This blog is personal. It reinforces to me how patterns unconsciously get repeated in families, and if I hadn’t found a letter, then putting this to rest may have taken more effort.
When I was 21, I fell in love with my first boyfriend. I was having a great time until my mother disapproved of him. It wasn’t clear to me what was so upsetting, except that my mother is old school German, and in her mind, people needed to behave a certain way, and in her mind he did not. The more time I spent with him, the more she disapproved. I was in 3rd year university at this time, and was feeling immense stress from my mother’s tension and her inability to find ways to manage her own level of distress. In short, what happened was that I developed stress welts, and the university doctor suggested I move out of home, stating that I was trying to please my mother and at the same time trying to cut the apron strings and wasn’t being successful. It just so happened that I was able to house sit for my aunt, which seemed an appropriate excuse to leave my traditional home. My parents knew that I kept seeing this man, and it must have driven my mother mad because one day my sister came to see me at work and said that I needed to come home because mom was not well, she was not getting out of bed. To the reader, and quite honestly to myself at that time, this might seem like an extreme response, and yet it was true – when I went home to visit my family, I believe my mother was having a mental breakdown. I attended a community event where my parents and their friends attended, and I was pulled aside by many of those friends saying that my mother was not doing well, she was constantly talking about “that man”. Clearly there was tension in the home, but my father did not ask me to break up or change my plans. As my 4th year of university ended, I then made plans to move out to Toronto to look for work. This meant I had to move back home, and I told my parents that I had ended this relationship because I am moving across Canada. Slowly my mother got better.
My story ended there. I knew that I had to move far away to cut the umbilical cord to a mother who was anxious about losing one of her babies – even though I was an adult. Thirty five years later, I started feeling anxious about my 19 year old son choosing to spend all his time with his first love. My husband was giving me advice to “chill out”. My son told me I needed to be more welcoming of his girlfriend into our home. I was trying to remind myself to not be like my mother, and it was surprising to me how strong my feelings were about protecting and/or keeping my son close to home.
As the reader, you may think this is the pattern that repeated, and yes, that is true. But there is more. After my parents both passed away, I gathered all the cards and letters that my parents had written to each other in the late 1950s when they were courting. My dad had already immigrated to Canada and was trying to get my mother to apply for her passport and papers as the Berlin Wall was being built in East Germany. I found a translator to translate some of the letters, and to my surprise, one that I chose illuminated this same pattern of holding on too tightly to your children. My maternal grandmother had 12 children, and my mother was the youngest, born in 1939 at the start of World War II. My mother never knew four of her brothers, who were killed in the war. Fast forward to 1960, and my father was sending money now for my mother to fly out of Berlin to Canada. They had a two-year long-distance engagement, which left my mother to cling to family during the Cold War. As she told her mother that her papers were finished, and that she would be leaving to Canada, I learned through her letter to my father that my mother was deciding she could no longer join him. My mother’s explanation was that she had been lying in bed with her mother who was crying constantly and shaking so much that they were going to have to take her to the hospital because they couldn’t stop her shaking and all were worried about her health. My mother wrote that her mother had lost so many children, she could not bear the thought of losing another child (in addition to the sons who died in the war, she had a daughter who passed away young as a toddler), and so she told my father she could not leave Berlin to marry him. Moving would break her mother’s heart! She got past this in the end, but clearly the stakes for leaving home are high in my family! And this all got confused with grieving for the lost ones, versus allowing your adult child to make choices for their stage of adult life.
Here is the family pattern of loss and needing to hold onto. My grandmother, having lost five of her children, could not tolerate losing her youngest. Only seven children were alive after the war. My grandmother’s broken heart was never going to heal, and at the same time she couldn’t bear seeing another child leave to a foreign country where she may never see that child again. These are three generations in a row of mothers not wanting their child to leave the roost.
The letter that was translated helped me to understand my mother’s mental breakdown with me 25 years later. Even though I wasn’t physically leaving, dating this young man was enough of a threat to my mother, and signalled that I may soon be leaving. And it explained to me why I was conflicted in my own heart with my son about the person he had chosen to date. Although I didn’t have a break down (I had done a lot of my own personal work over the years, which included forgiving my mother for how she treated me during this time), I was having to try to entice him to spend time at home, and I would share my disappointment with my husband, who would say “this is how life is, I don’t know what you are upset about”. I am hoping the pattern is now put to rest, as my daughter is declaring to us her first love, and while I notice myself adjusting to a new stage in my life (empty nester), I am practicing gratitude that both my kids have chosen good partners and are happy in life.