A Christmas Miracle

At the risk of writing a sentimental sermon about the spirit of Christmas, I want to share a miracle:  Julia, daughter #1, volunteered to spend time with her grandmother. 

As a mother, GM was a classic narcissist.  She loved her three sons to the extent they reflected favorably upon her.  In other words, not very much.  Success meant being superior to everyone else in every way.  GM made this her life's work and was extremely good at it.  She was not, however, happy and the sad part is that she didn't know it.  When she felt upset, which was all of the time, GM went about "fixing" some aspect of her environment in the form of giving advice or criticism or picking a fight or redecorating a room or shopping or "having work done.". Somehow her sons managed not to murder her for her constant expressions of motherly love:  telling them who they should be, how they should look, and what they should (not) do.  Failure to conform to her wishes was an intolerable rejection which never went unpunished.

Son #1 did his best to conform, but in the end was unable to measure up.  He dropped out of Yale, married a nice (wealthy) Jewish girl, and lived in the style to which his mother was accustomed for a couple of years.  The marriage failed as did the next three.  He lost his psychology license because he engaged in a romantic relationship with a patient and then moved to Israel to become a militant Zionist.  Son #2 conformed up until he graduated from Harvard Law School (after Duke University) and then dropped out of law to become a professional psychic.  Son #3, my husband, refused to conform but became a successful business attorney, got married, and had two children.  Of the three, he is the son who reflects the best upon his mother, but she still doles out the "motherly love."

Grandpa is a classic enabler who allowed his wife to bully their children with her withholding of love unless they conformed to her wishes which they were never allowed to do.  There has never been a more co-dependent relationship than theirs and while they were successful in many ways, they are both emotionally crippled and disappointed in their offspring.

I never let it get to me when GM would buy me padded bras and lipsticks and force me to try on clothing which accentuated the negative more than my own choices did.  When the babies came along, GM had a fantasy about how wonderful it was going to be and bought a houseful of baby products for the week or two we spent with them.  Unfortunately for her, Julia had her own ideas from birth about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it.  The two never hit it off but once Julia entered puberty, the war was on and I was caught in the middle.  My daughter and husband would tell me to tell GM to back off and GM would complain to me about how horrible my daughter and husband were behaving, like I could fix everyone.  If anyone should have hated her, it should have been me.

As Julia grew from teenager to adult, she struggled mightily with depression, anxiety, mania, and ADHD.  Her grandmother had no ability to understand why Julia was so difficult to be around as well as her failure to fawn all over her like a good granddaughter.  No amount of explaining was enough to enlighten GM.  For the past decade, she has asked me the same twenty questions about Julia and I have given her the same twenty answers.  It's like talking to a stone.

Meanwhile, Julia has had the benefit of loving, supportive, and understanding parents who demanded no more than she was capable of doing.  The one time that we asked her to step up to the plate was on the occasion of her grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary, a dinner party planned weeks, no months, in advance.  Unfortunately, the dinner party coincided with a "cosplay" convention in which Julia and her friends hoped to win an award for their costumes.  Fortunately, the competition was held in the morning along with the photo shoot.  The winners -- my daughter and her friends -- were announced while we were attempting to enjoy the dinner and Julia made sure that each and every one of us suffered for requiring her attendance.  I nearly disowned her after that and it was a long time before I was willing to give her the time of day.

So, when the girls came home for Christmas and the grandparents came down to be with us for a week, Julia made a big show of hating her grandmother (who chose to ignore it).  Kayleigh, daughter #2, took her sister to task on Christmas Eve and said some things which caused Julia to realize that it was she who was causing the problems by being reactive instead of ignoring the criticism and acting like a civil and mature human being.  As Santa was getting ready to fill the stockings, Julia came in and apologized for her many years of being an asshole.  She said that she finally understood that she owned more than half the dysfunction in the family and promised to do better.  I hugged her and told her I loved her and that the past doesn't matter as much as the present.

The next day, after opening presents and eating a delicious Christmas dinner, GM mentioned that she needed to get a manicure and Julia volunteered to take her and have lunch with her.  I almost died of shock.  She seemed genuine in her offer and GM was thrilled.  It was the first time that Julia had said anything nice to her grandmother in years and she seemed sincere.  Just the same, I expected a blow-up and arranged to meet them for lunch.  When I arrived, they were chatting and laughing like a couple of old biddies and the only explanation I could come up with is that a God had performed a miracle. 

