I Will Not Dumb Myself Down

Every now and then I am reminded of why I don’t get along with my mother. It’s because she thinks and treats me like I am stupid. My whole life, it has been a contest of mental will with my mother. And she isn’t happy unless she is making me feel like I am just the dumbest person on the planet. This was all triggered by a chapter in a book I was reading where the character got into an argument with his mother because she was treating him as though he did not know his own mind. Sounds very familiar. 

Outsiders see her actions and think she is just being a concerned parent. Showing me how much she cares with her questions of concern and checking in on me. But I know that is not what motivates her.

When she calls me asking me if I am doing okay, it is not because she wants reassurances that I am actually fine. BEcause she will repeatedly ask me “are you sure?”. That isn’t someone who wants me to be okay, that is someone who is hoping to catch me fucking up. It’s like she is seeking vindication for her ill will towards me, her feelings of how dare I make my own decisions without consulting her? 

I have moments when I realize what really drives wedges between me and others. The moment when they begin to think that I am too stupid to know my own mind, that is when the relationship goes sour. I have ended friendships because the other person was convinced that I just didn’t know better.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not convinced that I am the smartest person on the planet. I will be the first person to admit if I don’t know something. But if I know something, it’s because I have learned it somewhere. If I discover I am wrong, then I am doing counter-research to figure out why and then what is actually the right thing to know. That’s just common sense.

Maybe I wasn’t kind to my mother when I was young. I’m Generation X. We were raised before the information age. My formative years developed pre-internet. By the time I encountered email I was in college. So my learning lessons were done old school. Hitting the books, looking stuff up in libraries. Watching documentaries when they aired live on TV because TiVo was NOT a thing. There were no youtube tutorials. I read instruction manuals. 

We emigrated to this country from Guatemala when I was young, and my whole life my mother has had a huge chip on her shoulder, assuming people think she is dumb. She would lament about how she just wasn’t that smart. It’s not that she isn’t smart, she just didn’t have a lot of schooling when she was younger. She didn’t get it together educationally until I was in middle school and she got her GED and then went to community college. So she isn’t dumb. 

I remember growing up and doing my homework and as the eldest child, I had no one else to ask for help except for my mother. She was like, I can’t help you. I didn’t have that much school. She helped me up to a point, but there were many barriers, most of them language related because until she went back to school, things like English grammar were foreign to her, literally. 

Spanish was her first language, and she was incredibly well versed in that because she was curious and when she was married to my dad, I guess she learned vicariously through him, and through the company they kept. She may not have had traditional schooling, but she had plenty of nontraditional learning experiences. 

She never saw it that way though, hence the chip on the shoulder. 

As I got older, I think she resented the schooling I was getting. Despite the outward appearances that she was proud of me, I have come to realize that she inwardly resented me. As I got older, I began to realize it. Math was not a barrier, but she refused to help me. She claimed she didn’t know. She would lie and give me the “I didn’t get to go to school like you do” song and dance. And it would piss me off when I was growing up. 

I wasn’t going to ask my father because, for starters, I only saw him occasionally if he came to visit, since by the time we lived in the US, my parents were no longer together. So I had to figure stuff out on my own.

I got good at asking questions, and asking my teachers for help when I needed it. I was pretty smart, and I wasn’t going to let my mother not helping me stop me from learning and knowing more. 

Knowledge is power. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Because you can’t unlearn something. You can also take that knowledge with you everywhere.

Even when you have nothing, you can be naked, and alone, and with no actual possessions, but you will have what is locked in your mind. I needed that security because I wasn’t going to get security or reassurances from anywhere else. Knowledge, also, doesn’t cost you anything if you know how to get it for free. When you don’t have a lot of money growing up, free is a dollar amount you can afford.

Anyway, back to me and my mother. The older I got, the more schooling I received, the bigger her resentment grew. I somewhat understand her struggle. As a mother with an iota of sense, you want to celebrate your child.

However, as a mother with unaddressed mental health issues and a lifetime worth of resentment, you’re not going to react like a logical mother, but instead, the lizard brain that wants the satisfaction, that wants to feel superior is going to drive your actions — and that is what drives my mother. 

Every argument we have is when she does, or says something, to imply that I don’t know my own mind. To insinuate that I am too stupid to know better. She will even say “I am not saying you are stupid, but…” and then it’s like who the fuck are you trying to kid? I know what she means. She does think I am stupid, because she wants to control my life. She wants to hold me down and she isn’t happy unless I need her. 

