Fortified by having discovered late last week that my honors thesis student is doing as well as a good graduate student, and by having attended one of those lovely, sumptuous, intellectual parties Friday evening, which in everyone’s fantasies professors fairly live at, but which in reality take place only rarely, I have spent the entire weekend on grant administration, breaking only to check news and weblogs, answer the telephone, and plant a camellia. My arms and legs want exercise and rest, but I must be up at five to grade papers, plan classes, and update my course management system. I had thought I would also have time this weekend to referee an article, thus removing that onerous task from my to do pile, but grant administration took longer than expected, even though I delegated some of the work to a very competent team member. I am, as you can see, somewhat snowed under, and the relevant affirmation is, you are tenured faculty, you are in charge.
There is one thing I am not entirely in charge of, however, namely that I feel demented. I became demented this afternoon when my mother informed me that she had asked my sister-in-law, whom she has just visited, if she would like anything from home. She meant something like local olives or wine. My sister-in-law requested a book costing $350, which she received.
Why does this make me feel demented? Not because I want a $350 book myself. It makes me feel demented because this sister-in-law is well known to use others for whatever they are worth, and she is credited for “having done everything all on her own.” It makes me feel demented because my sister-in-law’s gold-digging was reinforced once again, and because I had that reinforcement made known to me. It makes me feel demented because, although I have never felt entitled to such gifts nor had the chutzpah to ask for them I have, since early childhood, been suspected of wanting to make off with the family cash. I never knew how to demonstrate that these were not my intentions. I have not yet lived down the shame of having such intentions attributed to me.
It makes me feel demented because I got grief from my parents due to my aunt’s paying for college–grief because that enabled me to choose the college I wanted, grief because it was money she could have given to them and did not, and grief because I did not have to pay for college and therefore “did not do it on my own.” Most of all, it makes me feel demented because, when I took my sister-in-law’s family in during the hurricanes, I did not have the means to entertain them in the style to which they are accustomed, and became, therefore, an object of resentment and scorn.
It has been suggested me so often that I must want my parents’ money, that I dread inheriting. The State of Louisiana does not pay into Social Security. The money may be needed, but I imagine I shall feel unclean. “You only want our money,” is a very aggressive statement. It means something like, “We will not accept your love.”
A note on this text, in case, as my Christian detractor warns, my parents should come across it and feel hurt: the things that made me sad about the book gift were two: 1. To hear, from people who have always been afraid I might want their money, that when they meet someone who actually does feel that way, they do not seem to mind. (I have been hearing from them that I am after their money since I was a small child.) 2. To see them treated this way by anyone.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Unpoetic Coda: The relevant affirmation is that, although the $350 book is a small matter, the issues it raises are not, and while it would be more pleasant to be well enough over it all to just handle it, it is all right to feel demented.
Maybe it may be time to deal with some of these issues?
This all sounds very sad. Don’t you have friends who can help you with this pain? I will pray for you.
Carmen
Carmen, I appreciate your good intentions. I was about to say chere, I do deal, the fact of even writing this post is dealing, “no es triste porque es la verdad” as Rigoberta Menchu said about a much more serious circumstance… and yadda yadda. But perhaps you are right, maybe it is time to stop giving credence to these accusations, or stop trying to fight them. I have only recently realized that they may not be seriously meant, as in, the content isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it’s just used because it works to make me feel bad.
The price of the book means nothing, it is the gesture of it all. It plays again in those destructive dynamics. What happened with parents wanting to be able to say that they paid their child’s way through college. What is so wrong with you aunt paying. I would think I as a mother would feel relieved unless while the aunt was living she was sticking to your parents because they did not pay. Do you know that I did not save for you daughter. I thought it was something rich people did or could do. I saw a container of sour cream tonight, actually we threw it out because it was old and thought about how it was such a treat when once every four to six weeks I could buy a container of sour cream, dip mix, and two large bags of chips so my daughter could have what she called a “chip party” on a Friday night while her and I watched movies. Anyway when it came time for her to seriously consider going to college I felt it was my obligated to help her through financial aide, scholarship applications and loans because I did not save for it. And because she was independent from me until she was 24, unless she was married or had a dependent, neither in which she was, my income would be considered. So when she picked a technical school, something I was against, and warned her about, and yes it has come true, she insisted. She went through pharmacy tech school. I made a deal with her, I would pay the loan (is was under 2000) and after that she can not hold me responsible ever again. So I wanted her to make sure, because I wanted her to go to college. She freed me and have not complained since. But now she wants to go to college which I will help by giving her room and board and help with applications but I just do not have the money to out and out pay and I do not think I should take on a loan, she will have to do that.
It has been suggested me so often that I must want my parents’ money, that I dread inheriting.
How horrid. If they feel that way, I would imagine that you would not be slated to get any. It is almost controlling. I know I know, controlling is always in my thoughts. It is as if you cannot ever say anything about it because you are damn if you do or damn if you don’t.
Maybe it will help to feel less demented if you can think of why you mother needed to tell you that she bought the book. Perhaps she feels inferior to you and want you to know that she can buy something that expensive if she wants to? I don’t know. I get nervous talking about other people’s family.
You can feel demented, you have that right, yet I know that you know you are not demented. It is all a part of that “crazymaking.”
