“Sometimes, there are things you can only communicate by clashing.” – Yuuki Aonno
I’m watching a very well-written and directed show on NF and man, they just love to suckerpunch your feels the moment you relax your disbelief.
But it reminded me of recent things and related reasonings, so here I am, as usual, to core dump it from my head into the tarpit for peace-sake.
My daughter demands that I acknowledge and accept her reality over my own.
She doesn’t understand that I can’t do that until she figures out how to do it herself.
She doesn’t understand that it’s a mutually-interdependent and co-created reality that cannot exist until she’s willing to accept that her experience isn’t the only experience that exists in that space-time.
She’s so fearful of rejection that she won’t even engage the conversation unless it is so absurdly sterilized and mannered that it is little more than public pleasantries with the occasional dip into my emotional well to supplement her own.
It’s funny, really. She once accused me of being an empty kitchen sink. She didn’t realize the admission in the accusation – the only one who could possibly know it’s always empty is the one repeatedly draining every droplet without care for the needs or purpose of the sink itself.
To beat the poor analogy utter into paste, I mind not.
She is so adamant that her experience is ascendant, primary, and objectively singular. It’s as if she doesn’t realize every human on the planet and most mammals feel exactly the same way…. or that life is about finding a comfortable and cooperative consensus that cares for everyone as equals in a relationship.
She isn’t willing to admit me into her life unless and until I am willing to take up a mantle she has created for me wholly without my consent, my knowledge, or my input.
And she doesn’t understand why facing that kind of ultimatum from 2003 until 2020 finally convinced me that she’s just not at a place where she can afford to hold more than her own perspective. The reasons, bluntly, are as irrelevant as they are incontrovertible. They exist. That is enough to break the final straw on the pitiful blanket of motherhood I’ve insisted upon holding together in spite of its rickety, gauziness.
To tell me that I do not know or understand all I lacked as a parent is arrogance topped by presumption. Ain’t accepting that gift. She can keep that one for herself. Trust me, she’ll be opening it in roughly 15 years and she won’t recognize nor remember all the things she packed to send to me.
Let alone admit them as being of her own creation.
Let alone admit them as being evidence of her own inability to release and trust as she insists on being trusted.
Then, in another 25 or so, she’ll finally realize it’s an inheritance that is as replete in her as ever it was in me, or the matriarchal line that continues in my grandchildren, her children.
It all comes back around. This is the simple truth of life and the process of living. No deed, remembered, lacks weight; no deed, forsaken, can weigh.
I was not willing to accept that was the ask until recently. No fault there, I have become a better and healthier person over time. I wanted to share that success. I wanted to rebuild. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I wasn’t paying as much attention to the subtext and tenor. Mea maxima culpea.
I will not forsake my experience, life, and reality. I wanted to hear all of yours and share all of mine so we could both come to contentment and understanding.
But you cannot accept me as how I am, cannot accept me as who I am, cannot accept me as what I am, I’m out of definitions/labels I would be willing to wear.
That makes things simple. Which brings me full circle because, as Yuuki well put it, sometimes there are things that can only be communicated by clashing.
I enjoy finding connection points like this in the creative tales of our species. It helps me better elucidate and understand myself; as accepting any stable reflection is wont to do.
But unexpected feels are always a bit surprising.
Core dump complete.