One more epiphany

Sometimes, when you are looking for something, you end up finding something else. Usually this happens to me on Google, where I am researching something for a blog post or to sate my persistent curiosity, and come across something entirely unrelated but which resolves one of my many other unanswered questions. Today, however, I wasn’t Googling, I was free-associating while in the shower when a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated bits and bobs of my history suddenly stuck themselves together into a revelation that spans a good 70 years. And an amazing thing about it is, for being 70 years in the making, it is uncommonly brief!

I got married when I was 17. I was pregnant. He was 19 and in the Marines. It was late 1964 and Vietnam was just starting to ramp up. The baby was due in February and in January he was shipped off for a 6 month overseas tour. I was going to face the last months of pregnancy and birth alone.

We all know that my mother was, at best unreliable. And untrustworthy. And she had been opposed both to my marriage and my plan to keep my baby. (In those days, middle-class girls in my condition got shipped off, ostensibly to some distant relative where she had to take care of sick auntie. In reality, however, we were sent to an institution for unwed mothers, a place where we could live out the remainder of our pregnancies in secret, the babies taken from us—sometimes against our will—and put up for adoption. The girls then returned to their previous lives, pretending the pregnancy and baby never happened, sparing themselves—but mostly their parents—the embarrassing proof of their sinful ways and the tarnishing of their ever-so-important reputations.) But I thwarted my mother and got married, receiving from her the gift of “When the going gets tough, don’t come running to me—you made your bed, now you have to lie in it.”

With that kind of maternal support and my husband overseas, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get to the hospital once my labour started, but I figured I would eventually think of something.

As it turned out, I didn’t go into labour. I went three weeks past my due date and my obstetrician, who examined me on the 4^th of March after ordering x-rays of my abdomen, sent me to the hospital for a Caesarean section the following morning—the x-rays showed the baby’s head to be too big for my pelvis.

It was that evening—the day my child was born—while I was still dopey from the anaesthesia and the pain pills, that it happened. The nurse came in with my meds—this was in the days when hospitals were well staffed and nurses did more direct patient care than they can do today—and she said that when she finished distributing the meds she would come back and give me a back rub.

Unbidden, my mouth opened and out popped “No, that’s ok. I really don’t like anybody touching me.”

In that moment I knew that I had spoken a truth of which I had never been consciously aware. I didn’t like people touching me.

But that was at odds with my behaviour—my teens and early adulthood were during the Swinging Sixties and Free-Love Seventies and I swung and free-loved just like everybody else. But I didn’t like people touching me. I didn’t.

I knew from childhood that my mother didn’t want me. She was very clear on that, even told me to my face in my early teens. I slept around both when it was the “in thing” and when it was not. I had a couple of bad marriages—one so bad I almost killed myself while in the suffocating depression it evoked in me. I then had a good marriage and he died and for the first time I experienced raw grief. I have been cheated on and lied to and treated with disrespect by a man I loved, and listened to him swear he loved me while he continued to cheat. I was abandoned by my mother repeatedly. I have been abandoned by husbands and lovers and even the child whose reluctance to leave the womb compelled the Caesarean that sparked that first epiphany.

And all of these experiences, while seemingly disconnected and spread over a span of decades, are related in one very specific way: I didn’t want people to touch me—I wanted them to want me. Not for what I could give them or do for them or provide to them or perform for them—I wanted them to want me…just. want. me.

Today, at 71 years, five months, and ten days of age I have finally figured out that what I really wanted wasn’t sex, it wasn’t cuddles, or orgasms or back rubs or hand-holding or massages or jewellery or flowers or designer goodies or presents of any kind—what I have wanted all along was simply to be wanted.

I don’t think I really know what that feels like.

The Unloved

It is almost Christmas again. For many people, this is a time of good cheer, love and togetherness. For others, not so much.

I am not talking about the homeless or the non-Christian or those incarcerated or locked away in mental institutions. I am not talking about the poor, those who can barely afford to eat, let alone waste money on a tree and gifts that are not strict necessities. I am not even talking about the Scrooges and Grinches among us. I am talking about the unloved.

Unloved people fit into every niche and category of human being you can name. They are atheists and devout followers of a faith, they are Christian and non-Christian. They are rich and they are bone-chillingly poor. They live in palatial mansions and in cardboard boxes. They wear castoffs from dumpsters and they wear designer labels. They surround us, they are our co-workers and our neighbours, the strangers in the street, the acquaintance at the park, the cop on the corner, your hairdresser, your barber, your dental hygienist, your vet. They surround you on any given day, like strangers in a crowded elevator. And they are completely invisible to us.

