Department Of My Work Here Is Done
MH and moiself recently received this text from daughter Belle:
“Mom and Dad; you guys raised me to be such a safe driver that I am being urged to drive more dangerously by my friends.”
She then sent a copy of a message from a coworker…
…and added, to us:
“but don’t worry, you also raised me to not give in to peer pressure “
* * *
Department Of The Things We Rarely Do Via
Venues Which Could End Up On Social Media
That would be tell the truth about knotty issues – truths that may not present ourselves and/or our loved ones in the best of light.
Sub-Department Of The Unflattering Memories I Did Not Write
On The Post Right Before And Then Right After My Late Mother’s Birthday… [1]
That was because it felt wrong to complain about her on or near that day…although my truth-telling was not so much complaining as it is realizing.
Department Of Self-Analysis
Dateline: a weekday some time ago; circa 7:30 am-ish; morning walk while listening to NSQ ( No Stupid Questions ) podcast. It was a repeat episode: How Can You Stop Comparing Yourself With Other People? [2] The main topic the hosts [3] were discussing was – wait for it – comparing yourself to other people. They of course mentioned social media, where it’s very easy to feel yourself dull and/or unfulfilled [4] when you look at the posts of other people, and see their pictures of them and their well-mannered, high-achieving children travelling to beautiful, exotic places …
These images came through my earbuds as I was about to take (and then post) a picture of the morning sunlight glistening off the top of the waves at Manzanita beach. I snickered at moiself, and resolved to do my part to fight this trend: Instead of posting a picture of this enviable costal sight I’ll return home, take a picture of the cat litter box, and post that instead. But before I could make a note to moiself to actually do that, the NSQ hosts distracted me with their comments on aspects of Social Comparisons Theory [5] (specifically upward and downward comparisons).
“Having more fun than you’ll ever have – I mean, wish you were here.”
“…the upward comparison is what people worry about with social media. You go on Instagram and it’s always sunset, and the wind is always blowing just so, and everyone looks amazing…. that is the dark side of upward social comparison.
‘…
schadenfreude, the idea of taking pleasure in somebody else’s misery, is kind of a form of downward social comparison. When we look down on other people and that, at least temporarily, boosts our self-esteem…”
The talk of upward/downward comparisons brought back a not-so-pleasant memory. Since I have included in this space ( in, e.g., The Summers I’m Not Forgetting, 6-28-19 ) an epic moment of my mother’s parenting (making me my favorite “fresh” apricot pie for my December birthday), equal time will now be given to an epic parenting failure of hers.
Backstory: From junior high through high school, the girls in my circle of friends were good-looking. As in, ranging from beautiful/cute to down-right-gorgeous, in both the face and “figure” departments. I didn’t befriend them for that reason; that was merely a fact, which was born out by another fact: they each had several of our guy schoolmates either lusting after or sincerely smitten with them. Moiself, I had conversations, and phone calls. Initiated by those guys. About my friends. With the phone calls, it would typically take the guy who called me many minutes (sometimes over an hour – no exaggeration) to get around to the real reason for his call.
The most memorable of those calls went on for two hours, during which time Guy Friend® AC and I discussed, among other pointless diversions topics, the possible interpretations of the rock group Chicago’s song, 25 or 6 to 4. [6] AC was the most prolific phone caller: from his first call, [7] to every single time he called, I found out I had to talk around the reason he’d called me. If I asked him to directly confirm why he’d called, it would take even longer to get to the point – I would finally get around to dragging out of him what he was really after. [8] Which was always something along the lines of: was (my friend) RR going to be at the JV basketball game after school tomorrow, and if not, could I figure out a way to get her to stay after school and watch the game with me, so AC could at least see her there and maybe even get up the courage to talk to her by coming up to the stands after the game to talk with me ( he had no qualms in doing that because, he said, I was “easier to talk to” )?
After that 2 hr marathon of a call I had a case of dry mouth and brain. I schlumped into our kitchen, shaking my head to (I thought) moiself as I reached into a cupboard for a water glass. My mother was at the sink doing something. [9] She noted the puzzled look on my face and asked me what was up. I told her about AC’s most recent phone call (she was aware of his series of calls), and my other conversations with male friends about my female friends whom they had crushes on/wanted to date. I told her that I found it all so…odd, and silly. I couldn’t understand the obsessions; certainly, my friends had positive – and in some cases, outstanding – qualities, which is why I was friends with them. These guys are missing so much! They’re intimidated by, for example, LM’s and RR’s beauty or MB’s body…if they’d just talk to them, they’d see how much more they have to offer than their…uh, pulchritudinous-ness….
