Creating Ourselves: My Mother, Not Myself

By Barbara Keating

Homily for Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Mankato

August 25, 2019

My mother’s official diagnoses for which she was hospitalized multiple times starting in her forties, included alcoholism, paranoia, and manic-depressive bipolar disorder.  Unofficially, but going back as far as I can remember into my childhood, she was angry, easily irritated and unpredictable in the frequency or severity of her anger episodes.  I realize now that she was mentally ill for decades before her diagnoses.

What I want to share today are not necessarily my experiences of dealing with a mentally ill parent but the four sets of understandings that helped me to create myself as I want in spite of my mother.  I hope that some idea may resonate with or help someone here. For the insights to be meaningful, however, I do need to provide some unhappy context.

I was the odd child, the different one, the perpetual disappointment prompting criticisms, scoldings, and spankings for which I did not know the reason.  It did not rise to the legal definition of abuse.  But I do not trust any adult that ever hits a child.  I was a shy, reticent little girl, afraid of but anxious to please my mother.

From the outside, we looked great.  Our house was neat and clean.  Mom served a good, meat-and-potatoes supper every night.  She did all of the work for a large garden in our backyard; made sauerkraut and canned vegetables.  She made us nice clothes.  One Christmas, my sister and I had matching, red taffeta dresses with black velveteen bows and rhinestone buttons.  She made matching red, white and blue outfits for us for each  4^th of July.  We always looked good in public.  Mom always acted nice in public.

But an angry mother with an odd, disappointing child is not a good match in private.

I try when I become aware, for example, but realize that I still have poor eye-contact skills.  No secret as to why.  Mom considered looking at her, particularly in the eye, to be defiance, a big sin.  She would snap, “Don’t you look me, you brat!”  Sometimes she slapped my face.

School became my haven.  I could not get my mother to like me but I figured out in first grade how to get teachers to like me.  Be good.  Be quiet.  Work hard and get the best grades in the class.  Several nuns in grade school and high school became my heroes and role models.  I also had the good fortune to have other adults that were good to me and for me.  Two elderly neighbors always welcomed my visits.  Girl Scout and 4-H leaders encouraged me.  I loved spending weeks each summer at my grandparents’ ranch, a needed respite from the tensions at home.

These adults were kind to me when my mother was not.  They appreciated my efforts when my mother only criticized.  They offered me a sense of worth when my mother claimed that her getting pregnant with me, therefore I, had ruined her life.

Being the odd, disappointing child was confusing.  It was worse as a teenager and alienating.  I figured out at fifteen that one of us needed to be more rational.  It was up to me to strategize around mom’s issues.  She did not, for example, want to specify a curfew.  She preferred a vague, “Just don’t come home too late.”  But I knew that any time would be too late if she was in a bad mood.  I insisted on a specific curfew and clock, suggesting “11 PM by the living room clock.”  And then, I always came in five minutes early because I did not trust her to not move the clock ahead a few minutes.  More than five minutes would be too obvious.  I caught it once.  The living room clock had gained three minutes in four hours when I came in five minutes before eleven.  I could tell she was irritated but felt successful that I had avoided giving her an excuse to direct her anger at me.  A geriatric psychiatrist years later described her as “crafty.”

My first lesson for healing started when my first child was born.  I promised Lori the first time I held her that I would be a better mother than mine.  But, what did I know about parenting?  Most people parent as they were parented.  It was the first time, however, I declared that I would NOT be like my mother.  So I read magazine articles, newspaper columns and books about parenting.  Children: The Challenge by Adlerian psychologist Rudolf Driekurs was the book that changed my life.  Dreikurs provides an entire framework for good parenting and other relationships such as teaching.  Two of his students, Dinkmeyer and McKay, organized the ideas into Systematic Training for Effective Parenting handbooks.  I highly recommend them and taught about them for years in my family sociology classes.  The latest edition still serves as my gift for baby showers.

Dreikurs identified a few basics for building positive relationships with children: Mutual respect; taking time for fun; encouragement; communicating love.  He recommended five specific practices:

First: Understand children’s behavior and misbehavior: All behavior has a social purpose.  Dreikurs identified four goals of misbehavior:  Attention, power, revenge, and display of inadequacy and suggested how to better respond.  Reward good behavior with attention, love, and encouragement.

Second: Encouragement, not praise, accepts children as they are. It focuses on contributions and strengths; recognizes effort and improvement; eliminates unrealistic and negative expectations.

Third: Good communication skills use I-messages and reflective listening.  Good communication explores alternatives and assists children in choosing solutions.  It avoids demands, should-messages, judgements, and put-downs.

Fourth: Good discipline is not punishment but makes strategic use of natural and logical consequences: Natural consequences come from natural order; parents simply decline to rescue a child.  If a child carelessly loses something, for example, the natural consequence is not being hit or yelled at by a parent.  The natural consequence is that the child goes without or replaces it with his or her own money.  Logical consequences, on the other hand, come from the social order. Parents establish reasonable boundaries that grow with the child and set reasonable consequences connecting freedom and responsibility.  A child violating a boundary has chosen the known consequence.  Parents stay firm but affirming.

Fifth: Family meetings allow all to be heard and give children the opportunity to contribute to problem solving.

These practices work very well.  My greatest joy today is that my two daughters are wonderful mothers to my three grandchildren.  I am proud to say that they give me credit for having been a good role model.  I also love getting thank you notes from or seeing former students.  They most often thank me for teaching them how to be better parents.

Mom’s drinking got much worse after my sister and I left home and my brother was a toddler.  I fell into the role of family resource person.  Each time Dad called to tell me that mom was threatening suicide or acting drunkenly crazy, I was the one to call our family doctor, drive to Papillion, talk mom into going to the hospital and take her while Dad drove my brother to my house where he stayed during her hospitalizations. These crises occurred every six to eight months for years.

