“The telephone is ringing, is that my mother on the phone?” wails Andy Summers of The Police, like a man having a breakdown, on their calliope-from-hell Synchronicity track Mother. “Telephone is SCREAMING, won’t she LEAVE me alone?” His unmelodic howls are the sound of a child being consumed by Kali, or perhaps Medusa, mythical Devouring Mothers.
No doubt anyone with a distant, indifferent, or downright cruel mother will think that what I’m about to expound upon is a self-indulgent non-problem, and that I’m a horrible, ungrateful child. But those who grew up with mothers who behaved in an over-involved, invasive, controlling, or obsessive manner, all in the name of love, will know exactly what I’m talking about. And know exactly what Summers was yelling about. “Oh mother dear, please listen, and don’t DEVOUR me!”
Far on into life, the umbilical cord is still wrapped around our necks, and we’re suffocating.
**
Psychology that makes use of myths and archetypes, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychology, posits as one of its primary characters the dark counterpart of the loving, nurturing Good Mother: the devouring, engulfing annihilator of identity Jung called the “Terrible Mother.” Terrible not necessarily in the colloquial sense of “bad,” but powerful and demonic: a woman driven by fear, anger, and/or insatiable emotional hunger, seeking to overpower and bind her offspring to her forever.
How confusing for a child to be presented with both mothers at the same time. Love becomes confused with control and manipulation; independence and individuation become like a major insurrection. This is actually not too far afield of the characterization of God that Bible-believing Christians are required to worship. I am the personification of love, so it goes. If I love you, I must control you; if you separate from me, in your selfishness, I will pursue you and blot you out. The destruction is not literal in the case of the Mother (as it is with the Father-God), but more of a smothering of the separate self.
Boys are forced, in the process of becoming men, to separate more decisively from Mother than girls are, an initiation that can prove emotionally crippling and affect all of their later relationships…but girls often have what are called “merged attachments” with their mothers that aren’t exactly healthy, either. Mutual over-identification can result in a claustrophobic lack of boundaries and the snuffing of any conflicting differentiating thoughts or desires. (What gets snuffed, and stuffed, however, doesn’t go away — it just winds up in the pressure cooker of repression, slowly turning to rage that may one day blow the lid off.)
While sons may sacrifice relationship to become autonomous adults, daughters will sacrifice becoming autonomous adults to maintain relationship.
**
I’ve been experiencing bouts of rage, and falling into ancient feedback loops in my brain about the futility of trying to live my own life as an adult, ever since my mother joined Facebook and began hovering over my every move. Not only does it cramp my style and inhibit my self-expression, but I’ve been bombarded with messages inquiring about my cryptic status updates and making judgments about my subject matter. She writes on my wall and comments on my posted items. (My friends, in the meantime, fall silent, and the ones from whom I most want to hear say nothing for weeks.) She even downloaded a photo from my page, blew it up, and began obsessing about whether or not I was eating enough. (What doesn’t make sense is that it’s like pulling teeth to get the smallest financial assist from my parents, but she can waste hours and hours of a day fretting herself into a lather about my imaginary starvation.) She hasn’t said anything publicly humiliating, at least not yet. Most of her public comments sound like the quintessential supportive mother. And she does have those Good Mother qualities: when I was completely dependent and undifferentiated, she was completely loving and nurturing.
But she has become, in effect, my stalker.
There are several good reasons why I moved two thousand miles away from my family of origin. One was to stretch the apron strings to the breaking point, which worked, mostly, for a while, at least in terms of minimizing fresh incidents. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, my mother can pick up where she left off twenty years ago, and virtually micromanage me to her heart’s content.
Could I have ignored her friend request?
**
When I was growing up, she would go through my notebooks. This is how she discovered a “dirty” story I had written in the fourth grade with my best friend Maria. That incident prompted the most humiliating lecture of my entire childhood, with my tight-lipped Puritan mother uttering innumerable uncomfortable euphemisms regarding the sacredness of holy matrimony. (Ever have one of those moments where you wished the ground would open up and swallow you whole?) Maria and Judy Blume were almost entirely responsible for my sexual education. If my mother had had her way, I probably would have believed babies grew from a seed in their mommy’s tummy until I was twenty-five and married to some poor God-fearing boy who would have to break the news to me in our post-nuptial motel room.
But I’ll come back to the subject of sex later. My mother’s snooping also enabled her to find the hidden bus ticket I’d bought during my senior year of high school to visit a prospective college a second time. She went into hysterics, as was her wont, thinking I was running away. (I had been planning on telling them at the last minute, with a friend waiting outside to take me to the station; it was the only way I thought I had a chance of pulling it off, in that household.) Ultimately my father decided to let me go, and in the end I wound up attending that college, but ever after I kept all my most personal notes and diaries with me at all times. I carted them to school with me every day, knowing that if I left them at home she would find them and read them.
