Until recent years, my heart was mostly on my sleeve. When it breaks, it’s harder to keep it there. It’s difficult to stay open and vulnerable. When I think about the times I’ve tried to make myself less vulnerable right in the midst of vulnerability, I remember dismissing my tears, trying to cover up the depth of my emotions with an intentionally petty thing. For instance, while grieving, someone walks in on me crying and I’d think quietly, ‘oh, I spilt some milk. No use crying over spilt milk, they say.’ And sometimes, I’d say it aloud, and it might be taken literally, and I’m then labelled over-sensitive or indeed, petty. Ironically, trying to protect my fragile heart splinters it.
This became a trap of sorts. True vulnerability could and has been used against me, but self-dismissal set a precedent and lowered my self-worth.
I’m reminded of all of the things I’ve heard from others, people I’ve felt a kinship with and more besides. I think of how easily we dismiss ourselves and allow others to do the same, how we dress our truths in accepted, benign words and then get called out for lying. How many of us have told the truth and been called out for being an ‘attention-seeking whore’ and how we put our truths in jars and shelve them away, hoping no one will rattle us enough to shake loose the truths so few seem able to bear.
I’m reminded of my grandmother (Nanny), often voicing ‘you don’t know who might pop round the corner, so us better clean up before us go’, when on reflection, if I come home from chaos to more chaos, I can’t function as well as I might in a clean and tidy space. If my grandmother had voiced her truth in her day for what it likely was (trauma), it would have been harder to socially recover.
I think about how my insight about myself (and those adjacent) loaded people’s weapons, and I’m thinking that maybe, sometimes, what looks like ‘pride’ and over-fixation on societal perception of ourselves is self-preservation rather than pride itself.
There is an element of pride there; I often, as a child (and in regression), thought it went too far, but part of that comes down to fear of judgement. It’s easier in youth to be less afraid of it, to straddle the fear itself (no pun intended) and ride it out, because the journey is still new. In later years, as we age, it’s harder to do. It’s already obvious when you’re on a path and that trajectory is harder to shift once you’re weighed down with commitments and dependents, and I mean that in a more a literal sense, not in the sense that my family is a burden I don’t want.
Fear sometimes becomes crippling.
Dysfunction or anything threatening to unravel the routine that keeps it at bay becomes its own entity, and what looks like ‘control freak’ is actually more a person trying to tackle the daily tasks with very little help or understanding because fear dictates silence or dismissal and that breeds shame.
I stood against that.
I openly voiced my struggles clearly the first time around and it was used against me; it broke me down so severely that within my relationship, I appeared to be the one who couldn’t communicate without escalation, and later, that I couldn’t communicate at all. For a time, this was partially true, but temporary. And it stemmed from fear: fear of others, the same ones who had threatened me to become and stay silent. More recently, I recognise that their actions stemmed from fear, too.
If I was any less stubborn than I am I would not have had the resilience needed to break through that imposed silence.
I suffered from the struggle itself and I suffered the very thing so many before me have tried to avoid by ‘keeping mum’.
But (taking it literally, here,) who keeps mums really? Who looks out for mums? It’s not always other mums because some of us are programmed to keep in line and keep one another in line, too, (I succumbed to it myself at one point), and some of us do this without a backwards glance to how or why the line exists and who put it there.
There is a difference between conforming for the greater good and conforming for the sake of something that outdates the good of society. We shut up about these things because society punishes us for not quietly getting on with what is expected of us even when addressing these things create opportunities to address the root of wider issues that have come to light more recently. If we ask for help, we’re dismissed at first, maybe even the next five times thereafter. And often, when ‘help’ is offered, it’s done in a way that removes agency and still somehow dismisses the individual and the actual issue. But slowly, a small part of society is naming it, not for needless attention but necessary awareness. And it is resonating. It’s moving.
With these shifts come challenges, and some of those challenges exist because blame is so often shifted back onto mothers, with males renouncing responsibility to a degree all while dismissing where that responsibility sits.
Sometimes, the challenges go beyond our male counterparts, into the wider community. It takes a village, they say. But… if we’re overly concerned with what the village says as the village tries to raise our children, we are doomed to repeat the same cycles if the village is not yet enlightened. Or indeed if the village believes they are enlightened where an individual is not.
There should be caution applied when it comes to assumption. In a nutshell, it’s harmful to assume that a person isn’t handling a situation in the best way just because it doesn’t meet the aesthetic expectations of someone else.
Personally, this has been a step-by-step process.
Step one has been accepting that the men our nearest and dearest don’t want us to be with, are men who were boys raised by mothers doing their best in line with ‘keeping mum’*: getting on with it, seeing to every need of the child without allowing a child to learn how to handle that need, servicing a child instead of allowing the child to fend with guidance, and perhaps upon awareness, withdrawing completely, creating an equation of love with the absence of need. *and vice versa.
Side note: it’s interesting how we mirror these dynamics within relationships so that eventually a couple is rendered helplessly dependent on one another, all the while frustrated with the self and one another. As we shift out of these phases, societally and within our own families, we’re encumbered with the projections of those who bore witness to dysfunction and cannot fucking let it go or those who find dissent difficult. There are those who might view a parenting style as too hands-off or assume that the parenting style will continue through the generations and be too hands-on, and overall, there is underestimation of individuals and an undermining of efforts, adding to what is already a very difficult and often isolating process.
Step two, for me—as a female partner, a new mother, someone who was made into a scapegoat, a punchline, and a (partially figurative) punching bag for having blown the whistle—was overcoming the communities’ boundary breaking to stay focused on the task at hand.
Step three became putting my faith in trusted members of the local community (and a few from my former one) enough to not further isolate myself and later, my child. Step four and a half was having the courage to rebuild boundaries, and that part was not pleasant or polite mostly because people don’t like suddenly not being able to demean someone who has previously let them do just that.
Step four has been rekindling connections or making new ones, a little at a time, to gauge which particular pain is tolerable and how often. Sometimes there are setbacks. Sometimes there is progress. Both are valid. This is an inevitable part of the process, after fully realising what self-worth is made of and not just what is tolerable but having the strength to reinforce it.
Step five… not linearly, not really, but as ongoing as the rest of these steps… has been rediscovery… of self, and trust, and healthy (or healthier) love, of hobbies and interests outside of chaos—and within it—and simply having the audacity to exist without permission.
