Unraveling the matriarch.

Yesterday I spoke to my mother on the phone for 5 minutes. When we hung up, I was shaking like a leaf. I had to go to my bedroom, yell at the top of my lungs at the wall, everything I can’t say to her. I then lied down on the floor, in a Savasana, and regulated my breathing. I’m grateful I have learned how to give space to my emotions and regulate them, however, it is such a small part of growing. After I regulated my nervous system, I called a good friend of mine and vented and I did the same when my fiancé came home. The support system is absolutely as important.

My mother is a covert-narcissist. Delusions of grandeur, lives in an alternate reality, hypersensitivity to criticism, control freak, no empathy… but, on the surface, she looks like such a nice sweet lady; it took me decades to figure it out. My mother has shamed me and blamed me for my own mental illness my entire life, insinuating that it is caused by a lack of life hygiene and will power. I cannot even began to explain the toxic dynamics this has inflected upon me. To this day, I am still pulling at those strings, trying to unravel the mantle of shame she draped around my shoulders.

We have in our circle, a person that is not eating well. I said I was trying to figure out a way to help, because I know better than anyone how unrequited help can hurt someone, when my mother said “it’s just a problem of consciousness”. If you had been there, you might have seen the steam come out of my ears. I told her the most important thing to do to help someone, is to be jugement-free, she said “it’s not a jugement”‘.

Blood boiling.

I changed the topic, but when I hung up and yelled at my wall it sounded something like this :

“If you’re on a bicycle and hit a pot hole, fall and scrape your knee, and I tell you “you hurt yourself because you don’t know how to drive a bike well” : that’s a fucking jugement. You want to talk about consciousness? How about your profound lack of consciousness of privilege dynamics little miss white boomer. How about your oblivion towards how the current zeitgeist affects Millennials and Gen Z? How about your lack of consciousness of chronic disorders and illnesses? What about the lack of consciousness of how shame is the enemy of healing and growth and how shame is the outcome of jugement uh? WHAT ABOUT THAT CONCISOUNESS? It’s not a lack of consciousness, it’s a need for support, resources and communications skills that are transferred from one another. All things that we can contribute to by being present, jugement-free, willing to see where and how we can help, without imposing. You’re a boomer who grew up during peak humanity. You did not have problems of the community you had problems of the self. Therefore, you were able to fix them by yourself and now, you project your privilege unto us, but we do not have problems of the selves we have problems of the community. We fix it, by fixing our communities, not ourselves.”

My mother’s narcissism hurts me so much because I feel profoundly unseen, but I have this motto in life ” Give what you want to receive”.

So, how can I see my mother?

My mother was the oldest of 5 siblings and grew up in a poor but loving family. As the oldest, she took care of all her siblings, feeling unseen, like she did not matter, she was just the help. She married a brute of a man, I suspect love bombing was involved which, at the time, would have finally made her feel special. She made a family in which she was again, just the maid and cook. My mother is a mousy person, introverted, quiet, avoids confrontation. She divorced, re-married quickly (too quickly) to beautiful promises which ended up making her a maid and cook again; unseen. She started her “spiritual” journey, sadly fell into the wrong self help, the kind that says “fuck everyone just take care of you”. That elitist new age philosophy boomer bullshit. She did exactly what those book said : fucked off across the world, “healed” herself and started building an alternate reality in which she is a “highly conscious being” which knows the truth of god and the universe intuitively and any arguments against her beliefs is dismissed by the thought that *SHE* knows the truth and reality doesn’t matter. She finally felt special. She finally had an explanation as to why she her relationship were so difficult; because people just aren’t as conscious as she is. I theorize that narcissism is a coping mechanism to chronic lack of belonging.

So mom, you just want to be seen. You want to be loved without having to work for it. You want to be recognized and you try to “help” and you try to pass on your “wisdom” because you want to be seen, you want to be useful in other ways than just being a maid. You don’t know how to ask for what you need, you don’t know how to ask for help, you don’t know how to admit to being wrong without letting your ego be hurt. So, ironically, your problem is exactly the same as this person from our circle; communication.

We completely lose ourselves in the why and the how… we surrender to the stories and we forget to be present. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter why someone needs help, we can just be there, judgment-free, humble, connected, one.

I’ll try harder to see you mom.