**
She was always so full of fear, my mother. Maybe it comes naturally with the territory of parenthood, but in her case I believe it was excessive. It could only have been exacerbated by a terrifying belief system in which sinners have to fear falling into the hands of an angry God, and wayward children can wind up in the torturous pits of eternal fire. I took it in through my umbilical cord; I was nourished and weaned on the chemicals of perpetual anxiety. As a child, I was severely punished for going to the corner convenience store alone, and educated with Bible and religious stories about the unrepentant wickedness of the godless world. It’s a wonder I ever learned to go anywhere alone or try anything new. Peril, peril, peril was everywhere; Satan and his demons were hiding in the shrubbery. (Even today my mother is constantly forwarding those viral email alerts about home burglaries and identity thefts and people breaking into your car.)
Ironically, parental overprotectiveness couldn’t prevent me from being molested by a sixteen-year-old neighbor when I was eight. He didn’t do much of anything to me — he mainly wanted me to do something to him — but I never told my parents. For one thing, I didn’t even understand what had just happened, and for another, I didn’t have the language to describe it, thanks to their outstanding sex-ed program. (Parents take note: ignorance does not preserve innocence.)
I have to remind myself how afraid she is, when I get so angry with her…and when I find myself dominated by mostly imagined terrors myself. She seeks to control me when things feel out of control for her. I don’t want to continue that legacy.
**
But I promised we’d come back to the subject of sex, and here we are.
One morning at my grandmother’s house, having stayed overnight on the way to what would be my freshman orientation at my “secular” college (where I’d be on my own), my mother and I were seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. During a lull in the conversation, my mother gazed at me with that solemn, prissy expression that took over the shape of her mouth on those rare occasions she felt compelled to speak about “private” matters, and said, apropos of nothing,“You know, no man will ever satisfy you.”
I just stared, then shrugged, quietly and utterly mortified. What she meant to imply, I’m sure, was that no mere human being could ever fulfill me the way Jesus — if I would just let him — could fulfill my petulant agnostic ass. But her pronouncement had the gravity of a malevolent old wives’ spell. (Later, I would mention this ominous utterance to my more sophisticated and thoroughly atheist best friend from high school, and she would burst out laughing and say, “That doesn’t speak very well of your dad, does it?!!”)
I had no idea then of the difficulties that awaited me. If I had, I would have concluded that I had definitely been cursed. What a damning statement for a mother to make to her sexually emerging daughter! I know it’s superstition to blame those words, and not genetics, for an appallingly (still) misunderstood condition I share with Alfred Kinsey’s wife (one which set him on the path of sex research almost ninety years ago), but a part of me still believes that she and her petty, jealous God were determined to ruin my secular, non-marital sex life. This was meddling of the highest order; even my meddling mother had outdone herself.
The question you probably have reading this is: if it’s genetics, did she suffer from the same painful condition? All I can answer is: it’s likely, although it’s unlikely I’ll ever ask her. (I’ll take a root canal over that conversation any day, thank you very much.) Childbirth could have forced a resolution, but I can’t imagine my mother discussing the problem with anyone, including her doctor (who wouldn’t have understood it anyway). The women in my family are martyrs, gritters of teeth, towel-biters. My ancestors, as the old joke goes, walked ten miles to school in knee-deep snow, and it was uphill both ways.
So her doomsaying may have been based in her own unhappy experience. (It was certainly clear growing up that my parents didn’t have an even remotely passionate relationship). All along, however, that same shred of me that maintains a shred of belief in her angry God felt as if this were some kind of punishment — or perhaps a not-quite-perfect answer to her overbearing prayers to preserve my premarital purity. Eventually I figured out what was wrong (one positive about the advent of the Internet) and how to overcome it without the help of the paleolithic medical establishment…but my pet myth will forever be Anderson’s fairy tale of the little mermaid who, in exchange for legs — and by extension everything between them, with which to love her human beloved — has to endure the sensation of walking on knives for the rest of her physical life. (I wonder if I will ever truly feel like a Real Live Girl, to steal from another children’s story, and not just a duct-taped broken doll cheating her way to legitimacy. A cruel joke on someone practically born chasing after boys — like the clubfooted girl who wants only to be a ballerina. Why would a man like Sonny want a broken doll when he could have his pick of Real Live Girls?) This irrational sense of divine persecution still adds to my self-destructive despair during my more suicidal moments.
I would come back for visits during college and find pamphlets like “The Hound of Heaven” on my nightstand, the message of which was that God would hunt you down, like a tireless bloodhound, no matter what you did. The narrow, exclusive, punitive God she believed in, that is. You could run, but you could never escape.
My invasive, fearful, controlling parent wanted nothing so much as for me to believe in her invasive, fearsome, controlling deity…with Whose help she would seem to have successfully sabotaged my budding sexuality. Is it any wonder my shaky twenty-three-year-old self had to get as far away from her as possible? I broke and ran. The Good Daughter sacrificed relationship for the sake of self-preservation.
Unfortunately, I had internalized them both.
**
“And every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end,” Andy moans, his voice cracking with despair. My fear isn’t of dating my mother, it’s of becoming her. I have a horror of driving away the hapless objects of my affections with that same hungry, devouring, engulfing energy, that fearfulness that becomes controlling, the I-love-you that becomes I-annihilate-you. Psychologically speaking, coming from where I come from, I honestly don’t understand how any man could want to have sexual relations with a woman. How could she not remind him of the terrible Mother-Destroyer who could swallow him up forever in her ravenous maw? (Perhaps you gentlemen can enlighten me.)
