Friday, February 03, 2006
Feeling Obligated (and Annoyed)
Obligation is probably one of the most annoying feelings one could possibly have. It’s basically a war between the “right” thing to do and what you want to do. It happens a lot around Christmas-time. But it happens all year long as far as parents are concerned.
I’ve never felt very close to my parents. Not sure why, but I just didn’t. Time passed by at an excrutiatingly slow pace as a kid. I escaped into books and movies when I could, and I just could not wait utill college when I could finally move out. I made sure I got accepted someplace far away.
As an adult now you can pretty much do whatever you want. It’s one of the fabulous things about being an adult. However. Mom is still there. (Dad passed away a couple years ago.) I don’t like going to visit, but she’s only a three-hour drive away and I feel guilty if I don’t go at least once every 3-4 months. Is that bad? Am I a bad daughter for hating to take time away from my life to share it with hers? She emails me about what’s going on (though I rarely care what she’s up to). I’ll usually wait a few days before I reply and then blame it on work. It’s terrible. I’ll feel like, “What kind of a lousy, ungrateful child am I? Am I that selfish?"
I’ve tried to pinpoint where these feelings came from. Why do I dislike having anything to do with her? I know it has something to do with my childhood. Kids are very impressionable and easily become screwed up adults if treated the wrong way. I never thought of myself as an abused child, though there was quite often excessive discipline, I thought. An extreme example:
My mom had cooked up some steaks for dinner. I had encountered one of those nasty pieces of gristle in mine and couldn’t swallow it. I was afraid to spit it out because my mom was this really scary “you NEVER waste food!” kind of person. So I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I spit it out into the trash can and covered it with some toilet paper. Whew, nasty gristle gone. I went back and finished my dinner. Later that evening she pulls me aside and asks me, “Is there something you want to tell me?” I was perplexed. I was like 11 years old or something, what could I possible want to tell her?
"Uh… no...” I replied.
"Did you throw away food?"
I thought really hard. I only tossed that gross thing I couldn’t chew up. That wasn’t food. So I answered, a little unsurely, “No..."
Her expression hardened a little and I got scared.
"Then why did I find some in the garbage? You lied to me."
WTF? No, I need to spell it out. WHAT THE FUCK?? She went digging through the disgusting bathroom trash can to find the one tiny wad I had spit out? How neurotic is that?? What kind of an uptight, high strung mother was she? You know what my punishment was? She made me kneel down and hold my kid’s rocking chair over my head for, I don’t know, a long time. This is very bizarre. This is not normal. Luckily it only happened once, but still, shit. Usually I got spanked or hand-smacked with a spatula, but that day she must have been hormonal or something. On my knees with a chair over my head… to this day I cannot believe a parent would do that as punishment.
It’s remembering events like these that make it no small wonder why I don’t like having anything to do with her. I just wish I didn’t care. I wish I could just close off my heart and say “fuck you mom, stop bothering me.” But I can’t. She truly regrets a lot of the things she did when I was little. She’s even cried about it in front of me. How can you not forgive? So I try and make her feel better. I remind her that I didn’t turn out to be a pregnant teen or a coked-out whore.
But in the back of my mind the damage has already been done. I don’t feel close to her, and I never will. So I’m stuck feeling obligated to visit and write, to make her feel like she hasn’t failed completely as a mom. It’s almost time to pay her another visit, it’s been a few months. Ugh. Maybe I can get away with another month…
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