What is family? The nuclear family is too tight-knit for relationships to work unless you all happen to get along. Unless your personalities cosmically match up. Lucky bastards.
I decided to go skiing with my family for a weekend, it was supposed to be a break from my stressful, overly intense grad school life in which I get too much and too little done and meet too few and too many people and feel too lazy, inadequate yet somehow sharp and creative at the same time. An ongoing struggle. I always just want people to "get" me. So my attempts to hone language and to create unusual, vivid metaphor since early childhood have probably been my ongoing cry for understanding. There is the hope that if the words are piercing and unique and human and strong enough, that we will connect, that you will get closer to my consciousness. That this alone-ness will lose some of the alone as we connect in a closer understanding of the other.
Get me?
I did have a good time the first two days. Then my mother had to lose it and be unbelievably rude and insensitive. This callousness of hers has always been the pitfall of our relationship. I have never and will never be able to put up with it. I just don't put up. That's not how I function. I get incredibly upset with her laziness in controlling her own words, not that my control has ever been perfect, but then again she is usually feeling justified in her rude outpourings, during and after.
You cannot teach your mom new tricks. You cannot teach yourself new ways to feel. Sometimes, the sad truth is that you are stuck in painful repetition. Sometimes progress just doesn't happen. I am always dying to bring more empathy into her brain, to get those mirror neurons working harder, creating my reality and pain in her brain. It just doesn't work. I've been trying to since I was a little kid. I felt this inability of hers to be a proper mirror as incredibly painful, and injust. But maybe it's because she just can't do it, not that she doesn't want to, but that she can't. There can be a painful separation between people, when the walls between our separate consciousnesses seem impossibly thick.
I always want to bring consciousnesses together, but this fusion of reality is hard to forge. What do we want? Who are we? Do you want to be me and do I want to be you and are we? I was in love and felt inseparable. In love was a chance for me to fuse realities in the way I guess I am always kind of trying to do. Become me, become you.
I guess I hate being misconstrued and caricatured...there is so much projection here.
Labeled, ugh. The labels, the mean power dynamics within family, not my bag, baby.
Competition starts within the family when parents pit their children against each other in a battle of compliments and ridicule. The family in this sense can be a constant war, a constant modern competition to prove yourself again and again, sans end. Forget those warm, loving images in which family is supposed to be cuddly love and good times. Encouragement, fun and games...the family is also where some of the most painful modern struggles occur.
Yes, I love mine and find them in many ways to be impressive and wonderful. I am not saying that all I see is the struggle and pain that can be caused. I'm just having a so-so night, I am hurt by bullshit...too easily, but that's beside the point, I just am.
