For years after becoming successful - to me, success is being happy - I had this deluded notion that I would be able to share all of my success with my loved ones. For the most part, this was true. Dale's mom, dad, and stepmom all enjoy coming down to our house for gatherings and such or just to visit. I have a handful of close friends who particularly enjoy my hosting (company) from time to time. Other times we go places like shows or rent a house for events or whatever. We find ways to see our peoples.
One of my biggest dreams was to share my happiness with my own mom. I often imagined her on the back deck watching wildlife or on the porch watching the birds and feeding squirrels. I would imagine her face as she'd gaze down the road from her room upstairs, enjoying the way the mountain that Dale and I got married on drifts down and meets the edge of the road. Or the way the sun moves across the yard. I would spend hours thinking of how happy she would be here, so peaceful, so serene. We would take her to the pond and spend time there in nature when the skeeters were not too miserable. We might even eat hot dogs and beans over a campfire. She would play with the cats and enjoy their company and make the occasional cream of wheat with lumps and we would laugh first thing in the morning and she would read books while we were at work and maybe she would eventually make friends with our next door neighbours.
I thought that if I provided a safe, supportive, happy home with everything she needed to eat and live, that she would finally enjoy some happiness in life. I could make her happy.
Then she told me, point-blank, to stop giving her gifts. By then I had begun to face reality that she would never change, that she was simply a miserable human being who enjoyed hurting me and even more than me, herself. But at that moment, I was given a very valuable lesson that didn't hit me until just now. And it was so obvious all along, but I refused to see it.
She had dreamt of me with upswept hair and pearls about my neck once, and was disappointed when as a kid I sat there farting at the breakfast table. She dreamt of me with false teeth, no friends, no one but her in my life. She wanted for me everything and more that she had - contempt and distrust for others, depression, fear, past rape by her brother, emotional abuse, and neverending catering to her every whim. She wanted me to be stoic and never express pain or the depression she said I had. I was never to be angry, to matter, to care about others, to let others in. I was to be hers, and hers alone, her sounding board, her mirror, an extension of her contempt for others, and extension of whatever she felt like being any given minute. I was to be the devil. I was evil incarnate. I was her future preacher. She wanted me to be to blame for her mistakes, for our bunnies' deaths, for her walking out on jobs, for her failures to provide for herself and get off the system she purported to hate and distrust.
And I. Totally. Disappointed her. Like so many children do, I was selfish and went off on my own to become an entirely different person than she had tried to shape.
I woke up at, ironically, 4:04 this morning with scattered imagery and a relaxed state of mind and all of a sudden I had figured it out.
I am my mother! I am obstinate, driven, intelligent, ornery, passionate, creative, strong, and fiercely independent. She decided early on that she would never marry into a world where she was abused at home. I have leaned on God to give my child everything that I could not.
My child is me.
All the years of imagining what it would be like to watch my mother's dis-ease giving way to her innate sunny disposition... and all the while, I was watching myself, not her, grow into the person I wanted her to be my whole life. Someone happy, loving. Someone I could depend on to keep me going, to support me, to help God set me back on my path when I would be led astray.
I will never have that one human being that gave birth to me love me for who I am, or to watch the sun streaming through the trees in the back yard, or set over the mountain where I made a commitment to one of the greatest people on earth official. She never wanted that. Any of it. She kept trying to tell me, and wouldn't stop trying to tell me. She had to be blatantly blatant about it for me to finally listen: Stop giving me gifts. Like, duh. She didn't want to be happy, ever, and really did not appreciate my shoving it down her throat. All of that disgustingly happy stuff is what I wanted for myself! I am the one sitting here watching the sunrise each morning and revelling in the life I have made. For me. Not her. She already has the life she wanted.
You really cannot make another person happy. You can only give yourself the world.
-nv
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