I had a small victory this past week and I'd like to pat myself on the back. I went to the community where my mom lives and stayed with her for a few days.
When I got there, my mom picked me up and we walked to the parking lot to get her car. As we were almost to the car she started looking for her keys. "Oh, I hope I didn't lock my keys in the car." she said. As we got closer, we realized that the car was running. She had come into the station to get me and had absent-mindedly left her car running the 20 or so minutes she had been there.
Inwardly I was freaking out while outwardly I was remaining cool. This is a place I know all too well. A difference from my traditional pattern with mom, however, was that I was inwardly acknowledging that I was freaking out. It used to be that I would see mom do strange things and then deny to myself that they were strange. I really wanted to be part of a "normal" family so I chose not to see what others saw right away. I did not acknowledge to myself inside that what she was doing was upsetting to me. Instead I went into a kind of foggy denial, an alternate reality that made me feel a constant low-level anxiety.
In retrospect, I can see why I felt anxious. As a child I was trying to make grounded connections with "life on earth". I relied on my mom as the primary model of how to make that connection. Whenever she acted strange, bizarre or ungrounded (which was fairly often), both my stability and my perception of what is true in the world, were shaken to some degree. I was trying to build up the structure of my stable consciousness on a foundation that had some issues.
But life, and development, move on. I continued to develop whether I was ready for the next step or not. And so, interspersed between all of my logical, reasonable and well-grounded ideas and behaviors, there are little "wiggly bits"; they make the overall structure of my consciousness less secure than I'd like it to be.
So, now that I've acknowledged my "wiggly bit syndrome", what can I do about it? It seems like a good step is to find new models of how to do things and re-learn. I can steadily establish new patterns and find my way through to newer, stabler ground.
So, returning to the car incident, I tried to find a way to deal with this upsetting information that she forgot to turn the car off when she came to pick me up. At the time, I began running scenarios that involved her being unable to live where she does now. She'd be coming to where I live and where I would need to be much more responsible. Needless to say, this is not a happy prospect for me.
As I did this, I flashed on an article I read recently for a social work class I'm taking. It talked about how adult children can be overly forceful when they see their elder parents showing signs of aging. The article recommends that adult children take a deep breath and look carefully at what the needs are, and not necessarily rush in to try and change the parent's whole scene.
So I took a deep breath, acknowledged my feelings, and decided to keep observing to see how she was doing overall. What I came to during the two-day visit was that she seems to be doing just fine. She has a number of friends and social connections. She gets around in her car pretty well. She is able to care for her two animals. She seems happy.
In short, I can be a support to her but I don't need to rush in and change her scene.
Thank God!
My being grounded during this episode strengthened me. The stress of the moment was an opportunity for my "wiggly bits" to show themselves and for me to freak out and move into "foggy denial". But I didn't. I showed myself, in that particular moment, how to make my own mental structure more solid. And I can build on that.
I feel pretty good about how that went.
Your comments are welcome.
Warmly, Ben
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