Probably because when I did need her, she wasn’t there for me, and now it’s too late. She hasn’t realized, or accepted, that we can’t go back and recapture what was lost. That when I was young and I asked for her help, when I needed assistance with my book report, when I had to put together a diorama for Social Studies class, that is when I needed her and she denied me.

Forced me to figure it out on my own. So I became self-reliant. And that self-reliance has been biting her in the proverbial ass and she can’t deal. 

On that note, that is one of my biggest fears when I think about the possibility of getting out there and dating again. Because though I have developed a thick ass skin when it comes to people insulting me and not letting it get to me, I do have that one weak area. The ex sought to exploit it when we were married.

He wouldn’t come out and say that he thought I was too stupid to figure things out, but the way in which he sought to undermine our relationship with the cheating and the lying, it’s like he honestly thought he wasn’t going to get caught. That I was literally too stupid to figure him out. 

I found that more insulting than the actual cheating. It was the lying to my face when I was confronting him with the truth… 

Now, I know he is a narcissistic sociopath who hates women, and in hindsight, there is no way I was going to compete with the lies concocted by someone who believed the lies he was telling were his version of the truth.

Even way back before the cheating and the lying, there were times he showed how little he thought of me and my brain early in the dating part of our relationship that I overlooked at the time. We actually had arguments that he resented that I was smarter than him. Why the fuck didn’t I leave then?

This is what worries me. Because I may be older, and perhaps more aware of myself and those around me, but what if I am bamboozled again? Do I want to expose myself to that? What are the benefits?

There has been no lasting benefit in the shit I put up with in my marriage to mr horrible. He was just a blatant piece of shit who didn’t think about me at all. I doubt I ever cross his mind now. Also, there has been no benefit, only headaches in the contentious relationship I have with my mother. I can’t stand her and I she is like a gnat that I can’t seem to get rid of. 

I don’t walk around like I am just smarter than everyone. That’s obnoxious, who does that? I see my intelligence as a skill set, a tool I can use to get things done and figure things out. That is what makes me smart. So don’t treat me like I am stupid because that will be the end. I can’t keep things going with you at that point. 

The friend I have at work reminds me of my mom sometimes, and that is not a good thing. I can see the creep of envy in her eyes when I figure things out, when I get ahead because I am smart and can remember things. When I use my “big words” as she puts it. What? I’m supposed to feel guilty because I like big words and know how to use them?

Oh, should I apologize when people at work come to me for help because I know things, and am willing to share that info with others? That they don’t ask her the same questions even though she has been there almost 4 years and I only just passed my 1 1/2 yr mark with the company? Is that my fault?

I have to know things. I am curious, and I ask a lot of questions. I had to. My mother certainly wasn’t going to give me answers. And what does it say about me when I was younger than every time my mother had a question about something, she would ask me? Now when she asks me I tell her to google it, but she still asks me. Simple things like how many ounces are in a cup? I mean, look it up? You have a smartphone with the world at your fingertips. 

Do you know how badly I wished when I was little that I could research anything without having to leave my house? My father had bought us a Compton’s Encyclopedia set one year. I personally wished he had gone all out and upgraded to the Encyclopedia Britannica Set, because they made the Compton’s Encyclopedia too, but it was dumbed down for kids.

In any case, I would look things up in that book set, since I didn’t have the internet. Unfortunately if it wasn’t in those books, that meant I had to drag my carcass to the library, but it got me out of the house too, so it wasn’t all bad.  

No one made me look things up. I wanted to, and I was probably driven to it because I didn’t have the internet, I was super curious, I felt that the only way to get ahead, to break out of whatever mold people were trying to put me in, was to know more than them. To know better than what people were telling me was the truth. So I could discern the lies. 

That is my big deal breaker. The lies. I can’t be close to people who lie to me. I can deal with knowing people who are liars. I work with a bunch of them. I even hang out with them casually from time to time. However, I do not place my life in their hands. I certainly don’t trust them farther than I can throw them. 

I have through the years made and broken off relationships with people. There is the one theme that will drive me to cut things off, and it is my no-tolerance policy for people who treat me like I am stupid. Once someone has crossed that threshold, I am done.