If they feel that way, I would imagine that you would not be slated to get any.
This is the worst thing about it — I am (if there is any left by then, you know how expensive it can be to be old). Since they say they feel that way, it would be easier if they’d act on it. But since they don’t act on it, I realize they don’t really feel that way, they just say so to make me feel bad, put me in a double bind. I’ve seriously considered getting out of the will, but I know that in the end, that will just cause me to resent my brother, which is no solution.
“I have only recently realized that they may not be seriously meant, as in, the content isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it’s just used because it works to make me feel bad. ”
This sounds best. What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do. I know it is harder said than done. I tell my daughter that about my mother but I still get caught off guard. They been doing it for 40 years that I know of, so it is me needing to see, learn, understand, remind myself, absorb, that it is just what they do.
“What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do.”
Yes, this works (if you’re not caught off guard). I am good at it for many things, but less good if it is about this money thing, or about the question of how I should do my job (that is a whole other post.) But I will study this:
“What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do.”
Fragmentary notes:
1. I’m glad YOU think I’m not demented! 😉
2. On that sour cream: you know, when I was a child, my mother kept saying we had no money, and yet we kept spending it, and I was terrified–if we had no money, I thought, this must be all on credit!
3. My aunt, at least as my parents experienced her, was very controlling with money. The college money was in her will. My parents felt like she took over as parent by doing that, and resented it. I, however, appreciate it no end. She had not gone to college because her father had lost his job, and she wanted to protect us against anything that might happen, the economy, whatever. And getting sent away to a good college, and easily leaving a problematic household that way, and having time to study and make good grades, is a great thing to have happen. And everyone deserves it, but few get it.
4. Worthy of a post in itself: this money anxiety is one reason why I am against letting middle class ladies without job skills be housewives for too long. I notice that money anxiety in a lot of ladies in this situation, and it seemes to be a displaced one: it isn’t that they do not have money now, which is what they claim; it is that they know, but do not face, the fact that they do not have money making power, and this is a huge, unspoken source of anxiety and insecurity. This is my theory on the matter so far, anyway. If there were wages for housework and childcare, the panorama would look rather different.
“What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do.”
What unnerved me about the whole conversation, I suppose, is the contrast about having been yelled at so often myself about how I cost money, and got money from my aunt that should have gone elsewhere, I have so often been told, “Don’t you just want us to die so you get the money? That is, after all, what we wanted when we were young,” that when these people meet someone (my sister-in-law) who seems to actually feel that way, and they just give her what she asks for and continue to find her heroic, it is just hard to watch. All the work I have put into trying to show I am not out to get their money, and the one who seems to get admiration and acceptance is the one who behaves as they always imagined I wanted to behave, and criticized me for, supposedly, having secret desires to behave in that way.
“What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do.”
Therefore the really important mantra, elicited by Carmen and poinpointed by Moksha, is:
“I have only recently realized that they may not be seriously meant, as in, the content isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it’s just used because it works to make me feel bad. ”
And/or, putting the whole thing differently: when I was a child, I would have been willing to undertake anything to gain their approval, or even just to stanch, a little bit, the pain they said my presence in their lives had caused. It seemed to me that the first step would be to demonstrate to them that I did not wish their death, and I was not thinking getting their money. But the accusation, you just want us to die so you can get the money, we know it, because that is how we felt about the older generation, kept on coming. It was what they wanted to believe of me. So I could not take what I thought of as the first step toward my exoneration — which would put me on the road towards earning approval.
So now, when I see someone who does in fact think in terms of what she can get out of them, get those things and admiration and approval besides, it hurts and hurts, even though all of this took place so long ago.
The relevant affirmation is about the right to exist. Riffing off of the question of whether the State of Israel had the right to exist, I used to write in my notebooks (without understanding why): “Israel may or may not have a right to exist. But I have a right to exist.”
And here’s a DUH statement, of the kind I consider a brilliant illumination, but other people may have learned in the grade: I suppose it is that I never actually granted MYSELF the right to exist, really, or that I did not realize it was inalienable – which, then, would be why I am still so vulnerable to these projections.
Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I have the blog under this name, so I can start from zero, and not renovate a building, or speak from on high, but think from the roots up, from the ground up.
And so: we take this: “What if every time they say something you tell yourself, this is what they do.”
and add to it the right to exist, which I suppose, DUH, that up until now I have not fully accorded myself since I seemed to think at some level that it had to be conferred from elsewhere. Right to exist … right to my own thoughts and judgments …
even in real life, not just in a semi-secret weblog … I will think about this, and meantime, thanks to readers for helping me clarify this !!!
A couple of days later, I have another DUH type realization on this matter, while standing in the grocery checkout line. It is: neither of my parents is consistently good at standing up for themselves, and they are both rather afraid of authorities and disasters. And taught us, or tried to teach us, to be that way, too: over-cautious and over-tolerant (it is safer to be seen as submissive than as aggressive).
And since they do not defend themselves easily against actual encroachment (as in, letting my sister in law rudely use them to get a book, and apparently feeling vaguely uneasy about it, but unsure how uneasy), they fear worse encroachment from everywhere (as in, that I am secretly waiting for them to die and scheming to get their money).
I do not know, this is just an idea which came to me, but I have some evidence for it, and it would explain a lot about how and why we were taught to limit ourselves.