(no subject)
Taking care of my toddler all day (with my partner of course), but it can take a toll on one's energy (understatement?).
Also starting to feel the cold my child and partner have been experiencing. Throat starts to hurt. Tired.
My mom stops by as she's in town, which was pre-planned.
She was going to drop-off a birthday gift for my child's cousin.
She appears and says she has two gifts...and my mother reveals "the second 'gift'" is for my chid, and she starts to explain how "when [the cousin] is receiving gifts, then [your child] can have..." but I cut her off because I know she means I should give it to my child while the other child receives gifts: it's the pattern from my childhood. My family set a precedent when I was a small child that I would get "presents" too during someone else's birthday. Beyond childhood and looking back, I am upset by this tactic, obviously. It was an avoidance tactic: avoid a child's (potentially) negative emotions, but at what cost? I absolutely do not want to engage in this with my child, but it's like my mother sees it as her right to now act like "grandma" (aka the kind of entitlement to do anything however she wants her way regardless of what i think just as her mother did to her when I was a child), and I am frustrated that her response was to look offended/affronted that I didn't want to take this approach...because I reframed it all right there....
After all, my child is two years old.
My child has no idea about these things. But my child will have certain expectations (and changing those expectations later will only get harder) if we set the precedent she wants to set.
So in the moment, I reframed it as, "Grandma was so excited to see you because she doesn't get to see you very often, so she brought you a gift. Thank you, grandma!"
At that point, I still felt like I had all my shit together even if my mom did something she KNEW would piss me off (aka crossed a boundary because I have asked her in the past not to always bring my child gifts during every visit because I want her visits to emphasize that she expresses her love with her presence not with money).
Then, my child had been asking for bubbles, so I say I'll blow some bubbles to try and change the focus of the moment....
I feel dishevelled and just shitty, but when engaging with my child, and with grandma there, I'm being effusive and engaging as much as I can, trying to reinforce the delight my child is experiencing with the bubbles.
Then I make a comment about not wearing a bra because my mom is holding her camera up and I imagine she's taking pictures.
She says, "Now that's going to be stated in the video forever....you called attention to it...." as though i just messed up the video ... that I didn't even know she was filming.
I feel surprised and upset, and self-conscious, and emotionally, in the moment, I just don't want that video to exist.
So I (think I) set a boundary. I ask my mother to delete the video.
She says she will later.
I just feel anxious about it all. It's not precisely her, but in general, all of this content always available on someone else's device...so I walk over and ask that she delete the video right there.
Am I overstepping?
Maybe, but I'm obviously exhausted, not feeling great, sure while I'm probably going overboard, I just needed to see it get done to trust that it would.
My mother says, "You should trust your mother," as though she's delivering valuable sage advice to me....
To which I respond, "I have trust issues."
Her next response is, "well, i guess I should delete these other photos then," and she goes ahead and deletes not only the video, but additional photos.... Because she is being passive aggressive and she wants to punish me for hurting her, no doubt, thinking that I "don't trust my own mom."
At that point I feel erased and belittled.
I didn't ask her to delete static photos. I asked her to delete the video. Because of what I was saying in the video.
ARG.
But in this splitsecond moment, I can't articulate any of this. All I can do is then get upset.
And then she almost cuts me off when I try to explain what I'm feeling, and in a curt voice she says, "Okay, I guess I will go."
She's rarely in town. We rarely have the chance to see her. MY CHILD IS RIGHT THERE...and she's going to just LEAVE presumably because I'm an asshole....
She's punishing me, isn't she? Is she just trying to escape my toxicity? Or is she punishing me?
All I can think, in my brain in that moment is, especially as I'm looking down at my toddler who has gone sort of silent, is how is this affecting him right now? My emotions and my mother's responses? How is her just leaving all of a sudden going to impact him? What will he think? How might he internalize this?
I more or less tell her she's rarely there, we want to see her, that I'm allowed to feel upset because I'm exhausted, but I want my son to have time with her. So then I try to be as engaging as I can once more, and encourage my son to play with the gift she brought him, and he's all enthusiastic again as we play with the toy, and she can snap some more photos, and then of course my mother does have to go b/c of the time, but I just hated the entire event. I hate when something happens like this - my "out-of-control" emotions - when she visits and I feel like I'm the evil perpetrator of it all as though I ruined the visit.
And I needed to vent about this somewhere, so here we are.
And I just need to give myself some perspective.
I need to remind myself that I tried to ask for something that I needed and my mother was dismissive of it, and continued to escalate the situation, but reacted as though I was escalating it when I was really just reacting to survive the moment.
I'm trying to be good to myself and remind myself that trying to be "perfect" and make sure her visit is "perfect" so that I "don't rock the boat" is unrealistic and that, after a long day and when feeling sick, it's okay to not be perfect and to have a negative emotion.
I'm trying to remind myself that my mother has always denied negative emotions and has always punished me indirectly for having them, and that she lives by (toxic) positivity. This is not going to change. It's not my job to change it.
I'm trying to remind myself that making sure everyone else is happy is also not my job, but when I (seem to) fail to do this, I heap guilt onto myself, and that I shouldn't.
Deep breaths.
It's time to stop wallowing in what happened and start giving myself something good.
It took me the entire evening (since 4:30 pm today) to get here. I guess I just needed to write it out...by 1 AM.
🤦♀️