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Yesterday evening's LJ slowness didn't help with my funk.
If i haven't thanked you for your expression of cheer over my new haircut, Thank You!
The funk: i think it's one part hormones, one part reduced adrenaline as i relax from the stress building up to the first release planning.
We did a great job getting through that intense two weeks, now the plan meets reality and we have to change (a security issue means we need to release a product two weeks after the last point release instead waiting for a full release). And certain things are harder than we expected. And so on. We pushed through an intense two weeks of learning and planning and work is still work. Where's the magic planning dust? Intellectually, i'm still pleased, but the inner six year old wants the rainbows and unicorns.
There's the ongoing morning journaling issue where Tuesdays are east coast work days, and the rest of the week i need to be in a meeting at 8:30. I used to commute at 8:30, and i had the whole rich fruit of the morning to correspond and write and plan and examine. I miss that.
Another funk contributor: Yesterday morning i called my mother as i was driving in. She and Dad had had some sort of emotional event: she was describing how Dad (now retired) had committed to making BBQ for a group at their church and had "exploded," stressed out with worry about meeting other's expectations. As we chatted, she slipped from her current practice of conversation to what seemed a much older pattern of lecturing me and comparing me to Dad with much of the instruction being that i should examine my life and not be caught up with meeting others expectations (how that's stressful and could cause my autoimmune issues).
I know that when she starts in on her advice on fixing myself it's out of love. Yes, i have irritations; yes, the reactivity of one's sensitivities can be acerbated by stress; yes, wanting to meet others' expectations can be stressful. But, it hurts that she is so blinkered by her relationship with my father that she can't look at my life and recognize that it's not a life lived by someone who is choosing to stay constrained by others' expectations. She's the one who is trapped in that maze. When my father tries to tell her she doesn't have to have the house so clean, or serve on so many committees, or etc, she rarely frames her response as her choice or her need but as a should, a must. Now days, as my father is retired, he's been helping her with her musts and shoulds, and she has been happier.
Our conversation nagged at me much of the day. I think i triggered part of it when i challenged how she was comparing Christine's mandola lessons and coming orchestra work to watching travel shows. Mom's assertion had something to do with early dreams and how one can sort of satisfy them later, and she made some comment about remembering Christine's and my early plans
This triggered a couple of issues for me. First of all, the "early plans" would have come from the first 12-18 months of our dating, our senior year in high school when Christine was conducting through when she dropped out of conservatory. That's one year out of twenty some odd years. Of course, it was in this time i quit talking to mom about my heart, when she sneered something about i could contribute money to support the arts i didn't have to marry it. Yeah, that's still a wound. There's such a deep disconnect between her understanding and my understanding of creativity and being.
Then there was the analogy: her dreams of travel : Christine's high school plans of concert viola & conduction :: watching travel shows : Christine's current work with her mandola, the mandolin orchestra, and her composition plans.
Something about that just deeply offends me, and it may simply be that it angers the scars from being in high school and having Mom sneer at Christine as musician. So i pushed back on her analogy, saying i really didn't understand her analogy: that the mandolin orchestra wasn't some substitute for another dream but was an fabulous opportunity.
That's when she began talking about living up to others expectation's, her and my father's early plans that they would help free each other (that was news), but reality, stress (meanwhile, i was in heavy fast traffic and clearly going to be a little late)....
I have understood that some of my mother's inconsistent reactions towards my choices have a root in her defensiveness of her own choices and her disappointment with her life.
One of the wonderful gifts of working with a therapist that self help books will never provide is the opportunity to have someone help you break through the barriers you've made to your own understanding. Mom has deep paths of rumination and examination and places she will not go: she's incredibly self aware in places and totally blind to other things. I know i have the same habit of rumination and traversing over the same ground: it's well learned from her.
I think i can put this rumination to bed, though, and let go of the irritations from yesterday's call. One of the painful pieces, the sense that she cannot see me, that she doesn't recognize just in how many ways Christine and i have both chosen to be our authentic selves and not allow external expectations to dictate our being, that she hasn't heard me as i describe the disciplines of examination for authentic Truth that Friends' practice encourages -- i can acknowledge that she can't sometimes because she's trapped with her own life's disappointments and has to manage them.
