breaking patterns with mom

I’ve been observing my mother this past month and a half that I’ve been staying with her.

Anyone who knows me even a little, knows that my mother is a significant influence on my life. This is a fairly regular occurrence between mothers and daughters, especially for elder daughters and especially in Asian cultures. The woman you grow into is inevitably a derivative of the source code housed within your mother (and her mother and her mother and…).

The imprints our mothers make on us are hard to delineate from the rest of our Selves. And while a lot of its contribution to our personalities might be positive — good habits, moral codes, loving dispositions — , some of it leads to self-sabotaging behavior that reenforces burdensome ancestral karma being passed down from mothers to daughters.

So, going back to my mother. I’ve been observing her and what I’ve realized is that she comes from a long line of women who have an extraordinary ability frustrate themselves and be the source of their own misery.

My mom has always been high-strung. Its such a normal part of my life that I didn’t realize that all along I had been in a bootcamp that taught me how to deal with overwrought individuals who can’t neither relax nor manage the emotional fallout of their inability to relax. I have often wondered where this sinking and jittery feeling of “not doing enough” comes from. I used to think it was a positive externality of having a demanding mother with high standards. Like I was being trained to be a Spartan or something. But now, after having spent an extended amount of time with mother, in which I have been really present with her for the first time in…ever(?), I see that I am mirroring her behavior and not just responding to it as an external stimulus. This headstrong, powerful, irritating, beautiful woman whom I have loved, admired and yes, also bitterly raged against, is the person who I emulate when things aren’t going my way.

The person who she is the unhappiest with when things aren’t going her way, is herself.

Lets take an example. My mom is under the weather today. A cold, thankfully nothing more than that. But its a bad cold, she’s been sneezing all day. I tried to get her to rest, to take it easy, to not worry about managing the house today (not something she enjoys anyways). “We can figure it out”, I told her, I always tell her. But I knew there is no point pushing because she had already decided that she was going to spend the day miserably shuffling around the house doing what needs to be done.

(She would never let me do this, nor my dad, nor anyone over whom she exercises motherly dominion.)

She had a tortured look on her face and her voice was dripping with self-directed pathos. She’s not known for keeping a poker face, if she’s miserable she’ll make sure you know that she’s miserable. And as I saw her go about her day, I was tempted to get annoyed at this self-defeating approach to managing her illness. I used to believe that she was putting on a show to punish me for her decision, and it used to drive me up the wall 🤬 But this time I understood, having reached a higher stage of maturity, that it wasn’t really about me at the end of the day. I’m sure my presence ignited some old grievances in her and served as fuel for the fire. But the primary source of the inferno was her frustration with herself, with her inability to let go.

She couldn’t give herself a break.

She couldn’t let herself believe that taking a break will turn out just fine.

Her identity as a woman and her inability to trust that others can pick up slack where she drops it, no matter truth quotient behind it, would not let her catch her breath.

There is no room for external intervention in the conversation that my mother is having with herself. All I can do is empathize with my her. I am her daughter and I push myself in the same semi-involuntary way as she does. (I don’t however, carpet-bomb my surroundings with my negative emotions. Or at least I hope I don’t but others might disagree 😅.)

So today I just sat back, tried to be mindful of things with which I could help her and otherwise stayed out of her way as much as possible. Instead of being a casualty of my mom’s shitty day, I painted and pondered over inherited karma. They say the first step to breaking patterns is to be aware of them.

✅ 🙏