I was just sharing (what I thought of as) the cluelessness of my male friends and acquaintances. My mother either misheard or misunderstood the situation, and jumped to the conclusion that instead of being bemused on behalf of my friends I was disappointed by the fact that moiself was not the object of the same kind of attention. In an oh-so-awkward, cringe-worthy, kinda-joking-but-kinda not manner, she began to give me advice I’d not asked for, which began with: Perhaps I needed to find myself a less attractive group of girlfriends?….
Oh yes, she did.
I didn’t let her finish all of her thoughts. I walked away, once again gobsmacked by how someone I’d lived with for all of my life could seemingly not know me at all. Was I adopted by aliens, or I was I the alien, whom my parents had adopted?
A tender motherly insight, shared with her daughter:
If you hang out with homely girls you’ll look more attractive by comparison.
Gotcha. Message received.
Gee, thanks Mom!
When contemplating the phone call scenarios, never-had-I-ever thought about my own appearance vis-à-vis that of my friends’ until *you* brought it up. But now, I certainly (and forever, gawdammit, ’cause that’s how memory works [10] ) will.
Decades ago, when I first heard (what was to be a series of comments from friends and family) someone mention my mother’s and moiself’s facial similarities, I blurted out, “Yep, I got my mother’s bones – she’s 65 now, and I’d like to give them back.” My mother and I were the two in our family (of six) who looked the most alike, in terms of general facial structure. When I look back on her boner-of-a-mother-daughter-moment, it is because of this physical similarity [11] that I can forgive her ham-handed comments. I interpreted them as a reflection of her insecurities about *her* own appearance.
All these years later I realize how significant her blundering “counsel” was to me at the time. Fortunately, all these years later it doesn’t sting with freshness of that moment, but now and then I still feel the wispy, wistful regrets, re the fact that she never really knew me…and it’s too late now. There can be no answers to the questions I would like to pose to her, given the chance.
Also, once and again/as she was wont to do, my mother had failed at Communications 101. That could have been an intimate, kitchen-sink-conversational-moment between the two of us. I was not asking for her guidance; why couldn’t she have just listened, instead of providing the totally unsolicited (and truly wretched, ego-deflating) advice that in order to make myself seem more attractive – which BTW was not my goal in life (which she would have known had she paid the least bit of attention to *who* I was, and what kind of person I was striving to be) – I should hang out with homely females, or at least ones even less attractive than moiself.
For that incident, and a few others which followed over the years, I am soooooo grateful for not growing up in the world of social media. I mostly put that situation – and my mother’s unintentionally [12] yet nonetheless degrading comment – out of my mind. Although it later reared its ugly head several times. [13]
Particular head-rearing examples from the After College Years®: on more than one occasion a man with whom I had a passing acquaintance/lives-down-the-apartment-hallway/met at a mutual friend’s party/co-worker kind of relationship, asked me about a friend/acquaintance/coworker of mine (or in one case, my younger sister). As in, he found her attractive and wanted my advice re asking her out.
Not for the first time I was bemused by the request, and not for the first time, my answer was hardly earth-shatteringly original: I encouraged him to approach her directly. Strike up conversations in the hallway and/or at the mailboxes; pay attention to cues…DUDE, just ask her. And not for the first time, such basic, straightforward advice of mine was countered with, You just don’t get it, followed by his confession that he found talking to “girls” difficult, to the point of being intimidated. “But, we are, at this very moment, are talking,” I would point out. To which he and all the other he’s over the years, would respond with a version of:
“Yeah but, this is different. I don’t know what it is,
but I can’t talk to a girl I find attractive.
Sure, I can talk with *you,* no problem….”
Each time it happened, I decided not to further enlighten the clueless Date Fail Men – [14] all of whom, with their obliviously demeaning comments, reminded me of my mother, in ways I didn’t see at the time.
Another reminder came from the source itself, from a letter my mother sent me when I’d been married for less than two years. Not long after MH and I had visited my parents at their home in Santa Ana, I received a four-page letter (two pages of a yellow legal pad, written on both sides) from her, the gist of which is that she and my father had found my then-current hairstyle unattractive.
Really. Four pages.
Some of the page space was devoted to examples of people she knew (mostly her age) who’d found a flattering hairstyle in their twenties and stuck with it. [15] Was it a matter of money, she posited? If so, she offered that she and my dad would be happy to pay a competent stylist…. Also, after my and MH’s visit, she felt moved to get out her favorite picture of me, the one where I’m waving goodbye to her and my father after they’d helped me move into the UC Davis dorms the fall of my freshman year. How sad, she wrote, that I now looked “ten years older” than I did in that picture.
Holy epitome of obliviousness. I look ten years older? Uh, yeah, I’ll take that. Mom – I am, as of this writing, almost *fourteen years older* than I was when that picture was taken. Cutting/styling my hair in *any* way ain’t gonna change that.
