Mothers, Daughters, and Being Invisible
While I was visiting my daughter and grandson in England, I bought the book “Why Did You Stay?” by Rebecca Humphries. I saw it advertised in the Guardian newspaper, and I knew that I needed to read it. Even though Humphries’ book is about staying in an emotionally abusive relationship with her boyfriend until his very public affair forced her to stand in the truth of her relationship, I thought that this book could help me understand my relationships with my girlfriends. I wanted to understand why I keep giving and caring and supporting my girlfriends, when it isn’t reciprocated.
As I read Humphries’ very candid description of why she stayed and how she re-discovered her self-worth after leaving, the sentence, “All things I pretended I wanted so no one would see I wasn’t getting what I needed”, hit me right between the eyes. These words punched me dead center in the stomach because they described me. I have pretended to want something different far too often because I wasn’t sure I was allowed to need, or because it was too painful to stand in the truth that a girlfriend I cared about, whose friendship I had invested a lot of time and energy in, didn’t want to or couldn’t acknowledge my needs. Humphries’ words ripped a band aid off a wound I was ignoring and treating as if healed. A wound that was full of the time I have invested in relationships that weren’t feeding me. A wound that was full of pretending that I wasn’t feeling important, of ignoring those niggly doubts and heartaches that I bury under “I’m fine”, “we’re great”, and “I don’t need anything”.
Images of moments where I didn’t say anything, where I didn’t advocate for myself, where I packed away my wishes, my needs, and pretended everything was fine flooded in. I remembered how I didn’t say anything when a close girlfriend wished me happy birthday the weekend before my birthday during a phone call, I had made to her. She told me that she wouldn’t call me on my birthday because I will be busy. I didn’t correct her, even though I can still remember how my stomach hurt when she warned me that she wouldn’t call me on my birthday because she assumed that I’d be busy. I didn’t tell her that I needed her to wish me happy birthday on my birthday. I didn’t tell her that after all these years she should know that birthdays are important to me. Birthdays are when we celebrate the people we care about. For months afterwards I ruminated over whether to say something, and I decided to keep quiet and let it go. But the truth is, you don’t really let it go because it is a hurting emotional wound. You can’t and shouldn’t let it go because these moments tell the truth about who my friend is, how invisible I am to her, and how little she is prepared to invest in our relationship. These moments show the truth about how I allow myself to be invisible by pretending, by packing my needs away, by being afraid to make a scene, by not wanting to upset someone, and by my internalized “good girl” that has learned to discount myself and pretend.
As I thought about this incident, I realized I called her the weekend before my birthday to protect myself, because I already knew, without acknowledging it to myself under my well-honed pretending, that she was not going to call me on my birthday. I called her to protect myself from feeling unloved and uncelebrated by my friend. I called her because I have learned to take too much responsibility for the emotional labor in my relationships. As I thought about the mountains of emotional labor I have provided in my relationships, I wonder about my mother and grandmother.
Selfless sacrifice is a patriarchal expectation of women, and it is alive and well in my generational mother-daughter history. I grew up watching my grandmother weave her life around her husband and adult children, never once voicing what she needed. My grandmother was a woman of her generation and culture, stoic and entirely silent about what she felt and needed. My mother feverishly tried to make my grandmother happy, trying to meet my grandmother’s unvoiced and unacknowledged needs like a “good daughter” should in my family. And I was expected to do the same. I was expected to spend my life being my mother’s emotional helpmate, and when I refused and tried to change this dynamic, my mother cut me off with years of silent treatment.
It is hard to recognize that even though I have tried really hard to walk a different life to my mother through learning how to claim my voice and needs, I am still repeating some of my inherited, socialized self-sacrifice that makes me put my needs on the back burner and pretend all is well. As I write in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”, relationships are like a bridge. This means that we can only do half the work in our relationships. It is a relational impossibility and an engineering impossibility to build a bridge from one side to the other. Relationships, like bridges need to meet in the middle, with each person doing their half share to hold up the relationship.
My mother and grandmother did not know this. They believed that women are responsible for how their relationships turns out, for doing all the caregiving, and that it was selfish, unfeminine, uncaring to demand anything for yourself. My mother and grandmother did not know that they were missing an entire conversation that inquires after and honors what they feel, think, and need. I’m glad that I listened to my instinct and bought Humphries’ book, because I clearly needed to read her sentence, “All things I pretended I wanted so no one would see I wasn’t getting what I needed”.
· I need to start asking people I care about to behave like they care about me.
· I need to stand in the painful truth of what it feels like to not matter to the people who matter to me.
· I need to tell the truth to myself about the high emotional cost I am paying when I over-care and do not check if a person is able to build their side of the bridge.
· I need to stop investing my precious time and energy in people who cannot build their side of the bridge.
· I need to believe more strongly that my needs matter, just like other people’s needs.
· I need to recognize that it is not protective to pretend that I am fine when I am not. It is not loving to call a friend because you know that she won’t call me when I need her to. And it is harmful to keep silent, to not ‘rock the boat’, and to not ask for what I need.
· And finally, I need to ‘walk the talk’ and trust the truth in the words I wrote in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle” — “A woman who knows what she needs cannot be controlled.”