Generational Differences

My mother and my son have a very love-hate relationship. My mother loves her grandson, my son cannot stand his grandmother. There is a lot of confusion on both sides as to why can’t the other understand the love/hate. I am stuck in the middle attempting to mediate between the two.

I can’t claim neutrality. I am not Switzerland. I have difficulty not picking sides in their argument. For starters, I will always side with my son first. He is my child and I love him unconditionally. Also, unlike my mother, he has not betrayed me or my trust, repeatedly. So when something happens and my son gets nasty with his grandma, I can’t help but believe that my mother deserved it. I try to find the weak areas in the arguments against her, but they stand up to scrutiny and provide no ground for my mother to stand on.

The fact is that she treats my son no different than she treated me growing up.

This is unfortunate. I wish it wasn’t the case, but she is old and at this point she will never learn to change. The best I can do is help to keep their relationship from falling apart entirely so that he can maybe come to appreciate the few things that are good about my mother, such as her undying loyalty. My mother will always have my back. I may not appreciate the judgement that comes in tandem with such assistance, but the same way I would do anything for my son, I would like to believe my mother would do the same for me.

My son is almost 16. It is a difficult age and it was very hard on me to be this age around my mother.

She didn’t understand me AT ALL. Nor did she try. I do my best to consider my son, and weigh all his own personal needs and wants to determine how best to approach him and his many moods. I think as a result, my relationship with my son is very healthy. I do worry that I am turning into my mother sometimes with the things I hear come out of my mouth, but I combat that conversion with every fiber of my being. I will not become my mother.

My mother is still as clueless about the complexities of all emotions, especially teenage emotions. She is not very emotionally intelligent. Recently I located my old diaries from those tense teenage years and reread them cover to cover. I am glad I kept them, I think it helps to ground me as a person and even more so as a mother.

Those diaries contain pages and pages of entries describing the garbage relationship I have with my mother. My warnings to the past version of my mother, warnings that she was going to lose me forever if she kept alienating me with her behavior.

How much of the discord between my son and my mother is organic?

How much was influenced by my own dislike of my mother? I don’t make it a secret that I am glad I currently live very far from her because there is only so much meddling I can stand in my personal life. Did all my transparency about my unhappy relationship with my mother taint his relationship with his grandmother? Did I influence him to hate her? Or worse, does he think he has to hate her in order to remain loyal to me? That would be the ultimate horror. To think my son believes that love means becoming a copy of another person’s thoughts and opinions.

But when I really think about it, I see that the same ridiculous and unrealistic over-protectiveness my mother had with me, it manifests tenfold with my son. His grandmother has this insane notion that calamity waits to befall my son around every corner. That my son, like me, cannot protect himself.

What the fuck is my mother’s problem? It’s all lies. My son is a tough son of a bitch (pun intended). He is mean and nasty to people he doesn’t like and not afraid to voice his displeasure to his peers and strangers. He is also incredibly smart and emotionally aware. He knows the difference between foolish posturing versus standing up for yourself and what is right. He is awesome. Why is it that my mother can’t see this about my son?

Probably for the same reasons that she couldn’t see it in me, and that is most likely why my son doesn’t get along with her. The same clingy weakness that my mother tries to cover him with, is what gets under his skin and makes my son angry. Frankly I don’t blame him.

It is very insulting to know someone thinks you can’t ever make it on your own and would prefer you follow their exact example in life because somehow they know better than you about yourself.

Worse still, my mother is under some delusion that we are not people with a right to our own life, but rather life size dolls for her to control and mold in whatever image pleases her.

I am a grown ass woman and I battle with this every day. I still wish my mother would start seeing me as an adult capable of taking care of herself and not this fictional character version of me she has in her head. She has these scenarios she plays out where she thinks I am going to react a certain way to things she says and does and when I react opposite she is confused and angry. Why am I not doing the right thing? Why am not automatically agreeing with her? Why am not acquiescing control of my life and decisions to her?

I think on this, as the day looms that my mother makes the leap to move away from her safety net on the east coast and finally makes the move to Texas. My brother has been working on her to get her out of there because she is all alone and there is nothing to keep her there aside from her own stubbornness.

I am glad for it because I agree, she has no business being so isolated as she gets older. I am not glad because it brings her and her mad ideas closer to me and my kids. It is like inviting the devil onto my doorstep.

They insist that we will all end up moving in together. Me, my brother, my mother and my kids. They are crazy. We are all too stubborn and too selfish to live in one house in harmony. My brother has conveniently forgotten the inconvenience of our short time sharing a place when I first moved out here. My mother seems to only remember the good times and forget how she threatened that the only way I could live on my terms was when I moved out and until then I had to suffer and do it how she wanted all the time.

YEAH… I am not insane. So I keep the peace. I keep my son and my grandmother away from each other’s throats (more my son at his grandmother’s throat than the other way around) and I keep my mother from driving my son crazy.

It is not an easy job but I believe I am up to the task.