Serenity Happens!

Nature vs Nurture

Our two children, born three years apart, are so different we sometimes wonder if there was a mix-up at the hospital.  Firstborn Julia was a beautiful baby whom I showed off constantly in my effort to prove that I wasn't really a social pariah.  Pushing the stroller around the neighborhood gave me the courage to meet and converse with my neighbors, which I had studiously avoided for the five years before Beau and I became parents, out of a combination of fear and loathing (i.e., defensiveness).  Julia was so pretty that strangers exclaimed over her everywhere we went and for the first time in my life I felt like I could let go of the outermost layers of my psychic body armor; after all if I could produce such a beautiful baby, maybe I was capable of being normal.  I vowed to be the mother to her that I never had so that she would grow up happy, secure, and self-confident.

As I met other young mothers I became convinced that my baby was the one destined for greatness and glory; their babies were ordinary in comparison.  She learned to speak in sentences by the time she was fifteen months old and was completely toilet trained soon thereafter.  Only one other mother (a religious fanatic who regularly beat her little son with a paint stick in order not to "spoil the child") had her child out of diapers before his second birthday.  The rest let their children figure it out on their own which I found irresponsible.

Out of concern that Julia not grow up as an only child, Beau and I decided to have a second baby.  As the pregnancy progressed, Julia's personality became increasingly eccentric but we chalked it up to her extraordinary intelligence.  Every adult who interacted with her commented on how smart and funny she was, how engaging and creative, how insightful.  As her intellect became more and more obvious, so did evidence of inner demons.  By the time Kayleigh was born, Julia's tantrums were legendary.  I refused to believe that there was anything wrong even though her troubles were so visible I could no longer in honesty deny them.  I kept hoping that if we just continued believing in her and loving her and talking to her she would eventually grow out of her extreme emotions.  At the time I believed that nurture could trump nature.

Unfortunately, her tantrums worsened and in significant ways she did not keep pace with the "ordinary" children in her age group.  While her playgroup friends were able to count to twenty and recite their ABCs, Julia couldn't have been less interested.  She was too busy tearing the house apart to create a world of her own, narrating all the way, complete with imaginary friends and dogs.  Supervising her while caring for a newborn was exhausting and both children got less nurturing than I wanted to give them.  Meanwhile, Beau and I hit a low point in our marriage and we each blamed the other for Julia's increasingly troubled behavior.  I was beside myself trying to figure out how to protect her from the turmoil in her world and began self-medicating to an increasing degree with wine.

Kayleigh, meanwhile, developed on a more mainstream track.  She learned to count and recite ABCs by the time she was three, she sought out playmates rather than going off into her own little world of make believe, and she quickly grasped the concept of being rewarded for good behavior.  Like her sister, Kayleigh was a busy little bee, but in ways that seemed more "normal", in other words she made an effort to fit in with the other children.  This pattern continued through their childhoods and into young adulthood.

Today, they do not speak to each other in anything other than monosyllables.  Kayleigh is furious at Julia for being a self-centered whacko with a personality disorder.  Julia is furious at Kayleigh for being "perfect" and belonging to a sorority and studying business and being a high achiever in a conventional sense (i.e., making her look bad).  Julia is finishing at art school where she is majoring in sequential art, (also known as comics).  She can design and sew elaborate costumes for the conventions she attends with other sequential art fans, some of which are quite beautiful.  Kayleigh believes that Julia is an overgrown child who needs a reality check;  Julia feels that Kayleigh is mean and unloving and judgmental.  Beau and I hope that Julia will be able to live independently.  We aren't worried about Kayleigh being successful, but we do hope she can learn to be more accepting of her sister's challenges.

