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