If i haven't thanked you for your expression of cheer over my new haircut, Thank You!
The funk: i think it's one part hormones, one part reduced adrenaline as i relax from the stress building up to the first release planning.
We did a great job getting through that intense two weeks, now the plan meets reality and we have to change (a security issue means we need to release a product two weeks after the last point release instead waiting for a full release). And certain things are harder than we expected. And so on. We pushed through an intense two weeks of learning and planning and work is still work. Where's the magic planning dust? Intellectually, i'm still pleased, but the inner six year old wants the rainbows and unicorns.
There's the ongoing morning journaling issue where Tuesdays are east coast work days, and the rest of the week i need to be in a meeting at 8:30. I used to commute at 8:30, and i had the whole rich fruit of the morning to correspond and write and plan and examine. I miss that.
Another funk contributor: Yesterday morning i called my mother as i was driving in. She and Dad had had some sort of emotional event: she was describing how Dad (now retired) had committed to making BBQ for a group at their church and had "exploded," stressed out with worry about meeting other's expectations. As we chatted, she slipped from her current practice of conversation to what seemed a much older pattern of lecturing me and comparing me to Dad with much of the instruction being that i should examine my life and not be caught up with meeting others expectations (how that's stressful and could cause my autoimmune issues).
I know that when she starts in on her advice on fixing myself it's out of love. Yes, i have irritations; yes, the reactivity of one's sensitivities can be acerbated by stress; yes, wanting to meet others' expectations can be stressful. But, it hurts that she is so blinkered by her relationship with my father that she can't look at my life and recognize that it's not a life lived by someone who is choosing to stay constrained by others' expectations. She's the one who is trapped in that maze. When my father tries to tell her she doesn't have to have the house so clean, or serve on so many committees, or etc, she rarely frames her response as her choice or her need but as a should, a must. Now days, as my father is retired, he's been helping her with her musts and shoulds, and she has been happier.
Our conversation nagged at me much of the day. I think i triggered part of it when i challenged how she was comparing Christine's mandola lessons and coming orchestra work to watching travel shows. Mom's assertion had something to do with early dreams and how one can sort of satisfy them later, and she made some comment about remembering Christine's and my early plans
This triggered a couple of issues for me. First of all, the "early plans" would have come from the first 12-18 months of our dating, our senior year in high school when Christine was conducting through when she dropped out of conservatory. That's one year out of twenty some odd years. Of course, it was in this time i quit talking to mom about my heart, when she sneered something about i could contribute money to support the arts i didn't have to marry it. Yeah, that's still a wound. There's such a deep disconnect between her understanding and my understanding of creativity and being.
Then there was the analogy: her dreams of travel : Christine's high school plans of concert viola & conduction :: watching travel shows : Christine's current work with her mandola, the mandolin orchestra, and her composition plans.
Something about that just deeply offends me, and it may simply be that it angers the scars from being in high school and having Mom sneer at Christine as musician. So i pushed back on her analogy, saying i really didn't understand her analogy: that the mandolin orchestra wasn't some substitute for another dream but was an fabulous opportunity.
That's when she began talking about living up to others expectation's, her and my father's early plans that they would help free each other (that was news), but reality, stress (meanwhile, i was in heavy fast traffic and clearly going to be a little late)....
I have understood that some of my mother's inconsistent reactions towards my choices have a root in her defensiveness of her own choices and her disappointment with her life.
One of the wonderful gifts of working with a therapist that self help books will never provide is the opportunity to have someone help you break through the barriers you've made to your own understanding. Mom has deep paths of rumination and examination and places she will not go: she's incredibly self aware in places and totally blind to other things. I know i have the same habit of rumination and traversing over the same ground: it's well learned from her.
I think i can put this rumination to bed, though, and let go of the irritations from yesterday's call. One of the painful pieces, the sense that she cannot see me, that she doesn't recognize just in how many ways Christine and i have both chosen to be our authentic selves and not allow external expectations to dictate our being, that she hasn't heard me as i describe the disciplines of examination for authentic Truth that Friends' practice encourages -- i can acknowledge that she can't sometimes because she's trapped with her own life's disappointments and has to manage them.
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