Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line:

I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.

Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it.

Imagine being my mother and reading that line.

Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with her (there’s not) that makes me avoid her like a toxic, tentacled mother-of-origin from whom – as a wise, appropriately therapized adult and I am neither – I am supposed to disentangle myself. Please note: My mother is not an emotional octopus and looks nothing like Ursula in The Little Mermaid. Nothing.

As a result of this angst and regret, I have spent the last five days writing an addendum in my head about how it is not the case that I don’t want to NOT be on intimate terms with my mother.

Let’s go pomo for a second and observe the tortured, awkward syntax of that sentence. Revealing, yes?

I was going to write a smoothing-ruffled-feathers piece. The feathers were mostly mine, and the point of the piece was to reassure myself that I am a good daughter (mostly) and to realign my writing and my world with my core beliefs about myself: that in fact I crave attachment and am heart-centred, loving, high on interpersonal-commitment and low on requiring emotional distance.

And then I realized, holy truth batman!, maybe I don’t want to be close to my mom. Maybe I’m terrified. Maybe it is too emotional, too enmeshed, too fraught, maybe I’ll be overwhelmed, and maybe if I crack open the gates she’ll march right in and assume command of my castle again.

Maybe I am afraid of intimacy.

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That space represents the time it took for me to make an emergency penis check and realize that maybe the pop-wisdom that men are afraid of intimate relationships because of a fear of being overwhelmed by infectious femininity that will, upon contact, deprive them of their hard-won (real, and symbolic) independence from The Mother is not entirely woman-hating, commitment-avoiding, handy-excuse-making bullshit.

[I said 'not entirely'. I'm not fully convinced, yet. It might be a little true but as adults we should all get to getting over it.]

I am in shock, dearest readers. I have intimacy issues? Me? I’m the president of the let’s-get-close club. I’m convinced that kisses are the antidote to pretty much any problem and truly think that everyone in the Middle East should just hug it out. (And I’m trained in political science, so this is not just an opinion but a scholarly opinion.)

And yet. It is true. One of my friends tells me that I use sass and salacious innuendo to keep people at arms-length and as such he is unnerved when I am soft or sincere. This is not good, people.

Hence the earlier genital review. Like our cultural fable about commitment-phobic men, I think I have a fear of being engulfed by smothering, mothering femininity. Or, quite possibly, despite identifying with feminism, I may have a problem with femininity in general. Not only am I afraid of being close to my mother, I am also uncomfortable talking about periods and lactivism (bad feminist! bad! un-revolutionary!). I do and did both (bleed and breast-feed) but I don’t think either are trumpet-worthy achievements and I’m not going to march about the latter nor boycott H & M because it was just a job and a full-time, exceedingly poorly-paid one. I can assure you that golden aura did not magically appear around my head all Raphael-like as I nursed my baby who looks and behaves nothing like Christ. From this I infer that I’m probably not going to heaven for my breast-feeding sacrifice (which is a total rip-off) although according to some arguably tentative correlations, my kid will be less-stupid and marginally thinner than her friends whose mothers just mooed ‘no’ and as a result have nipples that still point north.

[Please note: my boobs are still spectacular. I have references.]

Anyways, gratuitous cleavage-shot aside, I have diagnosed myself with a motherloving intimacy issue. This is not consistent with my self-image or world-view. What to do?

I can tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to have a drinky dinner with my ex-boyfriend, Cognitive Dissonance. I’m hoping we get back together and to this end, I’ll wear something low-cut.

PS – did you notice that when I discovered a painful, earnest, uncomfortable truth I resorted to irreverance? I sure did.

PPS – let’s get philosophical and feminist-y. Maybe my intimacy-phobia (and men’s fear of The Relationship, according to Christian Carter and the good girls who write for Cosmo, which is to say, The Experts) stems, at least in part, from the way we have constructed ‘independence’ as the end of a process of disengaging from The Mother, who is the monster femininity writ large and freedom-eating. And maybe in constructing ‘independence’ as oppositional to femininity and connection and communion, we’ve made intimacy a very scary, dark and enmeshed place to visit.

PPPS – or maybe it is just me and I love you, Mom.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 7:01 am and is filed under Family, Love, Meaning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.