Traveling Down a New Road…

I’m stressing because life is changing and my belief system is being berated!  Anyone who has ever been around a Libra knows that making decisions is a slow and determined process.  Additionally I am especially agonizing because my upbringing was matriarchal with a strong independent streak.  This is part of that unwanted belief structure that I was practically born with.  Having a strong, matriarchal independent streak makes me less likely to listen to a man’s advice.  That’s bad, because it shuts out opportunities for insight and wisdom.  I don’t mean to do this, but I will automatically question motivations of anyone I am speaking with.  Because I have spent decades as a counselor, I tend to dismiss folks who have a personal agenda that they are using me to try to accomplish.  What I would like to experience instead is a conversation in this moment that has any number of different purposes and interesting motivations.  Why be judgmental and dismissive?  Just be aware.  It’s okay and even likely that people will have personal agendas in any conversation.  My smug satisfaction at my insightful abilities has led me a merry chase.  I am now finding difficulty with plain and clear acceptance.

Because I am tired and because I am in transition, acceptance of others and acceptance of the universe, as it is now, seems an elusive goal.  Yet that is what I wish for with all of my heart.  I am surprised and amazed at what it is like to be 50 years old.  I find that who I am is at war with my picture of my mother.  There is DNA I want to keep and DNA that I want to discard.  My ability to choose between those two seems limited.  My mother was entranced with this concept that her children must be “happy”.  I too, travel that road.  I would be a fool to think that – that road is a healthy one.  It is okay for my children to be unhappy, indeed it is part of the fabric of our lives as humans.  I cannot and should not make an effort to protect them from what is inherently an adult life.  And here is where men’s wisdom comes in.  It is my observation that men are much better at making demands of their offspring.  It is my observation that men are much better at allowing their children to hurt.  There is even a culture of “toughening them up” which seems prevalent in a father’s point of view about child rearing.

So here is where my mother’s DNA seems to get in the way of me making current choices: I want to coddle my children and protect them from hurt.  In the absence of their father, there is no one around to balance my requirement that my children be “happy”.  This seems to create a culture in my family of dependence on me.  I hand out twenty dollar bills and kisses when I should be kicking ass.  I have to make different choices and I have to listen to a man’s wisdom – how does that fit with being fiercely, independently matriarchal?

Well, my experience is that it is like rowing upstream.  It is intensely difficult and I often backslide.  My old friends in the recovery profession (drug treatment providers) call what I do, “relapse”.  But now, now, much more is at stake than the daily grind.  We shift, we change, we begin something new.  We are moving on as a family.  There are new definitions out there, new possibilities for DNA, our characteristics do not have to be written in stone, or even written in history.  We can, we must, be different and that requires me to change.  That requires that I be open to a different universe, a universe that includes a man’s point of view.