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Blog Entry 117 of 182 Bad Mom
I call myself Bad Mom because at the time I came up with it, I was learning about the assumptions we put behind our words. I was following the pattern of not believing that my kids are okay, and speaking to them from that basis. I changed that, and it made a big difference. I am from Utah and my people are still living there. My husband was in the Air Force and we rattled around until we saw Colorado, and we stuck.

What if I'm a pretender?
Contributed by: Lisa Arata   on 8/17/2008

A week or more ago I described a situation where I got my son to Freshmen registration late, they wouldn't let me in and I had a little temper tantrum that surprised me.

Well, today is Sunday morning and I was musing about the importance of marking this day in a special way, since we don't go to church and yet need to do something nice. My husband was working on his computer and I was musing out loud. Then he started chuckling about what I was doing.

I was getting hurt feelings. We'd had this conversation before and I thought he'd agree that we often waste our Sundays taking care of weekday things and not being a family. But something about the way I was talking made him chuckle.

What happens next is interesting, if only in the context of this blog.

My feelings were hurt and I started tearing up. He seemed inimical to me, like something that mattered very much to me was something silly. He was going to tell me why I was so funny and I said I didn't want to hear it, I just wanted my message heard.

He said he was chuckling but he was on my side and he loved me and all, but it didn't feel that way. I wasn't experiencing him on my side. I experienced it like a child.

This makes me wonder: Am I really mature? I had a temper tantrum. I got hurt feelings over being laughed at. These are two things I thought I'd grown out of.

Maybe I was exhibiting adult behavior all these years, not letting my temper control me and acting oh-so-calm and rational all the time, but not actually being an adult. I'd been told how adults act. I'd never worked through my childhood emotions and just stowed them away, and now I'm acting the way I really feel, and it looks childish.

I'd like to extend this to an incident that happened last spring where I wrote about a friend and she was insulted by it. I was puzzled by how she interpreted it so very hurtfully, when I didn't mean it like that but she couldn't see what I meant.

In this small incident this morning I couldn't take it the way my husband meant it. Because, the thing is, if I'd let him provide me with "the correct interpretation" I'd have compromised my own authentic interpretation of it, perpetuating being a fakely reasonable adult.

It's interesting to look at things through a prism. The overriding truth of this morning was that my husband did agree that we needed to go out and find something to do together.

It just seems to me that there's a gap in our sense of mutuality. And what else lies in that gap? What weed seeds? What bacteria are lurking down in that crack? And do we need to clean it out? Is such a thing possible?

Well, as Edie Brickell said, "choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep."



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Showing 1 of 1 comments
Submitted By: Gladys Mercier
posted on 8/19/2008 @ 9:29:32 PM
Rated Blog Entry
I hope you found something fun to do together.
Showing 1 of 1 comments
CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Lisa Arata

Greeley , CO

Lisa Arata has posted 182 blog entries and 282 comments since joining on 4/18/2007. Lisa Arata 's average blog rating is 4.74.
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