Some of them react to their status with churlishness. “Happy Holidays!” you say, extending a greeting intended to include those who do not identify as Christian and their celebrations as well. “Don’t ‘Happy Holidays’ me,” they snarl back. “It’s ‘Merry Christmas’!” They don’t hold doors for those whose arms are too laden with packages to do it easily themselves, they don’t step aside so a child can see Santa at the mall, they don’t smile and return the love of the season because, feeling unloved, they have none to share.

Some react to their status with manipulation. They earned their status with it and they keep themselves in denial with it. Having driven love away with their manipulations and petty cruelties, they have cast a web of fear and obligation and guilt out to snare the unwary. They will draw you in to a nest of festivities planned to create an atmosphere they can pretend is love. Giving none, they receive none back, just the pandering of those who continue trying to squeeze love from a heart of stone and the obligatory appearance of those who fear repercussion for their failure to attend the command performance.

Others react to their status with fear and longing. Most of the year they keep it together but during the times perceived as “family togetherness” periods, they feel their isolation most acutely. Even the crumbs they receive, from last minute invitations to thoughtless gifts, from negative attention to being talked over and ignored, they believe that the little they receive is better than the nothing they would surely get if they were to demand the respect that was due them. They fear they are not loved and they will do anything they can in order to avoid confirming that fear.

The unloved are legion. They are the children who got socks and underwear under the tree when the siblings got coveted toys. They are the children who reaped lavish heaps of costly gifts but who are merely props in the dramatic script of the adults in their lives, fawned over for photo opportunities, badgered to bring home brag-worthy grades, valued only for what they can do, not simply for their existence.

They are the wives and husbands who endure abusive spouses rather than be alone, the mothers and fathers who vow to give their children better than they received but who simply go to the opposite extreme, giving their children what they need to give them, not what the children individually need. They are the people who don’t recognize love when it walks into their lives and sits down next to them because they don’t really know what it looks like. Their definitions of love were gleaned from their experiences of abuse and being ignored, of being engulfed and overwhelmed, of being prized for their performance but never for the simple fact of their existence.

The unloved suffer. Often in silence, occasionally dropping hints in the hope that someone will hear the echo of emptiness inside them. Afraid that others will feel threatened by their emptiness, they seldom speak of it and instead, silently hope for the miracle that is someone who can hear them. Their pain is smothered, expressed in a sigh or a wan smile, released only to run in the privacy of darkness. Sometimes it escapes, alarming witnesses, generating distance at a time that closeness is most needed. The pain lies buried, often forgotten, existing as an undercurrent of fear that permeates all aspects of life. Some allow the fear to control them, others rebel against it, but it shades life with its grey pallor.

The unloved are unloved by themselves. They have accepted their unacceptability. They live in the guilt of being flawed. They unlove themselves as much or more than others do. They are, in truth, their own worst enemies because as long as they do not love themselves, they validate those others who do not love them. And at no time of the year is this lack of love felt more than now, during the season in which we are reminded by heartless corporations and soulless sellers that this is the season of love, to give to show your love, view your gifts as an indicator of how much you are loved.

But when you don’t love yourself, nobody else can love you. You cannot feel the love of another if you cannot feel your own. You cannot rejoice in it, embrace it, revel in it when you cannot see it or feel it or touch it. No matter how much love another has for you, you cannot relate to it if you do not have self-love. If you do not value yourself, you do not respect the value others have for you. Love begins at home, within you, with you loving yourself and believing that you are worthy of being loved. It all starts with you.

So in this holiday season, remember that those who taught you that you are not worth loving, who viewed you as burdensome chattel rather than beloved child, those who gave you manipulation and control instead of love and understanding—they have earned their aloneness. Not only have they earned it, they have spent all of the years right up to this moment telling you that when it comes to love and respect for you, they are a dry well, an empty cup, a drained basin. They never had it for you, they don’t have it now, and the future cannot be any different. Hope will bring you back, again and again, but there will be nothing where there was never anything in the first place.

