The MIL came out of her (my!) bedroom. After commenting that I'd been doing odd things when she came out earlier (I was exercising to a yoga video) she said that she couldn't stop humming Brian's songs. B. had played them on the trip to DC this past week. And now they were stuck in her head because they are so good.
Don't get me wrong, it is a good album. But everything B. does is like that for the MIL. It is a clinging sort of puppy love where he can do no wrong and is her champion and savior. I think if Roger had not been around, B. would have ended up coddled and admired to the point he would have been a conceited ass. But Roger took all the air out of a room and could only stand to see something admired if it was an extension of himself. The MIL seems to be trying to make up for lost time - but it doesn't work that way. He cannot revert back to childhood. At the same time, she wants him in the role of savior. She clings to him when they are out, she gets distressed and tells him about it if he goes to bed while she is in the bathroom and she doesn't hug him goodnight. If I were B. I would be shaking my leg and screaming "get the hell off me!" She has come back from DC all self-satisfied from having B. to herself the entire time. Her humming is driving me crazy.
I remember having first loves like that. That horrible, yet wonderful infatuated love that turns frantic when the person wants more independence. Because of our long history before dating, I never had that deep a level of "he can do no wrong" with B. After knowing each other for seven years, I'd seen how very wrong he could do. My realization of the humanness of my parents was complete by the time I graduated college - they made the decision that I was an adult and stopped sheltering me when I started college, so by the end I could talk to them as an adult. B's parents never made that decision, sheltering him well into his thirties so that he was never the adult. They never faced problems as a family and he only learned secrets when they were leaked to him by bitter family members. Thank goodness his aunt told him about his mother's mental illness - losing his Dad was shock enough, if he hadn't know about his mother before she flipped it would have really been a horror. I really feel it was irresponsible of his parents to try to "protect" B, especially when he, as an only child, would then be responsible for them if anything happened (which of course it did). And now this terrible dependence and the feeling that the more she clings the faster we want to run away from her.
Friday, September 07, 2007
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2 comments:
I don't know what to say...
What is one supposed to do when a mother's love stops feeling like the love of a mother?
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