EN GARD

YOU DON'T SEE THE ME IN ME

Gaining wisdom means being able to clearly see what is actually happening, not what you think is happening vis-à-vis your feelings. I realize that the tension I feel when I talk to my son has to do with avoiding the perception he has superimposed on me. I am an "ice queen" and it is "always about me" when my feelings come to the fore. I would wonder to myself, who is he talking to? I have other people in my life who reflect back my warmth and my companionship. His name calling and characterization of me had me en gard like a fencer in a match. "En Gard," when he'd respond to my attempt at providing perspective with...."I'm not them. I don't care about them." "En Gard" when it became clear that my relationship with my 3 year old Grandson was contingent on my babysitting duties or being a spectator across a restaurant lunch table. I wanted to be family. "En Gard" when one of my rare invited visits to their home was chronicled by taking offense to my checking email on my Blackberry. " En Gard, En Gard....." I probably did seem somewhat mechanical. I was "fencing" so as not to get "stabbed".

Now that my son has a new daughter and her arrival was duly lauded on Facebook without so much as a phone call to me, I am at the preverbial crossroad. Second child of his and his wife and second time back at the same cross road that I thought we had long distanced in our rear view mirrors. "En Gard"

Angry? Hurt? Discarded? Thrown under the bus? Is there a hole in my heart that hurts in the morning when I wake up and realize that I will not hear his voice and/or see him? Of course there is but there is also a blanket of wisdom that covers me these days. I love him. I am, therefore, letting him go. I forgive his weakness. I forgive his plentiful self importance. I do not forgive his behavior, however.

I am ME and not the Me that you see in ME.

Building a Foundation of Wisdom

"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them".....Oscar Wilde

I think there are complicated layers in this parent/child concoction. There are personalities, dispositions, styles of communication, values and substance. In a perfect combination, these layers merge together effortlessly. One thing though.......there is no perfect storm, so to speak. Just a layers fusing and overlapping creating obstacles along the way. Take, for instance, the layer of disposition. Some people are hard wired to be brittle or mellow. Some of us grow to develop direct styles of communication. Sometimes it's abrupt, hard hitting and/or blunt. Other people have soft, diplomatic, inquisitive styles. A direct communication style delivered to a brittle disposition can result in spontaneous combustion. There's a parental style too. My Achilles heel was always respect. It was pretty obvious. It was my daily mantra. Oddly enough.....it is the respect that I required that is MIA with my adult child. My reflection tells me that my most important line in the sand became the weapon of retaliation. Could I have tempered that position with less rhetoric and less intensity? You betcha. But I cannot go back and change the template. I did a lot of right things too. I loved like a mother bear. I protected, guided, laid down boundaries, rewarded with pride. It hurts a lot to have him overlook my benevolence and cherry pick my faults.

"A vessel is not truly empty until it is broken".........Confucius

When I heard this quotation, I knew it was the first ingredient of wisdom that I needed for my personal redemption. I will not become an empty vessel, broken into shards with my essence evaporated on the floor only to fill another vessel with the characterizations that he assigns to me. I am not the names my adult angry child labels me. To wear his characterizations gives him more power than he has the grace to handle. I have to be the person my values dictate. It is not helpful to buy his version of who I am. It locks him into his prison of persecution. It doesn't offer him the freedom of wisdom and perspective. It simply fuels his anger.