My DD took offense at an impersonal pronoun in my last post. I screwed up. I was tired when I read her comment and should have left it alone. But I was going to be offline for at least five days and didn’t want to ignore her. So I jumped in and said something really stupid and hurtful. I’ve been re looking at it for the past 5 days.
That would be HER, not IT, thank-you.
At first I didn’t read carefully enough to distinguish between her comment (above) and my own words (below) which were posted along with her comment.
“Or if they really loved their first grandchild they sure had a strange way of showing it, huh? If they loved that baby unconditionally they would have clung to it and kept it safe themselves rather than cast it out to the unknown world of people in better circumstances, better able to provide for this healthy white infant. That’s what some people say.”
It was late and I was shaken by the capitalized pronouns, (representing a frequent accusation that I’m thoughtless and lack empathy). I reacted foolishly. In the morning I quickly edited the post without grasping what I was doing before leaving town.
In a rush and feeling awkward and misunderstood, I had changed that paragraph from talking about my parents and an abstract baby, to be more directly about her. I hadn’t intended to be that personal. Becoming more personally about her, I took it personally too, which can be quite troublesome. I hadn’t wanted to touch into the rawness of my reunion.
That is exactly what I was looking at when I started the previous post. How to love unconditionally and personally? How do I love what is just the way it is? DD, just the way she is? Can I love my whole family unconditionally? Without getting confused trying to suit other people’s desires or distracted by conflicting requests?
I know from long experience feeling *guilty* is more disabling than motivating. The burning regret that I had misunderstood her and reacted inappropriately again was overshadowed by getting my feelings hurt too, feeling ignored and insulted when I thought reaching out to her would be easier than it is. I keep moving to find the sweet spot where I can see what’s going on and interact with compassion rather than guilt.
It takes a lot of attention. I have to stop comparing myself to any measure of reasonableness – stop justifying choices made out of fear, jealousy or greed. Being afraid of losing her means I’m losing myself. She will always be a part of me. I just have to be open to who she is, whether she *likes* me or not.
When I am secure with myself, I see her with compassion. When I’m out of balance, the shaking wakes me up to how far I’ve drifted. I have to steady myself to look and see who my daughter is, to accept our reunion as raw and awesome and changing. Our differences, our similarities are all valuable. The beauty of who we are stirs me. And I can see her more clearly.
Reaching out and touching no matter what, that’s part of it. There is something about shaking it off and getting up and getting going that is refreshing too.
“Reaching out and touching no matter what, that’s part of it.”
There’s a lesson here to all of us, to embrace the hard stuff with the easy, and live with it. I don’t mean “live” in the sense of “put up with,” I mean “live” in the sense of “explore, understand and accept.”