While digging through the stacks of stuff in my apartment, I found the manuscript to my mother's abandoned book on "firm but loving" parenting that she wrote sometime in the '90's or early 00s. It's 22 pages long and she gave me a printout of it for me to proofread and edit. I had completely forgotten about its existence, but I'm glad I still have it.
It's basically her manifesto on rearing an adolescent, with some examples culled from my teen years (only framing it as experiences related to her by a mother who was one of her patients during her family counseling years), coupled with the rigid, robotic emotionlessness of her own mother's horrid parenting, a doctrine that damaged her early and the repercussions of which affect her to this day. It reads like an android writing a book on parenting based on an iron-clad philosophy that treats the child as a specimen rather than as a human being, and reading it again now, it's just sad. And I think she abandoned it because I told her straight up that it read like a book by and for robots.
I'm going to save that manuscript for posterity in my box of secret artifacts — old letters from long-ago girlfriends, "candid" photos that they gave me, rare porn, etc. — as it will serve as an actual written reminder of her ways after she's gone. It's a lesson book that bolsters my approach of doing the opposite of how she raised me when I deal with my friends' kids whom I love as my own.
Looking over the manuscript again, I also note that it's clearly written by an individual who came of age over seven decades ago and who, even at the time she wrote the piece, had zero understanding of then-modern adolescence and could not relate to it as anything other than something to study, or as something she read about in textbooks and articles in magazines aimed at the mental health industry.
Also, bear in mind that once my father moved out, my mother began rebuilding herself as a stronger person, and her experiences with him left her with a deep hatred of men in general, so having her child growing her her doted-upon little boy into a young man was something she could not handle. She so did not understand male adolescence, genuinely thought I was mentally ill, and shipped me off to two psychiatrists starting when I was 10 and again during high school, when I knew there was nothing wrong with me. Coupled with her being a world-class gaslighter (something she only copped to as of the past few years, and she brought it up with no prompting from me), it all did a real number on me, and it took leaving home for college for me to truly be allowed the freedom to evolve into my own person and not her unrealistic fantasy of rigid perfection, and also to be happy for the first time since I was old enough to fully understand what was going on around me.
My mother's family deeply and irreversibly damaged her from early on. Just some of the stuff that shaped her includes being thrown into a sack in the middle of the night and kidnapped by her father when she was two or three, an incident that gave her severe claustrophobia for life (she still cannot sleep without a night light), and, because they were bored and had nothing better to in their rural Alabama isolation, some of her immediate family regularly tortured her with electricity because they thought it was funny. She only told me all of that — and worse — as of the past twenty years, which caused a lot to make start to make sense, and the contemplation thereof drove a stake through my brain. I had to leave the apartment earlier this afternoon and walk around Park Slope for an hour to calm my thoughts.
Anyway, this grimoire of maternal dysfunction is now relegated to the large ENTER THE DRAGON special edition VHS box on this shelf, where it shall forever be imprisoned.
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