I wonder sometimes, too, if my exercises in supernatural communication and “manifestation” aren’t as unwelcome, unfair, and controlling a psychic invasion as my mother’s fervent prayers and intentions for her Prodigal child’s return. Or as unnerving as when she tells me she had a sense that I was crying, shortly after one of my dark nights of the soul. I shudder; it’s like having her reading my notebooks again. Even on the spiritual plane, it seems I can’t escape her omnipresent tentacles.
I realize, in my more lucid moments, that she’s simply driven by a natural desire for love and connection, gone dysfunctional and somewhat mad with unaddressed need. And perhaps the unique position of mother as germinator and source instills a built-in sense of ownership and entitlement: I made you, therefore you are mine. Her God, after all, created us to alleviate his own boredom.
But I once joked with a friend that my romantic tendency is to respond to a snowball with an avalanche, overwhelming constitutionally wary males of the species with a glut of sudden emotion. I become fearful; I obsess; I’m jealous. Not unlike my mother and her humanly insecure God. I have my own stalker tendencies, and have been known to Google like a private investigator. I’m not proud of this. It’s constant work, unpacking my own fears, owning my own projections, asking myself why I need to live through someone else. As I said, I understand that we seek to control others when things feel frighteningly out of control for us, and I don’t want to continue that legacy.
But I have no road map for the alternative. I wonder these days if I err too much on the side of caution, reining myself in when I should act. Then again, perhaps action would be just another symptom of my twisted Mother pathology…pursuing at all costs, when the other just wants to be let be. I sincerely don’t know.
What I do know is that the person I most want to hear from doesn’t communicate with me on Facebook (or elsewhere) anymore, while my mother has practically hijacked my homepage. It’s like a virtual drama by a millennial Jean-Paul Sartre, a No Exit of social networking. Hell as your worst online nightmare.
Having written this post to exorcise intolerable feelings and restore my own sanity, I can see the humor in it. It’s actually quite hilarious. As is that insane Police song. A recent visitor to this blog was convinced I was writing a tragicomic novel…and maybe that’s what my life is. My very own Confederacy of Dunces. Or maybe a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.
I open the floor to you, friends: what should I call it? Mamma Mia is taken.
That’s a lot to deal with. Appropriately enough, I have to write hastily, since I’m due for dinner with my mother down in Tacoma–I visit every Sunday, she’s been living alone since my father died, and she isn’t as naturally solitary as I am, so I feel bad. But yes: controlling and invasive and always full of advice at the wrong times.
The Facebook problem is common: the problem with those sites is that anyone can find you. Take solace in the fact that Facebook is by its nature inane and largely a waste of time. I recommend some variation on what you’re doing here: have public and private sites. I have three blogs, two of which are public, and a web site, so I have options on what I can disclose to people. While I was reading your post, I got a notification that one of my best friend’s highschool girlfriend just found me on Twitter, and she’s always blasting everyone she knows with animal photos and inspirational stories involving angels and chain letters/prayers, so I don’t look on this development with enthusiasm. But such is life.
Short guy answer on why men want to have sex: we’re programmed for it. The fact that we’re hard-wired for orgasm doesn’t hurt. More than that when I have more time.
Yes, I understand that, but in that way gay men make much more sense to me. Sure, a man can “invade” you, but there just isn’t that same psychological threat of engulfment as there is with women. (Plus your sex drives are much more likely to match.) Although maybe when you’re male, and you’ve actually had a chance to separate from where you came from, you don’t mind going back!
I just wish the only person trying to invade me right now weren’t my mother. Pffffbbbb…
I don’t follow at all. Are you saying that you can’t understand why any man would want anything female? We don’t all have some psychological fear of engulfment. Remember, Freud and Jung shouldn’t be taken seriously.
have not yet read this post completely, but a quick comment already…throwing away my promise of thinking 3 times before commenting…hoping that first thoughts are the best
My first thoughts were…overprotective is probably as bad as underprotective…and: you will pass it on unless you can assimilate it…maybe block your mother from facebook – although that is probably not so easy to really do.
You could phone her and explain it to her…”I need my freedom”. If you have contact with a potential boyfriend an facebook, having your mother there is probably kind of like as if you had her with you everywhere you go. It would certainly not be very attractive…
btw. I think it is a good idea to convert any kind of potentially romantic relationship from online to offline as soon as possible. And develop it offline, not online. Online = no smelling, that cannot work…babe, if he doesn’t call you back that seems to be a really bad sign…i know i’m that smart ass type again, but maybe you need to look for other mother’s beautiful sons…
I think your mother needs to be stopped overprotecting you. Facebook blocked, phone call each week – what do you think about my formula?
Not my place to say, but: sounds like a formula for disaster. If a parent (or anyone else, for that matter) could understand that kind of consideration, then there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
I will say, however, that the Facebook set-up could provide an opportunity to clarify some boundaries. Blocking your mother from Facebook would be an affront; but if you had to delete something she wrote on your wall, you could explain privately “Sorry mom, but there are some things I don’t want to talk about, even in front of my friends. *Especially* in front of my friends.” Every mother has heard that at some point, but every so often may need reminding.
