Why I named this blog what I did

Today I am reminded of why I had to name my blog stuck in the middle with you.  In case you aren't familiar, it is a great song (Stuck in the middle with you by the Stealers Wheel), and while it is truthfully a bit too upbeat considering my actual feelings about my situation with my mother, it captures the crazy pretty well and my proximity to it.

So what did a kid who grew up with more or less this song as her childhood mantra choose to do?  I study social norms and social processes.  I am becoming a sociologist to understand better why and how groups do the things they do. I keep trying to learn what can create positive change (and how to do more of that) and what can create negative change (and how to put an end to that).  I have no doubts that this desire is rooted in my childhood dysfunction.  So it goes.  I have come to peace with it and one day I will be able to actually study mental illness and children and not have too many raw feelings about it.  But not now.  

Growing up, it was always fairly easy for me to see social norms that some others took for granted, because I was raised by my mother with a completely unique, changing, and seemingly arbitrary set of social rules that were largely dependent upon her phase of life and mood.  Sometimes I complied with the social norms, sometimes not (and truth be told, I suppose this is still the case).  I learned how to fake it in both realms (hers and everybody else's), but rarely felt truly comfortable anywhere.  

My biggest issue with my mother is one she doesn't get, and that, in and of itself, is problematic.  She is trying to connect with me again, and it is not going so well.  I have lately tried to email her niceties and fact based details of my life, or reply to her random memory emails with pleasantries (which as readers of this blog might know, I do not do lightly), to which she never replies in kind, but only then digs in and says something to the effect of "I want more from you!" 

No lady, you don't.  

She wants less "fakey" stuff, she says, and more real stuff.  Ok.  You got me, I am kind of faking it.  But reality?  My real feelings?  No.  I've tried that before.  It has ended in one of the following scenarios: me with hives for a week and knocked out on prednisone in my first semester back to graduate school after two years off or her taking an overdose and, thankfully, landing in the ER.  

The frustrating thing is, she thinks I am being dishonest with myself, not my "true" self.  But this "self" to which she refers is the one that was sharing her reality.  I understand it is lonely in her world without her daughters in it.  After all, for close to 30 years she had at least one of us in there with her, "us against the world!"  But then my sister and I grew up and realized, like so many other people, wow, there is a world beyond my parents.  But then came the further realization that wow, we had some really messed up ideas of the world...paranoid, narcissistic, egoistic, hostile, codependent, entitled ideas.  

So she wants me to be less fake.  She wants me to be more "real".  To her in her world, this means being like her.  "Come back in honey, its nice and warm inside...and while you are here, I'll hold you close and clip those meddlesome wings of yours."  I cannot.  I will not.  To me being more real means speaking my truth, like I do here in this blog, which she could not handle.  

I've been trying a middle way, wherein I try to keep her in my life in some way that doesn't hurt me or her, but she says it is not enough.  She wants more.  Always, more.  

And I know what that means.  She wants all of me.  She wants my reality.  Since she can't have it, I'm not sure what there is left for us to discuss.  And so I sit with a message in my inbox and I'm not sure if or how I'll reply, but one thing I do know and that she is not getting the "more" she is after.  Not now.  

Well I don't know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain't right,
I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.

Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you,
And I'm wondering what it is I should do,
It's so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, yeah, I'm all over the place,
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
                                       -Stealers Wheel

Will it make her smile?

"Is there anything in it that will make her smile?"

That is what I said to my husband after he had boxed the bulk of what remained of my mother's stuff.  And then I, my mind racing through the dirty, dusty, jumbled heap of things that I know is in those boxes, burst into tears.

My mother apparently has found an apartment.  That is great.  Apparently she starts a job soon.  Also great. I really hope it is true, and if it is, that it sticks.  But regardless, she wrote to us and asked us to send her her stuff.  This was in the last few days of cramming for my preliminary exam and I was fairly useless around the house to begin with (which isn't to mention the emotional pit I land in whenever I deal with her belongings anyway), so my husband said he would take care of it.  And he has.  From corresponding with her to reboxing her stuff and going to ship it, he has taken care of it quietly.

But there was a component of it for which I was needed.  I realized that when her stuff first came to us one and a half years ago, or so, I looked through to see what personal, private, or important family things were in those boxes.  The main things I salvaged from those jumbled boxes were pictures.   Pictures from my childhood, my sister's childhood, and pictures from my mother's childhood and earlier.  My sister helped me with this process and put most of the pictures in albums.

The albums have resided on a shelf in my office ever since.  I realized that one of the things she might want from her stuff is her pictures.  But are they her pictures?  It is hard to say at this point.  I really don't want to deal with a call next year from Boston saying "Hey, you don't know me, but I feel strange throwing out family photos and I'm cleaning out all this stuff today." Which is basically the call I got one and a half years ago and which is why I have them now in my possession.

There are happy pictures in those albums.  Pictures from other phases of life where her illness wasn't running so rampant.  Pictures of happy kids and pets and grandparents and camping and silliness and Christmas...

In not sending these pictures I feel almost as if I am denying her the joy of those memories, but I am not sure I want to allow those memories to possibly be lost again to me either.

I realize as I write this that the "pictures" are analogous to really a lot more than just photographs, and that just goes to show that my feelings can still be pretty raw about all of this.

I came to my husband as he was boxing up the rest of the stuff and said, you know I'm not sure which of these pictures to give.  I haven't checked with other family to see how they feel and I am not sure myself how I feel.  I am just coming out of three days of prelim headache and haven't truthfully given it much thought until this morning.

He told me not to worry about the pictures.  We can always send them later, he said.  For now he has seven huge boxes to send as it is.  He is right and he calmed me down.  But then I asked, is there anything in there that will make her smile?

And I'm pretty sure there is not.  And the thing that kills me is that I still want to make her smile.  And I don't know what to do about that.