My mother called me yesterday asking if I’d bought a certain gift for my sister, who had her birthday yesterday but is in Rome so that we’re going to celebrate it next week. She also asked me how I was doing, and I noticed that I was still finding it hard to respond normally - I keep expecting her to want to hear something about “using my brains” cause that was what she asked me the last time she called, and I feel that while the interesting, intellectual things I do matter, there is more to life than “using one’s brains”. So I just said that I was fine and was going to a a fitness centre’s open house today (yesterday). She seemed to find it interesting enough, but I still felt kind of weird about it. How do I relate to my mother when I’m supposed to be “just a visitor who happens to be her daughter” but I guess that both of us feel like a mother-daughter relationship creates a different position, especially when you’re of my age. I cannot permit myself to have the same relationship with my mother that
she has with hers, because I’m still too young for that. It’s been only four months since I moved out of her house and a difference of opinions, no matter how important, doesn’t alter that. My parents seem to have agreed to disagree about my decisions - and of course this is not the first time, cause rehab created as much controversy -, and are still accepting me despite our conflict, but the simple fact that they probably know now that I’ll stick with my decisions, even if my parents disagree, has changed the situation for all of us. “Responsibility” is my parents’ device as far as parenting is concerned, but responsibility as in making one’s own decisions and seeing what comes from it oneself - if, after five years, I appear to have ruined my life, it’s my own fault -, is something totally different from responsibility for making sure you do as expected - the kind of responsibility I’ve hated ever since finding out about it.
Of course, you can’t expect a seven-year-old to take responsibility in the first sense - and, should I have ruined my life, people might’ve thought that you can’t do it with a nineteen-year-old. One always needs some accountability - ie. responsibility in the second sense - when one is a child or an adolescent. I have not broken with any form of accountability, in that I’m still willing to listen to what my parents, training home staff, university people and anyone else in a form of authority, has to say. The only way in which I refuse to be accountable nowadays is that of my parents - and only them - making the decision of how I’m going to arrange my life and then making it my responsibility to do it. They are not the only adults important in my life and they are not the ones to make decisions for me, cause I’m myself the one to do that, being over eighteen.
It was not an illegal, or even unethical, decision of my parents, when they kicked me out of the house three weeks ago becaus eof a difference of opinions about such fundamental things as training home, college and all that. Parents are required, till a person is 21, to provide food and shelter if needed, but I had both, and, as long as parents don’t deprive their children under 21 of these means, it’s not more than reasonable that they can set limits. Even though training home staff disagreed, I can see the reasonability in their setting the limit that, when I don’t make their decisions, or when I’m acting behaviourally disordered, or whatever the reason was behind their kicking me out of the house, I’m not welcome in their house. This falls, for a person who has food and shelter, under responsibility in the first sense: making your own decisions and seeing their consequences.
Of course, my conviction that I could do without my parents if they were to stick with whatever decision they made - it’s not quite clear to me -, is most likely not true. On April 22, 23 and 24, I felt an intense loneliness because I knew that I had no-one besides my parents and my sister. Now I’ve not felt accepted, let alone loved, by any of them for a few years - I attribute that to adolescence -, but I knew they could at least keep the illusion of caring about me and I was willing to buy into it. I have great difficulty doing that now, which seems to be at the core of my own difficulties communicating with them now. Whether it’s due to common adolescent loneliness or not, after our conflict of three weeks ago, I find it hard to establish a feeling of being accepted, again. Whether anything that may or may not have contributed to the conflict, relates, I don’t know - I’m the mistress of putting things into contexts that really aren’t there -, but it feels as if it was only the climax of a conflict (or sense of it, at least on my part) that’s lasted for quite a while.
I also remain the mistress of filling in hidden meanings, and so I find it hard to answer normally to a question as simple as how I’m doing, when my mother previously meant whether I engaged enough (for her liking) in intellectual activities. I don’t want my intelligence highlighted all the time - it’s one of my hot buttons and has been for many years -, and I don’t want anyone to think that the only way I can do anything interesting is by involving myself intellectually (which is one of my ways of spending leisure time, of course), so I get vigilant when such connotations are present, and when I previously found them present, I am vigilant the next time I get the same question, which is how I’m doing. I fortunately caught that feeling in time and was able to react neutrally by making the comment about the fitness centre, which was, indeed, the only interesting thing I’d been doing lately, so it wasn’t a lie or selection anyway. I don’t know how it came across, but I’m not going to allow myself to fill in meanings again.
