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Old Jan 20, 2015, 03:34 AM
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Rose76 Rose76 is online now
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Member Since: Mar 2011
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I thought of this thread when I was reading an article about the film critic, Roger Ebert, who recently died. Here is what really struck and surprised me:

At age 50, Ebert married trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammelsmith (formerly Chaz Hammel-Smith) in 1992. He explained in his memoir, Life Itself, that he "would never marry before [his] mother died", as he was afraid of displeasing her. In a July 2012 blog entry titled "Roger loves Chaz", Ebert wrote, "She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading". From: Roger Ebert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why a very talented individual, like Ebert, would remain in such a self-limiting entanglement with a parent is beyond what I can even imagine, but he straight-out says that he did. I'ld be fascinated to read his biography to try and learn how that evolved. Surely, he had plenty of options, at least financially. But he felt he didn't, emotionally.

Despite how much he suffered from not wanting to displease his mother, he managed to have a life that was pretty full and allowed him to develop his talents and have a high level of engagement with the broader world around him. Maybe, when you have been in a pattern for as long as 36 years, the most honest thing you can tell yourself is that this pattern is possibly something that, deep down, you are not willing to forego. Maybe it is just emotionally impossible for you. Then, perhaps, you can be somewhat freer to make the best of the situation.

Sometimes, when we say that we can't change a situation, it's really more true that we don't actually want to . . . not badly enough. Some important psychic and material needs are being met keeping the set up as it is. I really don't think that human beings are totally free to reinvent themselves from scratch anytime they choose along life's journey.

Maybe Roger Ebert managed to have a lot of success in his life, despite feeling trapped emotionally by his mother, because he accepted that he was unwilling to change that and worked around it. That takes a lot of honesty. It's okay to decide that you are not going to fully emancipate yourself from your mother's influence. But accept that you are the one making that choice.

Yes, had your mother been a different kind of person, you also would be different from how you are. A lot of what went into making you who you are may not have been your own choosing. That can be said about anyone, including your mother. You want her to do the work of changing, so that your life can change. She probably can't. And it's unfair to put all that on her.

If it's just too much of a heavy lift for you to leave this involvement that you have with your mother, then own that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Taking a poll of your friends who know you and your mother to see who votes for her as the bad guy is really kind of juvenile. It doesn't matter what they think . . . or what we on this thread think.

Basically, you're trying to have a pity party for yourself and get as many guests for that purpose as you can round up. Ultimately, this will just turn those whom you recruit against you, as you kind of see happening on this thread. You'll find no shortage of people willing to agree with you that your mother's expectations are unreasonable. But so what? These same people are not going to see you as a prisoner - like a child locked in a closet. Psychologically, you may be just as locked up as that child . . . but, at this stage of the game, the key is in your possession. These dynamics go on because you are complicit. An army of therapists are not going to make you do what, deep down, you do not want to do . . . for whatever reasons you may have. You have made a choice that you keep making . . . and your psyche has its own reasons for why this is the choice. It is what your mind needs, right now, for a sense of safety and security. The more you try to rationalize why you just can't arrange things differently, the more hollow it is going to come across.

Free yourself from the need to have others award you "the martyr's crown." That's not going to happen. You're at where you're at, in a situation that is what it is. Tweaking the details of the situation may be the best you can do at present. Start there. You'll have more energy and power to do that, if you stop telling yourself that your mother controls everything, as if you were a prisoner of ISIS. This is, at bottom, a power struggle and you are not just giving in. Telling her that you will accept all her constraints and just accept having a miserable life is your attempt to cause her mental discomfort. You are trying to control how she feels . . . trying to put her on a guilt trip. That's you trying to hold on to how close you are with her, but figure out how to manipulate her. That's trying to have your cake and eat it too. To tell her that you will totally capitulate to her, since she won't be as you want her to be is "All or Nothing Thinking." Life is all about compromise. You can pull off successful little rebellions, if you're willing to tolerate some friction. It seems that you don't want any friction. If that's your choice, own it.
Thanks for this!
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