#21 Snarl

Sometime many years ago, perhaps the mid-70s, my mother was in tears because one of my siblings (Janice, I think) was in some kind of psychotherapy, and "they always blame everything on the mother.  It's not fair!"  Her complaint was that the therapists always encouraged the clients to "blame all their problems on inadequate or bad mothering.  No matter what they talk about, the therapist always brings it  back to the mother.  Everything is the mother's fault."  And the mother is not allowed to hear any of the complaints, much less respond to or defend against the charges, even when the charges are based on faulty memories, misunderstood comments, or overheard adult conversations a child couldn't possibly have interpreted correctly.  But as the sessions go on, the kid is more and more clearly angry with the mother, obviously has lost respect for her (at least until a resolution is reached), and the mother doesn't know why, and if she doesn't understand what's happening, it hurts her enormously, and drives her crazy.  My mother was normal.  She was frantic.

Well, I know from my own experience it definitely was like that back then.  Dr. K. wanted to put everything on my mother, and I had to keep dragging it to my father.  I was talking with a teenager a few days ago, and she said she had quit therapy because the therapist kept bringing everything back to her father, and it finally just ticked her off, she loved her father too much to care to hear it any more.  So I guess it still happens, but maybe the focus is allowed to change now.  Equal rights and all that.

Now that I'm older, I guess I see the utility in it.  Perhaps it's just another duty of the mother.  We carry for nine months, give birth, carry for another two or three years, lug around bags of supplies, sit up all night when they're sick, fight for them when they're not getting what they need and deserve, try to anticipate and head off booboos and kiss the ones we couldn't deflect, worry and cry and hope, allow them to fail occasionally for their own good then cry in secret because it's so hard to allow them to fail, try to teach them everything they need to know to survive, and all the time we worry whether we did it right, because it's all brand new and we get only one chance with everything and then that moment is gone and we can't do it over.   And we all know our own mothers didn't do it right, or so we've been told, so we don't even have an example.

So when the child gets to the point where she feels she has a weight on her psyche that she can't carry any more, I guess it really doesn't matter where it came from, I guess it is still the mother's job to allow the child to put the burden on her.  It can't stay on the child, and there's nowhere else to put it that it will stay.  Everything and everywhere else is so nebulous.  Anywhere else she puts it, she's tempted to take it back.  Mother is solid.  Putting the weight on mother, and mother's accepting the burden, allows the child to stand up straight again, flex her aching muscles, and stride away.  The final burden of motherhood.  The weight of her own mistakes mixed with all the extraneous detris.  The moraine. 

(In my opinion, any child who doesn't do this or something like this, to some degree, is totally brainwashed and has never separated from the nest.)

When this shifting of the burden happens through a therapist, the mother never will find out what that burden is, what it is made up of, unless the child chooses to tell her (never a good idea, because the mother will be tempted to pick through the bag and refuse to accept the uglier rocks), but on the other hand, the therapist is a professional and knows exactly what is going on, will hold everything in confidence, and will (if he/she is any good) be smart enough to not form an opinion of the worth or morals of the mother based on only these battered rocks.  That's all ok.

If, however, the child throws rocks at the mother with a nonprofessional, over coffee, the nonprofessional is likely to form a very low opinion of the mother.  And if he's stupid, he's even likely to let that very low opinion, that total lack of respect for her as a mother, show when he meets her.  It can be so bad, so bad with no details, just the disdain, that the mother has to wonder what the child said about her.  (Let alone what the nonprofessional has said to others.)  The disapproval of the nonprofessional can be so clear that the mother can wonder why the child even bothers to maintain any relationship with her at all.  Maybe just for a safety net?   Maybe that's why it's so hard for the child to be civil to her sometimes, why she interprets everything the mother says or does in the most negative possible way, never sees the positive.  Why her immediate reaction to her mother is always defensive.  Finding out through some relative stranger what your child really thinks of you can have you crying on the side of the road on the way home.  It isn't a load shifting done that way.  It's just some a-hole sitting there on the deck lobbing rocks at you.  Rocks your daughter gave him. 

 I am angry.  I am very hurt.  I don't want to do it any more.