Siberia

Today Psychology Today served up an article for me about why abrasive people act the way they do. “Understanding the Abrasive Individual” referred to the personality quality as antagonism. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m an abrasive individual. But I think I’m also kind and try to be aware of other peoples’ feelings. Although I do speak my mind and I’m too blunt sometimes.

I think the most abrasive person in my life was probably my mother, who never had any clue why she rubbed me or anyone else the wrong way. A typical conversation with my mother went like this. Mom: “I really like your new haircut. Your old haircut was so unattractive. I’m glad you changed it.” When I told her that wasn’t a compliment, that was an insult that made me feel bad about myself, she told me that was just how the women in “her circle” talked to each other, sort of a sophisticated New Yorkese, and I must not understand their way of being together or something. I have no idea who these trendy, smack-talking friends of hers were.

I have a social media friend who I’ve known since Sarah was a baby, and her mother died suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of years before we met. She is still mourning her mother very intensely and missing her. I do miss my mother sometimes and I really wish I could talk to her about feeling so down these last few months. But I don’t really miss-miss her, especially the last few years when she had a lot of cognitive dysfunction and would call me up to rant about conspiracies between her doctors and her neighbors being able to control the thermostat in her apartment and so forth. She would get very angry if I didn’t buy in to these issues and offer advice. But then she would proceed to tell me why my advice was worthless.

I have to say that a big problem was also that I felt she never fully accepted or understood Sarah, and this really bothered me. She often talked to Sarah, or about Sarah, as if Sarah had little to no cognitive function. I would talk to my mother on the phone and tell her some news about Sarah or some event we were carefully preparing Sarah for — getting her period, for example — and my mother would say to me as if she were informing me about the obvious, “Oh honey, she doesn’t understand what that is! She can’t know what that is!” As if Sarah were in a vegetative state and couldn’t comprehend basic concepts and ideas.

I don’t know where or why she developed this very narrow, reduced notion of Sarah’s consciousness and mental abilities. Maybe it was her own fears about her physical (and mental) decline. But it didn’t make sense, and my mom’s attitude really mystified and irritated me, and it put a block between us.

Once my parents asked to Facetime with Sarah and me, and we set it up. Sarah was really delighted and happy to see them, and we “talked” for a few minutes. Then my parents said their goodbyes but didn’t end the connection at their end. I heard my mother say “It’s just so sad.” Why was it sad? I’ll never understand that.

My mother made me feel like a resident of Siberia. You know how when you read histories of Russia, how the intellectuals, or the Jews or Kazakhs or whatever group were forced to go live in Siberia, and it was such a terrible punishment for them. Well, I get that they were no longer living in glamorous St. Petersburg or Moscow or Lithuania or Kazakhstan, but acting like the move was a big punishment and a nightmare? How does that make the people of Siberia feel? The residents of Siberia are just living their daily lives, extracting their normal degree of happiness in life, and they find out that other people consider their life a punishment? Can you imagine if your new neighbors move in, and you bring them a loaf of banana bread as a welcome wagon thing, and they report to you that they are actually serving a life sentence and this is their prison? Gee. I never realized my life was someone else’s notion of hell.