I was speaking to a friend who was talking about her mother, she said that her mother had always had a way of making her feel fat, or of actually saying, you’re chubby, you have a fat head. We laughed, how could your mother say you have a fat head? I was telling her that I had heard from someone else just yesterday who said their mother said they looked terrible in brown – brown is like black, only better – how could you not look good in brown?<\/p>\n
We pondered back and forth about mothers and daughters and my friend said that these snide comments were drawn from competition between mothers and daughters. But I said you know I think it is different. I think it is that mothers see themselves in their daughters and the critical voice in their own head just comes out without filter because it’s almost as if the daughter were an extension of themselves. So the hyper skinny mom seeing her daughter not hyper skinny, incites fear and the critical voice. It’s weird, but I know I’ve written about this a few times but when my mom was in the hospital a few years ago, I was sitting on the bottom of the bed curled around her feet and she was sleeping. She woke up and looked at me and I smiled at her and she said, “Your eyes are so tiny. They used to be huge. You might want to think about doing something about it.”<\/p>\n
Then my friend said it was different with sons because they wouldn’t have that same transference. But I told her that I had just read about a woman whose mother in law wanted to friend her on Facebook and she remembered when she first met her on a trip with her then boyfriend and how she walked into the bedroom from taking a shower to find the mother sitting by her son who was lying on the bed, combing her fingers through his hair. The woman was appalled.<\/p>\n
Hell I’ve been appalled at the weird dynamics between mothers and their sons and I have had my share of mother in laws after three marriages. But I told my friend what I never had before was this perspective and that is after having Tin, I could totally see myself running my fingers through his curly hair when he is 35. And to know that I would be 85 when he would be 35, I would hope I would be sensitive to his partner, but there is a very good chance with one foot in the grave I might not give a rat’s ass about the partner and still see my little boy underneath that grown up man.<\/p>\n
Parents and their children as I told my friend – it’s all about the natural process of life. A little baby is cute and so when it whines and messes all over itself, we go “poor little pumpkin,” and grandparents when they hiss and moan and look like a wrinkled apple core, we think well it’s their time to go. Similarly, children – boys or girls – need to rebel, be disgusted, be frustrated, be in opposition to their parents because that is what they are supposed to do – grow apart, become independent. While parents – maybe we still see the little boy or little girl with their tiny hand curled around our finger smiling back at us even while they’re walking out the door. And maybe parents need to know when their job is over.<\/p>\n
My friend said to write all these things down because one day, I would have a 16 year old boy, and then another day a 25 year old boy, and eventually a 35 year old boy, and he would bring home someone he was interested in and in order not to keep perpetuating the same fucked up family dynamics maybe I could try a new approach like remembering that he is a separate person from me and that his squeeze is walking into our life and needs room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was speaking to a friend who was talking about her mother, she said that her mother had always had a way of making her feel fat, or of actually saying, you’re chubby, you have a fat head. We laughed, how could your mother say you have a fat head? I was telling her that I had heard from someone else just yesterday who said their mother said they looked terrible in brown – brown… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-1Sr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7219"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7225,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7219\/revisions\/7225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}