Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Smooth and Supple is Bad in Landing Gear

For my 50th post, I am going to write something of the truth that I've learned about myself.  I am looking for a mother.  A great deal of my life's troubles, and alas, there are a few, stem from that drive.  I am not seeking out some great Oedipal thing, but more the basics - care and comfort in the arms of the mother I never really had.  

So much of my behavior over the last 4 years has been the subconscious drive to find peace when I've had none.  I've driven so hard and so long with nothing, that my infantile brain began to remind me that I needed something, and desperately so.  This is not a knock on my SO, as she is neither my mother nor does she ever need to be.  That said, she is not the nurturing, warm and gushy type.  She just isn't, and it isn't in her DNA nor her experience.  She has many charms, and is a good person, but doesn't smother with love.

But like so many men who've reached my age without ever having had a mothering experience, there is some primal drive to get there that seems to overtake.  The women I've spent time with outside my marriage, damaged and unhinged as they all were (that is my real mother), all, to a one, had the mothering gene.  It was the only comfort I got from the relationships, even as they inevitably turned to a borderline (pun intended) disaster.  I would get care and comfort, mothering of sorts, but at the only place I've ever known it, the crazy bar.  

That sounds like a basic thing, to call this a learned truth, but to be honest, I don't think I understood what the hell I was doing to myself, and why I was doing it during that time.  Every single relationship and pursuit was to find my mother, or at least the crazy version I know, because I need to feel that love.  

Now, to greater things upon realization, and that is to find that love.   I don't really know where to look.

3 comments:

  1. Everything we learn and acknowledge about our struggles helps to heal, there are no small ones.

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  2. Funny you should just be reading this. I always knew I was looking to try to fix what I did not have. Only now did I realize I was continually ending up with what I did have.

    So hard to break the cycle when driven by such deep-seated needs.

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  3. Wow. For months now I have been trying to look back at my own battle with depression, and figure out why I would behave the way I did and as I read your post I understand that I was looking for the exact same thing in a father figure - somehow I knew that but I wasn't really ready to say it out loud - Thank you for your honesty. I will be adding your blog to my blog list.
    Syn

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