You didn’t cause this. It is not something you did when you were five months or five years or fifteen. It is them: they decided, from the moment you were a reality to them, the role you would play in their lives—not the role they would play in yours. Your role was created and cast with no consideration for you and your personality, sensitivities, wants, likes, fears, or desires. You were a lump of clay to be moulded to fit the role they created and forced to conform through any means acceptable to them. Depending on their own peculiarities, those means could have ranged from emotional privation, manipulating, shaming, guilt, gaslighting, untruths, and even physical attack. Their objective had nothing to do with helping you to develop into the best you that you could be, it was entirely about moulding you to be who and what they wanted to fit the role they created for you.

If you are still feeling unloved, it is because you are. It is because you bought into their bullshit and have not yet let it go. You are unlovable because you did not fulfil the roll to their expectations—and you have accepted and embraced that.

But the truth is, they are wrong. Their proper role was not to create a role for you and force you into it, their role was to discover you, and then your talents, and help you develop them, and to guide you, gently and lovingly, into the society in which you live. Their role was to focus on you and your needs and to adapt their lives to care for you and support you and assist you in becoming the best you that you can be. Instead, they sacrificed you on the altar of their own glorification. They were more important than you. You were a tool, a means to an end, a way to gain whatever they sought in the form of narcissistic supply. It is not your fault—it never was. They had a choice of who to put first and they chose themselves every single time.

This is the season of love, the perfect time to start loving yourself. The ideal time to stop measuring yourself against the yardstick of their perceptions and self-serving evaluations and to start creating your own. This is the time to stop self-sabotaging yourself because feeling guilty is more familiar than feeling self-pride. It is the perfect time to look to pleasing yourself rather than others. It is the ideal moment for you to learn and to practice the use of the most powerful word in the English language: NO.

When they disparage you, tell them no by walking away. Even if you are sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes and wrapping paper, even if you are sitting at the table with a half-eaten plate of turkey, even if you are standing in the kitchen with your hands full of hot food—now is the time to refuse to accept disparagement, belittling, scorn, and derision. This is not the time for words that can be twisted and turned back on you, this is the time to take their unloving behaviour and, rather than accepting and amplifying it, reject it. Reject it in the most powerful way you can: walk away.

On Christmas Day, 1990, my mother-in-law leaned across the dinner table in the middle of the meal, and told her son that, because he was refusing to sign legal papers without having an attorney read them first, he was stupid. And she repeated the word, shaking her dinner knife in his face, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” He was dyslexic and had trouble reading, so this accusation cut deep. The hurt on his face was plain. I knew nothing of narcissists in those days, but I knew I was not obligated to tolerate her behaviour, her hurting my husband, who had grown up to be a fine man in spite of her. I got up from the table and went to the coat closet, took out our jackets and my handbag, got the car keys, and walked out the door. It took her eleven months to realize we weren’t going to call her and make nice. She never called him names again—she knew we would not accept it any longer.

The most powerful message you can give a person is with your actions, not your words. When people treat you badly and you accept it, you laugh it off, you choose to ignore it, you are giving them permission to continue. When you say something to them, you not only give them an opportunity to ridicule you or put you down, you give them an opportunity to tell you why you deserve to be treated badly.

But when your actions speak for you, they cannot ignore you or try to talk you around. I had a tenant who was abusive to me every time she called me on the phone. When I started hanging up on her, however, whenever she was rude, it didn’t take her long to realize that she had to civil to me if she wanted me to hear her. Your actions are your most power message: do not permit them to abuse you and, one way or another, they will stop.

Sometimes the way they stop is the way my mother did it: she disappeared me (and my children) from her life. We did not hear from her at all—no cards, no calls, no gifts. We ceased to exist until the day came that we were useful to her. When you determine to stop the unloving from abusing you, this could be your outcome. My daughter has done the same. I am no longer useful to her, so she no longer has anything to say to me.

Thinking about such an outcome can be very painful. Nobody likes rejection. But if you put it into perspective, it is the kindest thing they can do for you, albeit unwittingly so. It saves you years—even decades of repeated little rejections, back stabs, insults, and abuses. It gives you the truth in one huge bombshell: they don’t care about you, writ large. The truth, in all its ugly glory, finally in your hands.

So, what do you do with it? You first recognize that they are the ones who are flawed, not you. They cannot appreciate anything beyond their own narrowly defined, selfish and self-centred perceptions. They will take anyone who fits their mould: my daughter found herself a surrogate mother who would behave the way she wanted me to behave, who put no limits or restrictions on her, who wouldn’t make her go to school, who supplied her with drugs and alcohol and did not act like a parent. Your Ns may do the same: find a substitute for you who will play the role. My mother substituted my daughter for me—my daughter played the role where I insisted on being myself.