Neither girl wants to be home when her sister is there.  On those increasingly rare occasions that the four of us sit down together, Julia suffers because she feels that her parents are only interested in what her sister is doing.  Kayleigh suffers too because deep down she is heartbroken at having a sister she cannot love.  It seems that Beau and I have ended up with two only children. According to Tolstoy, every happy family is alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Our family is an exception:  we are a happy family but not when we are all together.  When the girls are alone with one or both of us, there is love to spare.  When the two are together, the best we can hope for is a restless peace.  Is this problem between the two of them the result of nature or nurture?  I would argue that the answer is both:  75% nature, 25% nurture.  Beau and I certainly made mistakes in how we built our family, but having two children who have long been completely incompatible can only result from demons passed from parents to children.  If we hadn't been fighting our own demons, we might have recognized and treated Julia's illness in early childhood, when it could have made a difference to her and to Kayleigh.  Or, maybe not.  We can only know what is.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

Letting Go

Being a mother, I have always been reluctant to send my now adult children out into the mean streets of life and because of this I have done many things to shelter them from reality.  When I was in college, I had no money and worked twenty or thirty hours per week to pay my living expenses.  I never had enough to eat, to wear, or to sit on, but I managed to get through with a bachelor of science degree.  Just the same, I suffered the entire time from privation and from major depression, anxiety, and at times full blown psychosis.

My children were not going to suffer the way I did and so I made sure to spoil them so they could concentrate on their school work and enjoy their youth while they had it.  My oldest child suffered anyway because that is her nature.  She is, unfortunately, bi-polar among other things and therefore her experience of the world is never in balance.  This is a tragedy but it is not insurmountable.  Because I have spoiled her and never forced her to make hard choices, she has no idea how hard life really is.  She is scheduled to graduate from art school within the year and given her recent behavior at an important family gathering I have decided to begin the painful process of weaning her from the money teat.

When she went away to college I gave her my VISA card and set up on-line banking so I could monitor her spending and add money to her account whenever it went low.  She took advantage of this situation by buying anything and everything she wanted ("needed") in order to cope with the demands of living on her own.  She liked the feeling of superiority that being the "rich bitch" among her peer group gave her.  She was the one who could join the ZipCar program and pick up the check at the sushi restaurant that everyone loved.  At the time, I didn't give her much grief about this because her dad had a high-paying job and her grandparents had funded her education expenses.

In her sophomore year of college, she spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital on a medical leave of absence which stabilized her, but at the end of the semester, she realized that she needed to come home for a year.  We call this the year of living dangerously.  She took a class or two from the local community college while selling kitchen knives for Cutco.  She made good money, thanks to the referrals her dad gave to her through his place of work but the pressure to sell-sell-sell was too intense as was the crush she developed on her boss who used this to his advantage (not sexually, to her dismay) and she ended up burned out but wiser for the experience.  In the fall, she enrolled in art school and we lucked into a great living situation for her.

Art school was exactly where she needed to be because she is most definitely not a mainstream student and neither is anyone else at this particular institution.  Her creative juices began flowing and her two dimensional drawings of anime-like characters became three-dimensional costumes enabling her to begin role playing.  Sounds like good, clean fun, and it is for lots of people.  My daughter, unfortunately, has a shifting view of reality and loses herself in these fantasy worlds to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

On the evening of her grandmother's 90th birthday party, she wanted to be at one of the big Anime conventions in order to compete in the costume design and execution competition.  Fortunately, the judging took place in the morning and the convention was in the same city as the family gathering.  Unfortunately, she and her friends won "best in show" and this meant that she was absent for the adulation and accolades she desperately wanted for her beautiful work, not to mention her beautiful self in her big-hair blonde wig.  During the birthday dinner, she kept checking her iPhone for updates on the judging and when she learned that she and her girls had won, she let her fury rip.

It was an unfortunate situation but how could she not attend her grandmother's 90th birthday party?  Especially since it is this grandmother's money which finances her private school education.  Fortunately, she is a great actress and made a lovely toast with a genuine-looking smile on her face.  The rest of the time, she did her best to get my attention by slugging down as much wine and champagne as she could get her hands on and trying to get me out in the hallway so she could berate me for "forcing" her to be where she did not want to be and preventing her from being where she did.  I had had enough and I told her to suck it up.

She called a few days later to demand an apology which I explained she was not entitled to.  The person who needed an apology was Daughter #2 who had been seated next to her during the dinner and who spent two hours after the dinner in tears because of how horribly Daughter #1 had behaved at an important family celebration.  I was proud of her for not hanging up on me, although she did her best to deflect responsibility for her rotten behavior.

It is time for Daughter #1 to learn to face reality and to that end, I have removed myself as co-signer on her credit card and have put her on an allowance.  I am expecting a very rough ride for the next few months but she believes that she is an adult capable of adult responsibilities.  Better she learns this now -- before she moves to San Francisco and meets reality in all its meanness.