Then I took a course on American Family Problems in graduate school.  This lesson is that knowledge is power in dealing with many challenges.  I learned about alcoholism and chemical dependency treatment.  I learned that our family was typical in our mistakes in dealing with mom.  One mistake is to repeatedly seek inappropriate or ineffective help.  Our family doctor politely provided the diagnosis of “fatigue” for her drying-out hospitalizations.  I still think about it each time the news reports another celebrity being hospitalized for “fatigue.”

I eventually insisted that mom go to Chemical Dependency Treatment.  It seemed to work.  She stopped drinking.  Several months of improvement, however, were followed by more months of deterioration in attitudes, anger, threats and behaviors that got increasingly bizarre.

Our legal request for involuntary psychiatric commitment was denied in spite of a psychiatrist predicting that she was getting dangerous.  The judge declared that she was not yet dangerous enough to meet the legal requirement.  Our family doctor talked her into a regular hospital admission to monitor her high blood pressure.  Three days later she hit a nurse and started a fire in a waste basket.  She was transferred to the psychiatric unit and diagnosed at age fifty as having paranoid, manic-depressive bipolar disorder.

At this time, I got custody of my ten-year-old brother when I was 27.  I was not about to leave him alone with her after my parents’ divorce.

Mom’s diagnoses staggered me.  Mental illness was a life sentence for all of us.  Even with medication she remained difficult, impulsive, unstable, and unpredictable for the next twenty years until she died at age seventy from emphysema due to smoking.

My graduate school office mate recommended I see a counselor.  I would not have thought of it on my own.  The three or four counseling sessions were the most liberating experiences in my life offering me a third set of important understandings.  The counselor helped me to understand that my mother’s constant criticisms had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her.  No matter how many degrees I would earn (I was working on my third), my mother would never be proud of me, not because I was not worthy, but because she was not capable.  No matter how nice of a family I had, mom would never be happy for me or with me because she had no empathy for or interest in others.

Counseling helped me to let go of the anxiety and disappointments associated with trying to avoid mom’s criticisms and anger.  Since that would never be possible, I made progress in creating emotional distance and not reacting.  I learned to compartmentalize each encounter.  I enjoyed mom’s good days and left quickly on her bad days.  The same with phone calls – an okay conversation or a quick, “Sorry, mom, I don’t have time to talk.”  You just do what you have to do.

I also learned to accept with less embarrassment the professionalism and kindness of those to whom we turned for help.  After reading about the Walker Navy family arrested for spying in 1985, Mom accused me of being a communist spy and threatened to call the university president to tell her I should be fired for it.  Making such a call or writing a letter would be consistent with her previous inappropriate behaviors.  It was embarrassing to call the MSU President’s office to warn them and explain.  The assistant, however, kindly replied, “Oh, Dr. Keating, don’t worry about it.  The President gets crank calls all the time.”  I don’t know if mom called.  It doesn’t matter because “The President gets crank calls all the time.”

 

Finally, I want to recommend another book to anyone with a problem parent. Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life by Psychologist Susan Forward provided an important retrospective for me. 

Forward asserts that children have rights to be fed, clothed, sheltered and protected … to be nurtured emotionally, to have their feelings respected, and to be treated in ways that allow them to develop a sense of self-worth … to be guided by appropriate limits on their behavior, to make mistakes, and to be disciplined without being physically or emotionally abused.

Many children, however, are denied these rights.  Children do not know enough to protect themselves by identifying their parents as the problem.   “When we are … young, our parents are everything … our all-powerful providers. … With nothing and no one to judge them against, we assume them to be perfect …. Our culture and our religions are almost unanimous in upholding … parental authority.”

Toxic parents, however, are more common than we want to admit.  Many, like my mother, look fine to outsiders.  One lesson is that we should not judge our insides from others’ outsides.

Forward identifies six types of toxic parents:

1. Inadequate parents focus on their own problems and make “mini-adults” out of their children who must act as parents.

2. Controllers use guilt, manipulation, and over-helpfulness to dominate children’s lives often extending into their adulthoods.

3. Alcoholics and addicts prioritize their addictions over their children.

4. Verbal abusers rob their children of self-esteem and confidence.

5. Physical abusers blame their violent behavior on their children.

6. Sexual abusers betray their children and steal their innocence.

 

Forward offers seven steps for healing:

Step 1. Resolve the forgiveness trap: One does not have to forgive.  Giving up the need for revenge is good but absolving the perpetrator of responsibility is not. Forgiveness is only appropriate if the perpetrator earns it.

Step 2. Examine the parental relationship:  Is it worth saving?  Can you maintain some kind of relationship without unhealthy enmeshment?

Step 3. Establish self-definition, emotional independence and emotional integrity.  Respond nondefensively instead of reacting … by thinking as well as by feeling.

Step 4. Define responsibility: Victims are never responsible for the abuse they receive.  The perpetrator is always responsible.  Having been abused, however, does not excuse our negative behaviors.  We are responsible for our behavior as adults regardless of our childhoods.

Step 5. Confrontation: In person, through a letter that may or may not be sent, or with a therapist surrogate.  The purpose is not to retaliate, punish, fix, or get something positive from such parents but to face up to them, to overcome your fear, to tell the truth and to determine the type of relationship you can have with them.  One friend to whom I recommended this book went to her mother’s grave and yelled at the gravestone.

Step 6. Breaking the cycle: Not doing the same.

Step 7. Letting go and moving on.  Creating yourself as you want to be.

So, that’s it: two books, a class and a few sessions with a counselor.  Of equal importance, however, was the kindness and support of others: neighbors, teachers, friends and professionals.  Each made a difference.  The people in this congregation make a difference.  From my bottom of my heart, I thank you.