You find out who you really are and you embrace it. You find your real self, your real tastes, your real likes, dislikes, values and beliefs. Some of them may mirror your Ns and that is OK, some of them will be diametrically opposed—and that is OK, too.

You embrace your real self, the one who doesn’t share their ethics or tastes, the one who is different from what they have tried to shape you to be. You love what you learn about yourself even if it goes contrary to what you have been taught to believe—create your own beliefs, beliefs that feel right to you. Listen to information contrary to what you have been taught, think about it critically, accept what feels right to you and discard the rest. Let yourself become the real you and love that new person for no other reason than it is you, the real you, the you that you were always meant to be.

When you love yourself, you feel whole. Even if you are not truly whole yet, when you love yourself, you feel that way.

When you love yourself you open the door to others to love you. Not exploit or manipulate or control you—to love you. New people come into your life and love comes with them. Sometimes romantic love, sometimes platonic love, but it is all love.

The way for you to no longer be one of the unloved starts with loving yourself, wholly, completely, and unconditionally. It opens the door to a whole new world.

You can’t always get what you want...

Back in 1969, The Rolling Stones had us all singing along with “You can’t always get what you want…”¹ a message underscoring the turmoil of the times: military conscription, the controversial war in Viet Nam, the counter culture in its varied manifestations, student protests—it was a message whose time had come: you really can’t always get what you want.

That is one of the hardest things for ACoNs to truly accept, the fact that sometimes we simply will never have that which we want most: a normal, loving parent. Cultural myths don’t help, either, those inane sound bites that tell us we can have it all if we just work hard enough, that we can be anything we want to be with enough effort, that nothing is beyond our grasp if we put our all into it. Hard work is rewarded, goes the axiom, but the reality for most of us—ACoNs—is tragically different.

Many of us cling to denial in order to have hope that someday—one magical day in the misty future—our wishes will come true. We cling to this denial like a life raft in choppy seas because it is what keeps our hope alive. It is our one link to the possibility of our fantasy being realized and we use that denial to keep the door open for us, believing that one day, if we can find the right words, the right gift, the right expression, the right act, one day our Nparent will open their eyes and suddenly want to love us and nurture us and care for us like a normal parent would. And when that day finally comes, all of our hurts will magically fall away and we will live happily ever after, basking in the warm glow of parental love, our ears ringing with the joyful sounds of choirs of angels...

But suppose you were to meet a middle-aged woman who is miserably unhappy because she believes she is entitled to the throne of England and she is angry and despondent that she has been denied it and nobody will help her claim her birthright—in fact, people just dismiss her claim and expectation and invalidate her feelings by calling her a “nutter.” She has a genealogy indicating that she is a descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie and through him, she believes herself entitled to the current usurper's assets, position and prestige. She has halted all forward motion in her life due to her despair and the injustice of not being recognized as the rightful Queen of England and seems to be stuck in a kind of grief over being deprived of what she perceives as her entitlement. Do you feel sympathetic to her? Or do you think that she has an unrealistic expectation and is needlessly bringing all of this grief onto herself? Or maybe you think she needs serious mental health assistance?

But really—how is she so different from many of us? We put ourselves in limbo, into an emotional holding pattern, waiting for our narcissistic parent(s) to wake up and see us as their beloved children, and to feel bad for mistreating us. We put our emotional development and often the very forward motion of our lives on hold, focussing our energies and our mental processes on trying to find ways to get them to give us what we want: to be viewed and treated and loved like every child deserves. We feel the pain of deprivation of what we consider to be our entitlement and others, who have not experienced our Ns in the ways we have, have little or no empathy for us—some of them even think we have mental health problems.

Many of us acknowledge being stuck like this and the pain it brings us. We feel we are at an impasse because we are waiting for our NParents to give us that which we perceive to be our emotional birthright and we refuse to move forward without it. Yes, that is correct—we refuse to move forward. It isn’t that we can’t, it is that we won’t. We think we don’t know how, but in truth, we do. And this is where it becomes a little convoluted...

We want something from these people, our narcissistic family members. We believe we have an entitlement to it and we believe we need it (whether we do or not isn’t the point here, it is what we believe). They do not want to give it to us—it doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter if they are justified or not, it only matters that they refuse to give us what we want. They tell us this in their actions—they give us only what they want us to have, not what we want or need or are entitled to. Sometimes they tell us with their words: “I don’t care if your sister got one, you aren’t your sister and you can’t have one…” or “You don’t deserve it, but your brother does,” or “I don’t know why I put up with you,” or other such rebuffs and rejections. We learn that we are burdens, that others are loved while we are not, that we are inadequate, a disappointment, a trial—we accept this and feel dutifully guilty.