(And that wasn’t the worst comment/jab. She also wrote that the way I was currently wearing/styling my hair wasn’t how I had it when MH first met me…and implied that if I looked then how I looked now, he wouldn’t have been attracted to/married me).
After I got over my initial WTF!?!?!? shock, I xeroxed her letter, circled and numbered the major points she made ( so that she could see – and not deny – what she’d written), and wiped the floor with her obtuseness addressed them all in a letter of my own, which I attached to the copy of her letter. I was brutally upfront: Your opinion about my hair is the forest you can’t see for all the straggly trees in your way. Imagine how I felt, getting a four-letter page from my parents essentially telling me how old and unattractive they find me.
I reread the letter one more time before I sent my response, and realized what was at the root of the hairstyle red herring. Of their four children, I was the one who lived farther away from my parents. Several times I’d discussed with my siblings how, when I saw our parents in person, I was very cognizant that they were getting older. [16] This can be jarring for an adult child to realize, but it is also the Natural Order of Things ®. What we don’t often think about is that it can happen the other way. When I’d made the trip to SoCal (which prompted the haircut-diatribe letter) it had been almost a year since I’d seen my parents. For whatever reasons, I looked older to them. Now, if a parent notices that their adult child is getting older, what does that say about *their* own aging?
Here is the gist of how I ended the response to my mother, followed by my signoff:
I get it, Mom, even though you obviously don’t. Since we share some bone structure/facial similarity, if you notice that I seem older to you, well then, what does that say about *you*? I hate the be the one to break it to you, but you are – surprise! – getting older. And you need to deal with whatever issues you have about that before dumping your own insecurities onto one of your children.
I love you because you’re my mother,
but I don’t like you very much right now.
She telephoned me as soon as she received my letter. She apologized, said she was so embarrassed for having sent the letter; she asked me to throw it away, and she promised that she would throw away her copy.
I can’t remember how I phrased my bald-faced lie. [17] I agreed with her request, even though I had NO intention of throwing that letter away – Are you effin’ kidding me? This is exhibit A. No way was I giving her the nonexistence of the letter as a proof of her likely denial ( “I never said, would never say, such a thing” ! ), should the subject ever come up again.
* * *
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [18]
“If the veil of self-condemnation, inherited shame, religious fear, and psychological self-rejection were finally pulled back, we might discover something terrifying to systems built on control: that human beings are not cosmic mistakes in need of metaphysical cover-up. We are expressions of existence itself, carrying immense depth, creativity, consciousness, relational capacity, beauty, and becoming within us.”
( Jim Palmer, Author, Professor, “Post-Religion Spiritual Director,”
Founder at The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality,
excerpt from his FB post on sin and shame and control )
* * *
May your safe driving inspire (or intimidate) your friends;
May you talk to people you’re crushing on directly, instead of going through mutual friends;
May you share the hidden meaning (if you figure it out) behind Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Those blog posts would be either the last Friday of June or first Friday of July.
[2] Originally aired 8-9-2020.
[3] Psychologist and author Angela Duckworth and economist and Author Stephen Dubner.
[4] The FOMO experience…which sometimes seems to be the primary purpose of social media.
[5] Nutshell presentation: Social comparison helps us evaluate ourselves by comparing our traits and abilities to others. The upside: – upward comparisons may push us to improve; downward comparisons make us feel better about ourselves. Either way, comparing ourselves can also lead to misleading judgments about our abilities.
[6] (aside from it’s amazing guitar solo, what was the song really about?)
[7] We were somewhat friendly and were in a couple of classes together. The first call came as a surprise, as he’d never asked for my phone number. He must have gotten it from that retro form of information dissemination, the phone book.
[8] I never hung up on him; the calls – thanks in great part to MY conversational skills –wandered into some really interesting and entertaining territories (e.g. music and art and politics)…. Or so I thought when I was seventeen.
[9] Not the dishes – that was my after-dinner chore.
[10] Many a psychological and/or neurological study has shown that “…insults linger longer than praise or compliments….” (“Spoken Insults Stir Up More Brain Activity Than Compliments And Linger For Longer, Too,” sciencealert, 9-4-22), and that humiliation is the strongest emotion we can feel (“Does This Brain Research Prove That Humiliation Is the Most Intense Human Emotion? Wired.com)
[11] Which I always found ironic, once it surfaced, as we were the two least alike (re interests, personalities, worldview) in the family.
[12] Gaaaawwwwd, I hope so.
[13] yes, times plural, as in, this happened more than once.
[14] Several of whom later tried asking me out, perhaps as a form of practice.
[15] even in their sixties, which I found hidebound, and not flattering
[16] Even so, I never wrote to them, telling them how old they were looking….
[17] Framed by an unattractive hairstyle!
[18] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