But there is no easy way of telling someone to stop being so persistent. The nature of these social network sites kind of encourages that sort of abuse.
I actually thought about writing to an advice columnist about this issue! Russ is probably right – deleting one thing is better than blocking altogether. It’s clear, though, Russ, that you just don’t experience what I mean about the smother/mother turning one off about women. I’m not postulating backward from theory, this is actual (viscerally) felt experience.
I actually feel a bit more rational about mamma having blown off a bunch of steam.
Online = no smelling! This is true, Blue. I would give my right arm just to *smell* certain persons again. But with the very rare exception, I can’t even bring myself to look at other mothers’ beautiful sons right now. It’s supposed to be pleasant and for me it’s downright painful. Maybe I’m screwed, but I’ve always had more in common with a Jane Austen character than any of the Sex and the City gals.
No, I guess I’m not experiencing any sort of Madonna-whore complex, or whatever Freudian confuting sexual partners with parental figures, if that’s what you mean. I’ve seen it in others, sure, but I tend to take people for who they are, better or worse. I’m also having this conversation on another front, about the confuting of sexually idealized depictions of women (porn actressses) vs. real-life women. I don’t get how anyone with much of any life experience would confuse the two, but apparently it’s prevalent enough to warrant more than a few books and articles on the subject.
I’m not following what you say you’re viscerally experiencing, though: are you saying that you think of yourself as being too matronly to attract men, who are only looking to be mothered? Or are you yourself looking to avoid men who remind you too much of your father?
Russ dear, you’re just lucky, I guess! Maybe it’s one of the benefits that comes with the Asperger territory — more literalism, less symbolism.
I’m not really saying any of those things listed, I’m still talking archetypes, which, judging by what you’ve said, are inconsequential and meaningless notions as far as you’re concerned. But I do feel like they’re like templates in my unconscious, ordering the reactions my mother (and those behaviors) inspire. What I’m saying is if woman = engulfment/loss of self, why would anyone go there with me or anyone else? But you just don’t have that equation in you!
Do you find Joseph Campbell as useless as Freud and Jung?
I like the whole bit about Asperger’s making me less insane and more grounded than those not so affected. And I was feeling grateful just for the mathematical knack–
First off, let me say that I don’t think Freud and Jung are useless–they just shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Freud had a lot of loopy ideas, and I can certainly understand why he may be despised by the modern educated woman, but I think he made a lot of useful contributions to psychology and analysis. Jung as well, though I’m not as familiar with his work in detail as I am with his ideas, loosely. All I can say is that I’m not about archetypes or collective unconscious–so I’d suck as a Buddhist. Likewise, I think Joseph Campbell is kinda cool, certainly interesting and thought-provoking, but I’m not buying the whole Hero With A Thousand Faces angle. Sounds to me like TOE in physics (Theory Of Everything), some kind of grand unification theory of human consciousness, and I’m not buying it. I think human experience is too diverse, too unique, to be summed up that simply.
Nevertheless, we can see some similarities, infer some loose generalities, draw some conclusions. So we can talk about Madonna-whore, so long as we can agree that it’s not a universal experience. I guess lots of guys have mother-complexes of whatever variety, and that can complicate relationships. No, I don’t experience it myself.
But let me say this as well: I don’t think that the association of Mother and Sexual Ideal is necessarily very common, but you ask how anyone could recognize that sort of loss-of-self and still want it? Well…I want it, in some vague way. When I think of the Object Of My Obsessions, I feel a strong sense of willingness to surrender. Believe me, that’s no easy statement coming from as staunch an individualist as myself. But I’ve finally met someone I could totally give myself up to. I’m dying to be overwhelmed. This must be what male black widow spiders feel.
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
Dear babe, I’ve read the rest of this entry now…
I feel a mix of feeling sorry because of your suffering, I hope this wording is good, and fascination…the fascination is hard to explain without vomiting my whole life into your comment section, which I will *not* do, don’t worry
It is pretty clear that our parents do affect us tremendously, we have them around us for at least 15-20 years, day to day and at least the first 10 years we look up to them…as if they were giants.
Some stuff is really inherited, not only body features, there is recent science that strongly hints that even things like traumata can be inherited. But a lot of stuff is of course impregnated on us by the repeated behavior of our parents, it molds us, like a dog puppy is molded in the first 4 weeks.
Did I mention Bowlby already? (attachment theory)
Insecure attachment causes problems with any relationship in your future life.
I often see the picture in my mind of you in a tree, waiting to be rescued by…Sonny?
Together with attachment theory goes the concept of developmental trauma, the kind of trauma that goes like drops on a stone, drop by drop until there is a hole in the stone.
If you look at the problem you see only a drop of water – can hardly be the cause for anything traumatic, an independent observer will say. But ask the inmates of Guantánamo about water related torture techniques..
You need to shake that off, and that’s no trifle, no trivial undertaking.
