In Defense Of The Indefensible
Thoughts on someone telling me I need to be a punching bag for a while
Youngest Son told me sometime in 2024, I needed to be Daughter’s punching bag for a while. That I needed to suffer the rage filled and curse laced public shamings Daughter chooses to use to express her anger toward me. In a span of time that included 2024, as I (in some ways happily) have been struggling to heal from my things while facing the growing bitterness from my children who were financially supporting me for ten years while floundering through the deepening chasm between Daughter and I who had begun estranging from me a few years before, I tried my best to accept it might be true in part. Be her punching bag. You’re the mother. You are required by cultural law to give up feeling your things to give room to everyone else’s things.
Today Daughter is 36. I’m 63. Daughter has been low or no contact with me for over 13 years at this point. In the moments we have civil conversation it takes a small indiscretion on my part, an unknown line crossing on my part, where until those mysterious moments, the ground rules are two shifting boundaries Daughter has expressed, and I honor. She occasionally lifts a boundary without notice to possibly test the waters or maybe just test where she wants to be with her connection with me, and on my own negative thinking days, maybe simply test me.
Those rules are: 1-I am not allowed to talk to her one on one in any situation-text, phone, in person, email. Unless she decides otherwise. 2-After 13 years of not being part of each other’s lives and truly not knowing each other at this point, I am required to know what words will be considered incendiary on her part.
In those moments of civility, I have walked on eggshells. Have for years. I did that with her father to avoid his rage and violence (it did not work) including being silent on almost every important topic in teaching my children about life. Now that I experience a hauntingly similar behavior from her it’s been something I had to realize she showed me when she was young, but chalked up to her being young and lacking maturity and assumed she’d mature out of. The tantrums. The rage. The shaming. The cursing.
When youngest Son said that to me I sat with it, as I try to do after every conversation, and tried to see it from his and Daughter’s perspective. As time went on and the rage filled comments from Daughter continued, I recognized (with the help of therapy because I’m a broken person as much as my kids are) she crosses lines with me. I don’t expect my kids to respect me simply because I am their mom. I do expect them to be civil with me because we are human beings and adults. And don’t get me wrong, I love a well placed curse. In conversation, heated or not. LOVE them. The harm comes when it turns into “you’re a”. Those are the non reversible stabs in need of emergency stitching but often left to bleed out.
The truth is none of us in any situation are ever required to be someone else’s punching bag. Their rage is their rage. Yes, I contributed to Daughter’s immense pain in her life. Healing from our individual and shared experiences of pain is both of our responsibilities whether together or separately. I will continue to hope for together one day. And I know the opportunity for that becomes less and less likely the more years that pass without working through things.
I was well trained in this toxic culture of women must be silent and give over themselves to all others. When you’re trained by domestic violence, culture, church, malignantly angry other people, or any other externally damaging force to only see things from anyone else’s point of view or stuff down speaking up about what you know to be harmful, it can burn your esteem, your trust in yourself, your care about yourself, to a crisp. While it is my responsibility to find answers to my own trauma for those trainings-it does not require me to be someone’s punching bag. It never did in the moments the abuser told me I made him do his violence, it does not in Daughter’s anger filled words toward me.
In the last text exchange with Daughter, besides her calling me a bitch and telling me I only wanted a reaction from her, she told me I was going about “it” in the wrong way while not giving any of her thoughts on what the right way is from her perspective or what “it” is.
A thing that has helped me is learning to sit with things. It may not work for someone else who might expect a fast reply but it has made an amazing difference in my own life choosing not to respond quickly because doing so often leads to my saying things I don’t want to say in a given moment.
I sat with what Daughter texted for a few days. I realized what is right for her is not the same for me and without any conversation on what is right for each of us there is little to no hope of us having an understanding between us that will lead to a reconciliation. At this time, there is no conversation between us that is healthy. I grieve that truth. And I continue cleaning up my side of the street.
Cindi
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