|
It's hard. I know. It took me most of sixty years to learn that.
My mother got married and had a child at the age of 34 because she wanted someone to love her. She did not like being married and took me to America to escape a husband who declined being divorced until he'd been abandoned.
My mother did not like other people being married, either. She didn't like men, period, and professed to feel sorry for their wives. So, she didn't like her son-in-law and thought I should have household help, even as she declined to care for the three grand-children living in the same house, where we'd set up a suite for her. At that point I learned not to count on her. It had taken about thirty years.
|
|
For a long time I thought my mother was probably a lesbian and didn't know it. After all, her two best friends were a lesbian couple (I called them "aunt") and their best friends were a male couple (my childhood pediatrician and an architect). But, sharing a household with the best friends in Chile had not worked out well. My mother considered herself exploited by them, as she had been by her husband, and returned to America after nine months.
In her mind, that the Chile adventure did not turn out as planned was my fault, as had been her flight to America when I was eight. At thirteen, it was blame I was willing to accept, since the outcome was one I preferred. Besides, blame tended to have more basis in fact than the benefits I would supposedly derive from being relocated on average every two years.
If at this point you're asking how a child survives such peregrinations with an intact psyche, let me just attest that lots and lots of really nice people, who didn't let themselves be put off by often hateful behavior, account for that. They didn't take it personally and didn't take revenge on the hater's child.
It's hard to recognize hateful behavior when there's no apparent reason for it. Perhaps that's to the good because it dampens the impulse to retaliate. On the other hand, letting hateful behavior go unchallenged and unchecked can be really damaging, especially when it targets the innocent. I learned that when my mother turned the hate she harbored for her husband (whose name she used until she died at 98) on the grandson who reminded her of him. When the innocent are attacked it's time to call a halt and initiate an intervention.
Of course, to do that, we have to be able to recognize that innocents are often the victims of attack. And that means rejecting the common, and perhaps reassuring, assumption that "everybody's guilty of something." I say "reassuring" because it's an assumption that seems to be widely held in our culture to excuse many people doing nothing about other people being abused.
In any event, what I eventually learned is that hateful people always blame someone else for their behavior. It may even be that their brains are wired that way--that they don't see themselves as responsible for their actions because they don't see themselves as they are, at all. And, not being able to see themselves, they can't see other people as they really are, either. Which is why taking what they do personally is not useful and perhaps even hurtful. In which case, justice demands that we intervene.
During one of my mother's recurring near-dying experiences (three years before she actually died at 98), I cold-heartedly recorded her travails, including her distaste for communicating with me, on video. Which is why, in finally reviewing the tape after seven years, I heard her assert, in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity, that "I never learned to enjoy life," and, after repeating that sentence several times, concluding with "now I just have to figure out who to blame that I never learned how to enjoy life." Perhaps 95 years of living had finally brought her to the realization that it was not all her mother's fault and it wasn't mine either.
In any case, there are too many haters for us to wait that long. There needs to be an intervention and the innocent need to be comforted and cosseted. That works. I know.
|