Sounding smart-assy again. (Do you like my german-english?
I have only a vague understanding of you, I’m aware of that, and therefore my advice could be totally wrong.
My statements are just beta versions, uttered to evaluate by feedback, how much of it is useful – then maybe to be fine tuned or replaced completely.
Block your mother – that sounds a little bit like “kill your mother”, does it? So, yes, maybe Russ is right.
In any case I think your mother crossed the line by reading your private notes and your notebook, this is violating your privacy.
Mother’s do love their children, that’s in the genes, but sometimes they need to be stopped gently but firmly.
They will continue to love you.
And if not, it is better to live without this love.
So you can’t lose. Although I again want to make it clear that this is easier said then done, and even easier for me to advise, sitting comfortable on my safe voyeur chair.
Will I eat my own food? I don’t have much contact to my mother…I do love her…will visit her soon, she said she would be glad to see me again…long story…
It is also fascinating that Russ has Asperger’s, if I understood this correctly (was it diagnosed?), what does this mean that your two most active commenters seem to be affected? There would be a lot to say about this, but that would again be a little polluting your comment section…
Next…babe, please do make sure that you eat enough.
I step in the line of your mother here.
Check your BMI, ok
I find you totally delightful — that’s the first thing I want to say. The second is that what you wrote brought to mind something I read recently in A.H. Almaas’s book The Void. He talks about how he’s seen among many women a desire to devour or swallow up men with their vaginas, and that beneath that desire is a feeling of a hole in the genital area (similar to what men who experience castration anxiety go through). What he says is that, remarkably, when these women keep breathing and allow the sensation of a “hole” to just be as it is, they feel peaceful and spacious inside. I wonder if any of this resonates with you or seems totally off.
Hey, thanks, PPC. (I edited your post as this is my “shadow” blog where I’m just “alienbaby.”) I was feeling just a little besieged just now and your praise made me feel a lot better.
I don’t think I’ve experienced what you’re talking about, although I do get a hungry feeling of wanting to *consume* somebody. I also think I have some actual penis envy, just because they’re just so much dang fun to play with, and imagine how much more fun it is to feel it! Well, I don’t have to tell you fellas.
Blue: I could consume at least 20 pounds of my own body weight before I’d be too thin! My mother makes things up to worry about. It keeps her busy.
Yeah, the Asperger boys just keep it comin! I could launch into some huuuuge long thing about how my counselor 10 years ago suggested my dad might be mildly autistic, and how most of the men — present fixation and the guy I called ‘Luke Taylor’ excepted — I’ve gone for were some kind of version of him…hyper-rational and high on the IQ but not necessarily the EQ, often dismissive of my more emotional, intuitive, “squishy” reality…and how I’ve spent my life trying to defend myself to him in various guises, make him see squishy me as legitimate. Then I realized I’d just be on the defensive all over again! Ha!!! I will say that Sonny and Luke are a lot more akin to my squishitude.
Russ: that was a nice ending. “I’m dying to be overwhelmed.” Your talk of surrender actually echoes what I’ve heard modern mystics like Andrew Harvey say about “Divine Feminine/Mother energy” and how it can affect people, especially men, although I’m 100 percent sure you don’t care about that.
I second that, you are totally delightful and wonderful – that’s way I’m spending so much time here and try to be helpful, instead probably drowning you in some kind of negative information…
– but fully yours?
I can’t help it, I keep thinking “forget about Sonny”. That’s probably just the thing you want to hear least.
I think you will just filter me away now
From the info I have I get the impression that Sonny is the kind of guy you never would really own – could you bare that? Maybe be together with him, only to find out one day that he’s cheating? Do I have a wrong impression?
Wouldn’t you be better off with someone else, maybe not just as good looking (but still good looking of course, I don’t say get some ugly guy
Do you have this soul-brother feeling about him?
There are other soul brothers out there, I’m quite sure…
If you can’t have the one you really love, love the one you’re with…
I think I know what you think now.
Your feelings for him are so strong, it must be him, only him…
I understand that, I really do…
It is a nice feeling…
What do you think about the feeling of being in love and egoism? I want to have, I want to have, I want to have…
And also “I want you to want me too”
It’s a thin line between love and hate…but I guess you’ll never hate Sonny, and this would be a good thing, the shared beautiful moments…
That you want to repeat them is understandable…
You do have a lot to give, I want to say keep your eyes open for someone who wants to take it and has something to give you back…
I don’t see your face expression, babe, and I can’t reach out and touch you… Thank god, you might think
If it was too much for you I am sorry.
This damn blue butterfly will flutter away now…
just one thing: remember what Rilke said: life is in the right, always.
Let it catch you, surround you gently…
please excuse the phonetic word errors from my last comment, (I wrote hastily in the morning, before any coffee)
I had to take a day off. I don’t react well when I feel patronized, especially by men, however pure their motives. And that frankly felt pretty patronizing! Never mind that I have that voice in my head all day long already as it is, the introjected chatter of the Common Wisdom, and could hear the same naysaying anytime from most anybody I could toss a pebble and hit.
