7 – Drifting Negative

Dad,

After Mom started to feel better and the two of you moved to Florida, you and I tried so hard to end our estrangement. But we never really succeeded. We’d have a talk or exchange some letters, and we’d feel like we’d really understood each other and forgiven each other and gotten closer. But then, as time went by, we’d lose track of the progress we’d made and start to fall back into older ways of seeing each other. You often used the phrase “drifting negative” to describe this process, the way we’d slide into familiar grooves, even when we had new information and those grooves no longer fit us.

Why did this keep happening to us? Was it the geographical distance, only seeing each other in person once or twice a year?

Was it because we didn’t actually want to be close and at peace? Our relationship had always involved a certain amount of conflict. Growing up, I felt that you were critical of everything I did and held me to an impossible standard of perfection. You felt that I didn’t push myself as much as I should have and was not ambitious enough. I felt that you were competitive with me in a way that was inappropriate for a parent. You felt that competing with me was a good way to motivate me to work harder.

In addition, I always had this feeling that you were jealous of my childhood closeness with Mom, just as I was certainly jealous of your closeness with her. So maybe being in conflict felt familiar to us, like the most natural way to relate to each other.

Still, always being in conflict was uncomfortable, so we apologized to each other over and over again. But we couldn’t seem to let go of our anger. I think that’s because the present continued to feed our fury with each other. I always sensed it in you, just below the surface. I assume you sensed it in me as well. Because of this, we were always tense around each other and prone to see each other in the worst possible light.

The thing that kept feeding our fury was our never-ending disagreement over Mom’s MCS diagnosis. I was eventually willing to stop fighting with you about it and accept that you and Mom were never going to consider any other cause for her symptoms. I was even willing to pretend that I agreed with you, so I could be part of the family, because accepting your narrative was the price of membership. But you knew I was pretending and that wasn’t enough for you. You wanted me to agree with you. You wanted to persuade me that this idea of yours, perhaps the biggest “Big Idea” of your lifetime, was the smartest, most correct interpretation of her situation. It infuriated you that I continued to believe that my own ideas about Mom’s situation were the smartest ones. And it infuriated me that Mom was still so sick, despite your belief that you had found the “cure.”

It seems to me that our fury kept making our wounds deeper and deeper, too deep to ever heal. Our fury shattered our love over and over, so we could never make it whole again, no matter how hard we tried.

Karen