But for some reason we don’t take all of this and realize “s/he doesn’t love me and never will…” What we hear is “If I can stop being a burden, a disappointment, inadequate, a trial—if I can fix that, then s/he will love me!” We don’t hear them—we hear their words through a filter of denial that keeps us from believing what they are telling us and taking it to heart. They stubbornly tell us over and over and over again and we just as obdurately refuse to hear what they are really saying.

If you thought you were entitled to the last piece of cake and someone else ate it, how long would you be upset over that? How long would it take you to accept that the cake is gone, there is no more cake, and the culprit who ate it can’t give it back—at least not in any form you would want it. Do you put your life on hold because you couldn’t have it? I earned a letter in high school…the kind you put on a letterman’s jacket or sweater and wear at school with pride. I earned it twice—two consecutive years. But my mother wouldn’t buy me the letterman’s sweater to put it on, so I never got to wear it. I was entitled to that sweater and I even earned enough money at my after-school job to buy it, but she took my paychecks and refused to give me enough to buy that sweater. I had two choices: accept that the sweater was out of my grasp and move on with my life or stew about it for an indefinite period of time. I accepted--but what I didn't accept was that this was just one more message from my mother that she had no interest in me or my feelings and she never would...and I just was not listening.

Why do we do this? Often we do this because we are so busy going after what we want we aren’t hearing the other person telling us no. They tell what they are willing to give us with their actions, sometimes even with their words, but we discount, diminish, don’t hear, refuse to believe or reinterpret what they are telling us so that we can keep pursuing our goal, a goal they do not want us to achieve—a goal we cannot achieve without their cooperation. We are not listening to what we do not want to hear so we turn each of those unwelcome messages into something we can better accept: we are flawed and that is why we are unloved—but if we can fix those flaws, the love will flow. And when we can’t fix the flaws (that are, in truth, not even there), there is a perverse kind of comfort in believing that the fault lies with us, that mothers love their children and the world is right and safe and predictable and if we can ever figure out a way to fix our flaws, love will be ours, too. It puts a sense of control into our hands, a sense of power—if we can just figure out what to do or say—that protects us from facing the reality that will turn our sense of security in the world upside down: our parent doesn’t love us, never has, and never will. It is a kind of death, to recognize and embrace this ugly, painful truth. But it is also liberating.

It is axiomatic that we cannot always get what we want—even many of those things to which we are entitled. So why won’t we accept that truth and recognize that sometimes we have to live without those things? Well, some of us do. Some of us recognize that there is a difference between want and need, even in the realm of emotions, and we have learned to separate them. Maybe you aren’t letting go because you need nurturing, but your narcissistic, self-absorbed mother is not the only person on the planet who is capable of nurturing you. Therapists, friends, mentors, spouses, aunties, grandmothers—there are other people, including yourself, who can provide you with the nurturing that you need. Clinging on to the idea that you must get it from your NParent is a choice you make, a grief you inflict upon yourself, just as you would be inflicting it upon yourself by demanding demonstrations of parental love and devotion from the big rock that sits next to my driveway gate. It is not a facetious or absurd comparison, either—many of our parents have no more emotional capacity for us than that big grey stone.

How old do you have to be before you finally realize that you really can’t have it all? I was in my twenties when I realized that life was a series of trade-offs. Sometimes things you desperately want, with your whole heart, just are not available to you. They may be available to others, but not to you. Is that fair? Probably not. Is life fair? No. Can you have it all? Well, Maddie Eisenhart of Notie.com opines “‘having it all’ is a deeply flawed concept…”² and it is my considered opinion that she is correct.

You can’t always get what you want, most especially when someone is deliberately withholding it from you. In circumstances like that—which is where ACoNs all too often find themselves—you really have only two choices: continue with the futile yearning for something that will never be yours or choose to accept the painful truth that has been incessantly thrown at you for the vast majority of your time on this planet.

 “But if you try sometimes you just might find, you get what you need…”³

¹ Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” By Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Let It Bleed. Decca, 1969. LP.

² http://www.notey.com/@apracticalwedding_unofficial/external/3955415/15-feminist-quotes-that-prove-having-it-all-is-bullshit.html?

³ Op cit.