I took the day off and sat around in my underwear listening to Damien Rice and Glen Hansard. And I felt much better. And I realized something. All along other people have tried to tell me what’s best for me, especially my mother and the rest of my family. But if I had stayed in their insular, circumscribed, pain-phobic universe, I would never have experienced the exquisite shivers of passion, the agony and the ecstasy, that Damien and Glen sing about so bloody beautifully.
Wherever I am, it seems I wind up acting out the unrepresented opposite: among the rationalista I’m a woo-woo, among mystics I’m the skeptic. In my parents’ house I want nothing so much as to scream a stream of obscenities, empty bottles of Wild Turkey, and smash them against the wallpaper. I guess I could find a nice, homely boy who would never do anything to hurt me…now I’m going to be brutally honest…and I would find it necessary to torture him in subtle ways, and constantly look over his shoulder, resenting him for not being what I really wanted (because the f*ing manifestation people told me I could “do, be, and have anything,” and I had once successfully conjured up my own man). I’ve seen this kind of behavior dozens of times in women who’ve settled; it’s like their revenge at the universe, directed at an innocent target. (I don’t think Sonny has that perverse streak, but I do.) I would torment the poor sweet bastard until he left me. And no one deserves that. I more properly deserve to be alone, to marinate in my own Dostoevskian perversity, and listen to Damien and Glen.
I guess that makes this a pretty sucky personal development blog, but at least I’m sticking to my byline.
I promised to fly away, but I hope you don’t mind if I come fluttering back instantly
Patronizing…I’m really sorry if it felt that way, and thanks for telling me. Will let that sink in…I guess it is really hard to find the correct balance between “coolness” and intervention…
I’m blind, and your feedback educates me.
Your answer is great, I’m really relieved because your silence scared me…
I don’t think yours is a sucky pd blog, not at all, it is the best I know – can anyone show me a better one?
Non, je ne regrette rien?
That’s great, enjoy every inch of the journey!
One other thing: the question that came up for me through all this was what you actually want. Not necessarily with men, although that may be the area where you’re wanting something.
hm…I might add that, you may have guessed that, what I wrote is based on personal experience. It’s kind of like you see someone walking towards a cliff and you tell him “don’t continue to go there, turn around, there’s a cliff, you will fall down”.
but it might very well be the point that everybody wants to and needs to find out for herself if and where there is a cliff and how to navigate around it or jump down from it, to maybe see if one can fly or maybe just land softly and so on and on…
Unwanted advice, yeah? God, I feel like your mother!
I’m really sorry…but definitely you proved you’re a strong woman!
Did you ever feel happy sad?
It’s kind of like ice cream with ketchup or so…it’s the joy of feeling *something* again, like a rising sun.
Probably not available without the long darkness before it
PPC: Good question. It may not help that I started out by working backwards from a negative, looking at where I came from, the lives of my mother and sibling, and saying “I do NOT want THAT.” It’s difficult to express what I want in generalities, the way one is supposed to do in order to be productive and get somewhere. Feels unnatural to me. It’s more like the old saw about what porn is: “I know it when I see it.” Although 50K a year to live on and plenty of time to write would be a nice start.
Blue: “Can anyone show me a better one?” Ha! Thanks!!! No hard feelings.
I mean no hard feelings MOM!
Happy-sad yes. Lou Reed had that line about bacon and ice cream. It’s samsara, I guess, but would we want to live without it?
babe, babe… I think I better clarify that…I seem to be especially gifted to create misunderstandings, I’ve been told that
Really, I know no better blog, since your guest post on urban monk I’m hooked. You should write a book!
Of course I wanted to say that I don’t think anyone can show me a better blog.
I will try a different strategy with you now – I won’t ever give you any advice, until you ask MOM
So, even if you blog that you discovered that it’s really wonderful to climb on skyscrapers on crack – I will just keep my fingers firmly calm! Promise
Hey, climbing skyscrapers on crack is my new favorite pastime. How’d you know?
I knew it
> How could she not remind him of the terrible Mother-Destroyer who could swallow him up forever in her ravenous maw?
Russ is right, our fascination for the female is programmed in the genes, the fascination for the different, mysterious…soft, curvy…
A woman of roughly the same age we don’t compare with mother, I guess, and if we do we think positive and see her as a loving mother.
Hm, I’m not very satisfied with this answer myself – but at least I tried in the little time available. Have a nice weekend
maybe you didn’t know the following, and as you’re not a male geek, the chances for that are quite high
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy.
All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.
That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people’s failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.
If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.
This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.
Bob and float, float and bob.
Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let yourself waft higher.
Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.
They are most likely to say something along the lines of, ‘Good God, you can’t possibly be flying!’
It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.
Waft higher and higher.
Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.
DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.
When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.
You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your maneuverability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway.
You will also learn about how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.
There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments. Few genuine hitch-hikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.
— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy’
Wanted to say something about the penis envy you mentioned a few comments ago: I think that’s cool. Once again, Freud’s idea, but he got it wrong. My recollection is he thought women envied male power and felt that they were biologically incomplete and impaired. You summed it up perfectly: cocks are just fun to play with. That’s all the empowerment you need, right there. And as you may recall from my LJ post, a cock is necessary to truly appreciate pussy. So yes, plainly speaking, it’s nice to have one.
