2179 Rewriting

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Daughter and I have a rather strained relationship sometimes. I don't know how to describe it. She seems to get angry with me for no reason. At least, no reason that I can see.

Lately we've been working through some stuff - like one item every time I see her. She remembers things so very differently from my memory of the same incident. So many times she misinterpreted something I'd said or done long long ago, something that somehow became significant to her, and which she had misunderstood mainly because she was too young to understand, or she overheard me say something to another adult and she didn't understand the words or the situation, and she put her own spin on it.

Yesterday I was complaining that I'd never much cared for the idea of Santa Claus, that it makes Christmas all about getting stuff. She got annoyed and asked how I could say that, how come I insisted that she had to believe in Santa when she was a kid, and that I got really mad when she came home from school one day and informed me that she knew there was no Santa, that it was all me. She said that I was mad at her for not believing in Santa. So how can I say I never liked the idea of Santa?

I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn't remember that at all. I asked her how the conversation went. Is it possible that I wasn't angry about what you said, but how you said it?

She thought about it. She remembered that she was angry that I had lied to her, allowed her to believe a lie. She was angry that I had made her look foolish to the other kids because they knew the truth and she didn't. It turns out that that day, she didn't simply say, like, "Hey Mom. Guess what? There's no Santa." What actually happened was that she came home from school thoroughly pissed, and burst through the door accusing me of lying to her for years, "and what else have you lied to me about", are you even really my mother, and so on.

So my reaction was NOT to her not believing in Santa, I was reacting to her attack on me.

I told her I didn't purposely lie to her, that it's a dilemma when you live in a culture that pushes Santa, and if you tell your kid, your kid will snottily tell other younger kids, and you'll end up with all the neighborhood parents pissed at you, so you kinda have to let the kids find out themselves, which they do, pretty much all at once as an age group. I said that what I was most likely to have said was "Yes, Santa isn't a real person, but the idea of Santa is real, inside each of us."

And she said, yeah, come to think of it, I did say that.

So, her interpretation of what happened was quite different from mine. She had stored it as "Mom was angry because I didn't believe in Santa", expanded to "Mom is angry because I don't believe her lies." Actually I was angry because she accused me of lying and wouldn't accept that I didn't do it on purpose to make her look foolish, and wouldn't listen to any explanations. As far as I was concerned, Santa wasn't even the issue.

It's funny how many things there are like that. Many of them, if she stopped to look carefully at them, she'd see them in a new light. But the memories are stored in 4-year-old or 6-year-old terms, not 33-year-old terms, so until she dredges them up and rewrites them based on new adult information, they continue to influence her as if she were 4 or 6.

The hardest memories to rewrite are the ones stored before language, before there were words to describe them. Those are the ones that continue to influence our reactions for the rest of our lives. We may be aware that there's something unreasonable going on in there, but we don't know what it is, because it isn't in words. We reason in words, but we react without words. And even when we reason, it's built on a foundation of no words, something we can't describe, and therefore can't easily change.
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