11.30.23
Listening to Very Bad Wizards this morning, having of course woken up way before I needed to. I'm lingering at the desk to let George the dachshund keep napping, now on the bed. This episode is about Spirited Away, one of my favorite films, but also one that has helped crystalize the division between my mother and I, helped highlight the gap between our ways of being in the world.
During one visit to Georgia with the kids, I brought the film. We'd sort of bonded the trip before, spending hours watching old Japanese films, laughing and relaxing without expectations. They weren't films I would have normally been drawn to, but the time felt free-er than during most visits, and I loved that the kids got to experience those kinds of moments between us.
Anyway, wanting to share a Japanese film I loved, in a sort of reciprocal gesture, I left the film for she and her husband to watch, only to come back the next day to a sour expression. She'd turned it off early on, as soon as Chihiro's parents became pigs, and was angry. She took it personally, as though I was insulting her personally rather than seeing the moment of the parents taking what wasn't given / not being able to stop themselves, as a critique of our collective trance of Capitalistic over-consumption, etc.
Moreover, the film is through a child's eyes, as they mentioned in the podcast this morning, and children often see adult behaviors in sort of horrifying ways, like the unfamiliar older relative with jagged lipstick and big jewelry leaning in for a kiss one's parents insist on your receiving. The art here is visceral. I was sad that she didn't see it through, and especially that she didn't trust me enough to see it through, or at least ask what I liked about it.
I was an adult when she moved to Georgia. Wrapped up with parenting and in-law dramas, I felt her calcifying into us-and-them views more once she got married, but believed there was enough connection between us that we could disagree and hold pain, even resentment and anger, without completely rejecting one other, if only and especially for the kids.
But these visits amplified reality.
Deep inside, I had always been waiting for an apology, since my teenage years, or at least some assurance that I had been affected by the way she lived then, the fallout from her choices as well as just tough circumstances. Every phone call, as she eventually talked about her experiences and pain from the past, ways her parents had failed her, I waited for some spark of self-awareness and to be conversed with not like any person off the street who was hearing her story for the first time. I wanted her to, just for a moment, think something like "How hard might that have been for Stephanie?" I, who WAS THERE TOO. To realize who she was talking to and what I had been through with her, what I had seen.
I looked for that kind of moment for thirty years. I would go into our long phone calls like they were diving missions: the equipment would get heavy, oxygen would run out,. Afterward, I'd need recovery time, both emotionally and physically. So the chats were long, but not frequent, and without talking every day like some mothers and children do, the gap between us widened and widened until rare in-person visits became filled with landmines, seeded in the meantime by FOX News and the distant screaming of our neglected inner children.
I went to therapy; she did not. I began to work up courage to try to have difficult conversations, to learn to be honest in kind ways, hoping to relate more genuinely one day.
All that (having deleted several paragraphs), to say that maybe I should have seen her reaction to Spirited Away coming, that she would think I was trying to hurt her in some passive-aggressive way, because we weren't having mutual conversations. To be honest, I think the kind of reaction she had is a fascinating example of cultural differences, but also of stunting. Obviously my development was stunted by traumas of childhood, but because I had a deep lifeline with my writing and the way writing demanded I listen and seek, widen my scope more and more curiously in the world, I think I got far enough to find some value in feelings of exposure as a key indicator of growth.
I've talked a little bit about it before, but I'm able to 'be with' scenes in a film or book that arouse anger or humiliation or defensiveness. I'm able to spend time coming from different angles and imaginations. The pain, even horror, of this kind of feedback (that maybe there are different valid ways to view, for instance my country's history, much less my own) is something I've learned not to immediately shut down. Meditation too, has allowed me to have space around 'triggers' and such.
But she was so on-the-ready to be offended by me that she not only couldn't watch the film, but couldn't allow me into conversation. She talked to my niece about this terrible movie I brought, making sure to form a solid "Stephanie is an outsider" impression. There was nothing to learn from me, nothing worthwhile of knowing. I was against them.
I was not. I was always trying to get closer, but without abandoning myself.
This is a lot to write on a public blog post, partly because of my deep conditioning around oversharing or "trauma-dumping", which is another one of those very specific terms that then gets broadened to stop people from opening up at all.
When I say that I've perhaps progressed farther than she has, that doesn't mean I don't get caught in loops, smaller on some days than others, and that I'm not still contending with the egoic tendency to find fault, whether out there or in here. I'm indeed horrified by the limitations!
It's why I like the free-will debates so much. I recognize that ultimately, I didn't need to push the issue with my mother, to be acknowledged. I didn't have any reason to expect that kind of pushing to have resulted in more openness and trust between us. There was indeed some ruthlessness in insisting on not having yet another conversation where I pretended not to be hurt by the way she shut me out of proceedings around my grandfather's death, etc.
It was indeed horrible, the way she handled everything, and though I wouldn't have said it explicitly, did turn her quite piggy in my eyes.
Ultimately I even have to ask if she is right. Did I know, with her literal ways of viewing, that the film wouldn't be something she could or would take in? There's something there. All those years later (I guess about 20 or so by then), was I still the 17yo girl standing over her bed while tripping on LSD and wishing I could dose her so she would open up like I had?
Related, please see Phantom Menace, if you haven't, too.
I'll stop here for now.
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