I may as well admit to pussy-envy, since we’re being honest. Strikes me as high-maintenance, but worth it, given what orgasmic excesses I’ve personally witnessed. That’s *gotta* leave any male orgasm in the dust.
And so I wanted to say (and will, at some point, as soon as I finish that goddamn email I have half-finished in my gmail Drafts folder), that this is a very good way to approach Sonny, or any other man with a history of promiscuity. A very good strategy in dealing with men sexually is to put a potential encounter in terms that he’ll understand, ie “C’mon, it’ll be fun!” The advantage to having your orgasm hard-wired into your sexual response is that men don’t have to be convinced that they’ll get something good out of it. It’s rarely as simple as that, I know, since men have eyes and a brain (despite what anyone may say in moments of frustration), but that’s a good place to start if you want to use the intimacy to open a dialogue.
Blue: never read Douglas Adams, but that sounds like exactly the kind of mindset my coach talks about when he talks about such reason-defying (and seemingly physical law- or probability-defying) feats he’s accomplished as bending steel utensils and regularly winning large sums of money at casinos. There are tales of transcendental (Yogananda) meditators who can hover a few inches above the ground, and there are documented instances of yogis, white-haired old men, who meditate outside practically naked in subzero temperatures for days. My friend is forever repeating that much more is possible than we allow. This appeals to the child in me, but frustrates the adult always crashing into the ground and breaking my nose.
Russ: are you writing a dissertation, bro? I’ve waited so long it’s probably the moot point that bm3 thinks it is. Still, I’ve been contemplating what PPC asked, about what I want, and I’d honestly give anything just to play with THAT one one more time (if it couldn’t be 3000 more times). Jeezus Lord, I’d be happy just to smell him again.
Such a delightful discussion, I must say again. It’s interesting that you talk about specific sensations like smells when you think about desiring this guy you’ve been talking about. My sense from this was that you may be wanting to feel certain sensations in your body — for example, maybe a warmth in your chest when you smell that scent, and so on. I wonder if it would be useful for you to think about what these sensations would be.
I get this feeling like I know where you’re going with this…kind of like the way one might treat a drug addict. What other ways are there to experience the same sensations without the drug? That boils an awful lot of things down into a single sense response, though.
I find myself for some reason thinking about Woody Allen’s “orgasmitron” in the movie Sleeper.
Before I forget, I must tell Bluemorpho3 (and anyone else who’s interested) about the dream I had last night, since he’s the one who furnished that radical Douglas Adams quote about flying.
I was hitchhiking (!) with a companion – female, not anyone I remember – by the side of a road in the mountains, and we were picked up by a chatterbox woman driver who talked nonstop without paying too much attention to the road. I pointed out gently when she went off the main road onto a side dirt one. It was a narrow road, with no guard rail. She nonchalantly started to make a U-turn, not noticing how close she was to the left edge, and we went over the cliff!
I closed my eyes and braced for the inevitable. I was aware of the sensation of falling, but it seemed like the car just melted away around me, and there was no impact. I found myself back up on the road, walking along, as if I’d floated back up there.
I wondered, was I dead? Or did I just miss the ground?
Fascinating!
I read this already on the weekend, but couldn’t answer then.
But the same night (after reading) I also had a dream in which I was flying with a car. In my case I was first involved in a race by foot, suddenly I was in a racing car and flew a few hundred meters, landed safely.
If your dream factory produces flying dreams this has to be a good sign…
Hm, seems like the child in you has taken in DA…
Some more quotes:
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
—
“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
Max Simon wrote a newsletter called “The Most Important Question To Constantly Answer” on 21.03 – the question is “what do you want”
I wanna be up on the roof
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” -Buddha
We all have our favorite artists, musicians, writers, philosophers and so on….none are perfect or completely right..and there isn’t anything wrong or right about it…..it just “IS”. I think the best thing we can do is listen and be open-minded to the possibilities; even Doubt can be a gift at times. Personally, I am a big fan of intuition.
I think one of the reasons we are here (on Earth and in existence) is to learn from each other as well as teach each other – whether it is conscious or unconscious,direct or indirect. I know that I have learned a great deal just by watching/talking to people.
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On another note, I too have had some similar feelings in regards to having penis envy and even feeling very depressed about my sexual defectiveness.
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So much to say, but so little time….I’ll just conclude by saying that I find your blog refreshing always. Good luck with the mom situation, and stay grounded
the buddha quote makes sense
please don’t “believe” Douglas Adams, he’s just a funny guy.
btw., the casino winning guru might be a charlatan, every time money is involved I get skeptic…
Weird, everyone talking about dreams now. Had two unusually vivid dreams last week. Wednesday night I was swimming/scuba diving with co-workers in the Puget Sound. At some point I swam right into some very large aquatic mammal. (Don’t get all Freudian on me, you know how I hate that.) No, I’ve never been scuba diving, and what’s more that water came down the coast from Alaska, so you’d freeze in minutes. And I’m not one for swimming, either.
