss you.”
She called me around 11:30 this morning. I was chanting. I asked if I might have a moment to turn off a timer, and she said okay. When I came back, I asked, “How are you?” in a cheerful way. I was happy to hear from her. That mood didn’t last. She spoke with an all-too-familiar tone, a combination of preachy, stern, and condescending. She told me that she did get my email, but that yes, she was very busy. She said she was seeing her therapist, as she had been for a while, and that they and she had concluded that she really needed to work on herself, that she is almost thirty and it was important to do so. She explained that she hadn’t reached out to me recently, because of that decision. She said she enjoyed the little texts [I used to send], the funny stuff we [used to share]. She said she didn’t have time for the kind of email I sent her, with paragraphs (yes, that’s what she said, and she called it an “info-dump”) and she couldn’t give me the validation I evidently sought, by sending it. It’s hard, now, to believe, to recall the coldness with which she spoke, the anger I heard in her voice.
When I felt there might be a gap in the lecture she was giving, I asked if I might speak. That’s how intimidating I find/found her. Her response was, “I never said you couldn’t.” I gently said that I’d come to a similar conclusion to hers, that I needed to put some mental space between us, and that was why I, too, hadn’t reached out in the past few months. I said that I don’t need her validation, and that I get that elsewhere. She asked why, then, I sent the email. I replied that I thought she might find it interesting, and that obviously, I made a mistake.
I then softly said, “Bye-bye, honey”, and hung up. I didn’t have the strength to wait for her response, so I guess hanging up was rude, but I can only take so much pain.
Then it was my turn to get a call from the kid, as I sat in my car in the rain while finishing errands. Same tone. Ostensibly it was to apologize to me, and to “warn” me that she and her mom had had a bad interaction, but our conversation quickly headed down the same hill. She repeated the part about feeling that Eleanor’s attempt at communication was really a desire to turn our daughter into her therapist. I told her I didn’t see it that way; that she has one, even I now have one I’m seeing individually (and we’re both finding each very helpful). But, I said, if there was one missing piece to why she had chosen to reach out to our daughter at this moment, it was probably because we had both just experienced the suddenness of a dear friend dropping dead the previous week and, the night before their phone conversation, we had both watched, and been incredibly moved by, that friend’s streamed memorial service. I repeated the much-spoken and implicit message from that celebration of J’s life: to be at peace with everyone in your life while you still have them, because you never know when any one of them might be taken away from you.
That got a few inches beyond nowhere. She was sorry we lost our friend, but that didn’t entitle her mom to cross her “boundaries.” We’ve heard that term before, and frankly I consider it part of the universe of psychobabble that has permeated her generation more than it ever did ours. Later on, I found myself thinking about them, and the inherent problem with them: boundaries work both ways. They may keep out pain, but they hold in anger, and hers was palpable even over the phone, even to if not at me, who she’s never had the same level of disagreement with.
At one point, she asked if she would have been better off just not responding to her mom at all, rather than engaging in the way she did. I tried to analogize it to a situation that’s different but still painful. As I’ve mentioned here (and, Yes, dad, #condescending, I read your blog and I know all about it), I’ve been estranged from my late sister’s oldest daughter, my closest-in-age living relative, for just about a year now. It’s a combination of geographic distance but with a heaping helping of Trumpernuttery that she’s become infected with through the man she married after a messy divorce. Yet, as I said here recently, none of this changes the fact that she and I are family and I would still drop everything to help her if it ever came to that.
To our own daughter, I said, Let’s say I could somehow get past the QAnon bullshit and the Jesus bullshit and all the other bullshit that has fractured our relationship, and I wrote an email to her with an offer of reconciliation.
Again she interrupted, I wouldn’t do that….
Well, neither would I, but pretend for a second. Let’s then say she ignored it and I texted her, and got a response back, not angry and rejecting but just saying, as you seem to be saying now, “Sorry, I’m too busy and have too much going on to deal with this right now, but thanks for reaching out.” I wouldn’t take that as rejecting or hurtful. I’d take it as a sign of hope.
I don’t know what she said after that. I DO know how she said it. There was about 15 seconds of screaming, followed by what I thought was her boyfriend coming on the phone. Only it wasn’t. It was some dude on the radio, which came back on my car speaker after she hung up on me.
I have not heard from her since. Eleanor has worked through this with numerous friends, and is taking the high ground on the whole business. Neither of us was as upset by it as I expected us both to be. We wear our big boy and girl panties and know how to pull them up. I spent the next day with friends, on a dog walk and at an amazing concert. Eleanor and I are going together to hear another friend perform in a café tonight.
Since Emily says she sometimes reads what I write here, I will end with just a few more words for her:
I hope you find a channel for all this anger. There’s nothing any of us can do to change what happened, only what does and will.
Do not feel a need to “warn” me about anything between the two of you. Life doesn’t come with teaser trailers. Neither does death, as we found out about J two weeks ago today. We’re both past the point of screaming at each other or throwing things when one of us has our feelings hurt, by the other or anyone else. That’s taken a lot of work, and love, and understanding. We do not seek out a “safe space” every time we feel threatened by an idea or a word. Those are just a different kind of “boundary” that may keep things out but also bottles things in.
I understand your hesitation about how Mom’s new faith fits into this. I think that might have more to do with the hypocrisy and intolerance that have become the hallmarks of the “faith” we brought you up in and which we have both left after recognizing that. It might also be a by-product of where you now live, where Republican Jesus is King and nobody listens to what the real one actually said or stood for. I have not joined hers, but I get it. Find an ounce or two to spare in your thirst for knowledge and try to at least understand it a little better before rejecting what it does for her.
Most of all, I will say again what I have already said: just as you are not either’s therapist, I am not mediator for either of you. I spent more than your lifetime carrying back messages, spoken and unspoken, between parents and siblings. I have less than your lifetime left on this rock and I am not going to spend another minute doing it. If that means we cut off our own communication out of anger on your part, so be it. I’ll be here when one of us needs the other. And we will.