So a couple months ago my mother told me something I never expected to hear from her lips. I was not surprised when she told me she felt like a failure as a parent, since many parents feel they could have done better, hindsight being 20/20 and not getting a manual from the get-go. I told her I thought she did many things right as a parent. But I then asked her, "If you had been more of a success, what do you think would be different?" The answer? She said, "You would believe in god." She said she is worried that I'm going to hell. Ha! Since I don't believe in her god, I am exempt! But anyway...
I have thought this over and over, coming to the conclusion that taking offense and feeling indignant is completely an ego based response, and meaningless, and that sympathy for her misguidance is more appropriate. But the indignation and other thoughts continue to creep in, and I've been wanting to run them by someone, to get an objective viewpoint. The thoughts include the following:
This is a display of unhealthy boundaries--to think that she should have had any say over what I believe, and that her success or failure, albeit partial, depended on that. To have indoctrinated me would have been brainwashing but of course that is not how she'd see it. It is an insult to my intelligence to insinuate that I am not able to not come to the right conclusion for myself. Her fantasies of having a particular type of daughter did not materialize. But if she does not approve, how am I to spend time with her except shallowly? Not that I want her approval at all. But in the same situation with most other people, I would normally write them off and just not make an effort to talk to them, seeing the chasm of difference between us and sensing the self-righteousness, and I don't want to do that here.
I have been struggling with how to have a relationship with her. We have always had a hot and cold relationship. We're very different and yet over the years we've managed to get along from time to time. Sometimes quite well, and others not well at all.
But the difference now is that I never knew that she placed a value on whether or not I believed in her god, for her sake. And I feel it's disingenuous to worry that someone else is going to your imaginary pit of fire for eternity. Coincidentally even she does not believe she is going to heaven. She admitted that although she believes in god and lives according to the bible because she thinks it's the right way to live, she doesn't believe she's a chosen one and does not believe he'll pick her up for the apocalypse. And why?--one reason is that she has been divorced, and remarried! Oh, what a sinner!
So indulge me? What is your response to a parent saying to their free-thinking offspring that they partially failed as a parent because the offspring thought for themselves and escaped indoctrination? How to move forward with this this relationship? Because I certainly do want to have a relationship, I'm just not sure from what angle to approach it while feeling the indignation and the insult (failure on my part, I know), as much as I try to logically put it out of my mind and as much as I know that reaction is useless. I suspect I am going to hear that I am simply overreacting here.
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