Then on Thursday night (when you all were having dreams of varying signifcance) I was driving a bus through the Ballard neighborhood. Had to be careful, with all those hills, and driving such a large vehicle. For some reason, what echoed with me was the need to abide by the established bus route–even though there weren’t any passengers or anything.
I also want to go back to what you said about tormenting who you’re with, if they don’t live up to your ideal. You think that’s related to some sort of wish manifestation gone awry? Not just a testing of that person, to see if they’ll actually deliver on your expectations? I like to think of myself as accepting the other person for who they are, but in truth it’s been so long since I’ve been in a relationship that I can’t say with any certainty how I’d behave. When I’m with the Object Of My Obsessions, I’m so in thrall that, while I can’t say that she can do no wrong, I’m certainly so taken with her that I can’t imagine being antagonistic. Perhaps that has more to say about how far along the relationship isn’t, rather than any reflection on my character.
Sagenhoney: hey! I was just wondering about you, and wishing you’d come back. Your comment sounds like something that belongs on tomorrow’s post rather than this one. Are you psychic??!! I love that Buddha quote and have used it myself. Please stick around…
Blue: the “charlatan” has actually been a friend of mine for several years, and it’s true, he wins big almost every time! I’m surprised the casino hasn’t called him into the office.
Russ: interesting dreams, I could offer an interpretation but I don’t think you’re interested.
The thing is, you’re similarly “fixated” — when you think about relationship, all you think of is Her. You’re not into speculating about some random person! Of course you don’t feel antagonistic in that case. What I said was kind of reactive, but I’d have a lot of misdirected anger toward whatever “replacement” I was expected to accept, for not being Him.
Wait, so what are you saying? That Sonny isn’t your ideal? That you’re comparing him to someone/something else?
I’m not sure how to describe how I feel about the Object Of My Obsessions. I guess I never defined my Type, I just had a loose idea of what I’d like. Put it this way: she’s everything I’m looking for in a chick, and we seem to have about 80-90% in common. Thing now is to find out if I can flow with the other 10-20%–on my part, that is. I don’t even know how she feels about me.
Russ, did you ever meet her or do you know her only via internet?
Babe, I would not be too surprised if your casino ex-friend calls you soon, asking for some money
And, before I forget, I used to have vagina envy – wondered how sex feels with it, I guess we always envy what we don’t have…
And finally, MOM returns to talk about the disgusting things she was forced to read in the comments!
PLAYING with your own genitals? You will burn in hell and it makes you blind!
Well, MOM aside – at least too much masturbation will really make you blind, I think, egoism and lust without emotions…(even if you fantasize, in the end you are alone) that’s another reason why having an object of total desire but no sex with her/him…sucks.
Ah…and about approaching promiscuous men…best is a good blow job – if he does feel nothing at all for you that’s no problem, he’ll orgasm perfectly. Your blow job will be better the more you feel, so it’s a good deal for him. You can take Valium later to cope with your feelings.
That’s not cynical and I don’t want to make any assumptions about Sonny, just generally speaking.
Russ, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I was saying.
Blue, my mamma says I should wash out your mouth with soap.
BM3 – The Object Of My Obsessions is a twice-published author, something of a (very) minor celebrity in Seattle. I have seen her many times, and twice had the honor of having her out on a date. On the last occasion, I actually had her over to my apartment (though she did not stay). But most of my correspondence with her is over the internet, yes. Sign of the times.
And, in all candor: your advice to Alien Baby quite literally sucks. Though I am all in favor of oral pleasures, I think it would send all the wrong signal at this point, a sort of fast intimacy but suggesting emotional subjugation. Sonny would be undoubtedly pleased for the moment, but would most likely not reciprocate very quickly, if at all. (He hasn’t made any clear attempts to do so up to this point, right?)
Here’s a hint: if you need to medicate yourself afterwards, odds are your attempts at emotional resonance have failed, possibly to the point of disaster. (And this is Professor THC talking at you.)
A. Baby – I think I now see what you mean, that Sonny is your ideal and that any substitute would eventually earn your contempt (I had to read over your initial remarks a few times, guess I’m not as quick on the uptake as I used (?) to be). I had forgotten that you seemingly conjured him up, Witches-of-Eastwick-style. Me, I read about the Object Of My Obsessions in the Seattle TIMES, and began to fall in love from there. Oddly enough, I’ve never really done what you have, just mentally Frankensteining some ideal Woman, even during my very frequest “workouts”, when I let my all-too vivid imagination run amok. On reflection, I think it is equal parts my not confuting idealism with reality, and the fact that I can’t fool myself, even in fantasy.
I think you’ll get some time with Sonny, here’s hoping that it’s closer to the 3000 times you mentioned, and not the one-off. And go all out if you do, you already have the precedent, so BM3′s first-date advice won’t get you any more personal with him than you’ve been. (However, if you do find yourself down in front, just be mindful of your teeth. That’s about the only male complaint in an otherwise wonderfully generous gift.)
Goodness, fellas, my blog seems to have turned into a Dan Savage column. Thanks for your good wishes, Russ, although I actually thought bm3 was kidding.