To know me and understand why the world revolves around me, you must first know my mother. With that in mind, I am posting an excerpt from Subourbon Wife (the book):
My mother has always been very practical-minded in most aspects of life, with the one notable exception being her home décor. Her house is filled with precious antiques and beautiful things to look at, but there isn’t a comfortable place to sit anywhere. A couch, you may ask? Not a one in the house. She has several settees and uncomfortable chairs arranged to make for lovely conversation areas, but they are rarely used as we prefer to sit at the kitchen table and argue among family. Who knows if we would bicker as much if we only had somewhere comfortable to sit? It’s been so long that we’ve lived this way that no one can remember anything different. So if we – meaning my brother and I, along with our families, 9 of us all together – are at Mom’s house, we are undoubtedly in the kitchen. For one thing, the kitchen is the only room in the house with a proper light fixture, as the rest of the house is nearly dark, lit only by the dim and dusty glow of table lamps. For another, no one over five feet tall can fit their legs under any other chair in the house. My mother has a talent for shoving the most furniture and accessories into the smallest spaces imaginable, resulting in cramped walkways and virtually no legroom. M has to start practicing yoga in October each year just to be flexible enough to sit with us in the den to open Christmas presents. Mom, having shrunken to approximately 4 foot ten, doesn’t understand the problem. If, for example, you were ballsy enough to say something to her along the lines of “Less is more”, she would only correct you. “No, honey, MORE is more.” So it is quite a dichotomy that she is so no-nonsense in the emotional aspects of life.
My mother will spare you nothing for the sake of being nice. Or maybe she’d spare you, but she certainly wouldn’t spare me. “What are we doing with our hair?” is a favorite question of hers, maybe followed with something like, “You know no one is wearing their hair messy like that anymore. Meg Ryan doesn’t even do it” if she feels like putting special emphasis on it that day. Sometimes M and I will take bets on the drive over to her house. “I’ve got $5 on a comment on the hair within the first five minutes,” he might say. And I’ll say “No way. Not when I’m wearing these pants. It’ll definitely be something about my panty lines.” Other times, she will surprise us both by coming out of left field and remark on something that hasn’t been relevant in twenty years or so. Seriously. Several months ago, while looking at my right ear, she said something along the lines of, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d had your ear double-pierced at some point.”
“I did, Mom. When I was in 10th grade. At the time you said, ‘Oh honey, how tacky!’ so I let it grow over.”
“Oh good,” she said, clearly pleased with her 1987 reaction. “It really is tacky, you know.”
I rolled my wide eyes, probably the same thing I did back then.
Over the years, I’ve had many friends/ boyfriends/ husbands/people in line at the grocery store ask why her opinions matter so much to me. It’s not that her opinion matters, it’s just that whatever I do never seems to be good enough. For instance, on the morning I was to graduate with my MBA, she asked me when I would be enrolling in law school. (When I brought this to her attention years later, she said, “Well, you should have gone to law school! You would have made a great lawyer!”)
In her defense, Mom doesn’t look at these reactions as being unsupportive of me, she actually thinks she is being VERY supportive by just helping me be the best me I can. When I once opined that I didn’t think some aspect of my life was any of her business, she was quick to correct me. “Honey, your business is just an extension of my business.” And that was that.
At least I never have to worry about her being dishonest with me. Even as a child, I never remember Mom pulling any punches. When my brother and I were afraid of going to the doctor we’d ask, “Is he going to give us shots?”
“Yes,” she’d answer.
“Will they hurt?”
“Yes.”
“But what would be the point in lying to you?” she’ll say to me now. “You’ll find out the truth sooner or later, anyway.”
This must have been her thinking when I won “Miss Congeniality” in my high school beauty pageant. I remember her saying afterward, “I was hoping they’d call your name for congeniality because you didn’t have a chance at any of the beauty awards.” Ummmm…thanks?
Again, she was just telling me the truth. No sense in giving someone a false sense of security, right? If she hadn’t set me straight right then and there, I might have run out nilly-willy and signed up to be in another pageant. Better to know exactly where I stand in life, which seems to be in the less-than line. After years of programming like this, I became able to take off the training wheels of my mother’s voice and actually criticize myself as adeptly as if she’d done so herself. By the time I’d checked into rehab, the female counselor there told me I had the worst negative self-talk she’d ever heard.
“Really? Like ever?” I’d asked her. (I mean, here she was working with depressed folks all day and everything.)
“Ever.”
To be honest, I can’t blame this all on Mom. I have to attribute some of that award-winning negative self-talk to my sense of efficiency. If I were to, for example, snap at my husband for no reason, I wouldn’t start with negative self-talk like, “I am really cranky today.” Instead, I’d go directly to, “I’m a terrible wife.” See what I just did? Some people would take 14, 15 steps to get to that point, but I, what with my economy of words, jumped right to the bottom line of being a bad wife. That’s the result of years of practice, folks. I can get right to the worst part so I can move on to bitch about something else, an inherited trait some might say.
Back in those bad old days before getting sober, I used to consider bitching a sort of hobby. I was a basically decent person; I didn’t mean anything by it. But I was definitely a bitcher. If I asked you how you were doing and you said, “I can’t complain,” I would probably have said something like, “Sure you can! What about that good-for-nothing husband of yours? Is he still unemployed?” Just to get the bitching started, you see.
Now that I’m a happier person, I’ve had to give up my complaining ways. For one thing, there is infinitely less to complain about. And for another, I prefer to focus on the positives in life. Now don’t get me wrong – I’ll hear someone share in a meeting, “My worst day sober is better than my best day drinking” and I’ll just want to strangle them. I can call bullshit when I see it, even through my rose-colored glasses. If drinking wasn’t any fun to start with, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Or at least you weren’t hanging out with the right people. I am honest enough to say I had fun drinking, just not in the last 5 years or so.
Whereas I have rehabbed my attitude toward life as much as anything in the past year, I still have to remind myself hundreds of times throughout my days to go easy on myself. In AA there is a saying that you should stay out of your own mind because it’s a bad neighborhood. I know mine should be condemned. It’s been a sick place as long as I can remember. So who could blame my mother when I finally spoke to her from rehab and she said she was totally caught off guard by my break-down?
“But Mom, I’ve been telling you for years that I’m depressed!”
“Well, that’s just it, honey. You’ve been telling us for years. No one thought this time you were serious.”
Eye roll.
