Pretty Real Behind the Veil

In this picture, I was looking at my son, as I often did back then, and I was thinking that he deserves the absolute best mother in the world and I want him so badly to be happy in every way that I never was, and I am trying to think of how to make that possible when he has just me as a mother (a woman his father not-so-fondly referred to as gutter trash that he was kind enough to pick up off the street, though I didn’t deserve it, and I was an ingrate for leaving him, but I digress).  I had my son because I wanted a child more than anything in the whole world, to have the chance to give a better life to a child than I had had, to give me someone to love more than I loved myself (which I really didn’t at all), to make him feel special like I wanted to feel special as a child.  I wanted my son to have the best life humanly possible, yet I and I felt back then that I myself was invisible at best and seen as garbage and a burden at worst by my own family.  My husband (my son’s father) told me over and over again that I will never be anything but garbage, that without him making me look good, that I was nothing, and that was before I left him.  And frankly, I bout into it back then.  I thought that this little precious angel boy deserved a really good mother, and I wanted to be that, but I didn’t yet know how to be that.  I didn’t even know who I really was myself, and I really felt like I was unlikely to succeed in my present state at that time, thought I didn’t yet know how to make that better.  I thought it was important to make myself a better person, and I needed to learn a whole lot of stuff to be able to do that.

What I had learned up to that point was that the world was upside down for me, relative to what I assumed others called their lives, and in my own childhood what I encountered was that you couldn’t assume that someone could be trusted just because they were your family (I was repeatedly sexually molested and battered by two of them who were supposed to protect me from the bad guys, others just turned their backs on me), or because they had a public trust to protect the innocent and helpless, or because they once professed to love you and you had children together.  And given that these are the people from whom I would have expected to get a reliable set of rules for right, wrong, good, bad, etc., but I knew that the rules were often arbitrary, changing based on convenience and biases of the rule givers and enforcers, and even abusive, I had to make up my own rules and create my own universe around me.  Since the role models were not reliable, I had to figure out my own rules, and my own identity separate and apart from them, so I tried to stay open to other perspectives and try to find bits of truth for myself.  For me, the whole world was life on the other side of the looking glass, and anything was possible, both in a positive and negative sense.  I could create an interesting life for myself and my children if I could manage to ferret out the truth and develop the right structure to live within that was consistent with that. 

Great ideas, but the devil was in the doing and the details.  It was difficult to shield my children from all of the missteps when I set off down a fork in the road for a bit, discovered that it was a dead end or the path otherwise didn’t work well, and then had to get back on the right path again.  I was only twelve when I started listening to everyone who wanted to offer me perspective, to try to glean something useful from them.  Some of them really would have appeared to be weird to other people, and they would have dismissed anything they had to contribute because they judged them for things that was often superficial—perhaps sensational, like the nice man that I met who was in the process of going through gender reassignment and looked kind of strange.  People would look at him/her and judge based on external appearance.  But the whole notion of judging someone based on the superficial package I had rejected from the age of about 10, when I first learned about racial prejudice, and kids being valued or devalued based on how “beautiful” they were, not by how good their hearts were.  Not to mention growing up in the south, where I was forced to keep quiet about being battered and sexually molested by family members, and NEVER EVER talk about the elephant in the room.  I knew how it felt to grow up being judged by people who didn’t even know you at all, like my father’s family.  I was too different from them, and I didn’t live by the simple rulebook that they expected family members to follow.  So just because someone looked different was not a criteria for rejection, and it didn’t disqualify whatever I might potentially learn from them.

I chose Sundeep’s father on the basis of three things:  he was sharp and I thought I could learn a lot from him, he was clear in his mind about who he was and what his principles were, and he had a very connected and supportive extended family, which I thought would be good at least for my future children, as they would never have to find themselves without a family, as I did.  The family was conservative, and protective of young ones.  I didn’t believe they would allow anyone to hurt my children.  He was very hard on me, and berated me constantly, but I had some backbone and fought back, so at least I didn’t just roll over and take it.  But we fought throughout our courtship and marriage, and eventually, I came to the realization that he would never stop trying to tear me down, and if I stayed with him, our son would grow up in a war zone and I knew too well how horrible that was.  The best thing that I could do, was to separate, go back and finish my school and try to get some self-esteem, and do the best I could by my son.

But I was always worrying that I would fail, and sometimes that could be paralyzing to me.  I kept trying, but my own fears and insecurities undermined how well I did it many times.   I had a HUGE hole in my bucket from a very tragic childhood, and I was like a drowning person.  I felt tremendous need for a lot of stuff, like unconditional love and acceptance, protection, affection, etc., and I went back and forth between reaching out like  drowning person to grab onto someone to give it to me, and not letting anyone get too close because needing, my childish mind thought, was why I lost everything, and it was best not to need anything from anyone at all, if possible.  Then maybe someone would love me, if I became the ideal person to them.  Problem was, that there was no ME left when I did that.

The only thing that I felt certain about was that education was going to be key, both formal and life lessons.  I was thinking that I’ve got to finish school to prove that I am not garbage.  I need to prove it to myself, I wanted to give my son someone to be proud to have as a mother, and I felt compelled to prove it to those who I wanted to love me unconditionally, but I didn’t believe that it was possible to love me unconditionally.  So I would try very hard to love my son unconditionally and accept him and not judge him, because I didn’t want him to grow up like I did.  I had no idea how to pull this off at this point, because I wasn’t always quite sure which side of the looking glass was the safe and healthy side at any given moment, as I questioned that as I learned more about the world and people around me.   Whichever side I’m on, what I DO know is that the looking glass was never far from me.  The world was truly upside down, and the chaos that came and went was disturbing.   So all I could think of to do was to try to be as honest with my son as I could possibly be, about my perceptions, what I was trying to do, and when I thought I had gotten it wrong.  What I tried to conceal, to no avail, was my poor image of myself, and a deep sense of shame that I even existed.  I had those tapes playing in a loop in my head, and it polluted so much of the good that I tried to do, and took me down more than a few difficult rabbit holes.