My mother and I have a fraught relationship to say the least. We actually don’t have a relationship to speak of, but that’s not what she would say. She wants us to be close because mother/daughter, blah blah blah. As you can probably tell, I don’t give a shit about that. Here’s the thing. I am not anti-mother/daaughter. I’m anti-prescriptive roles based on gender. Actually, I’m anti-prescriptive roles based on anything.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m libertarian with a small ‘l’. Basically, I’m for whatever you (general you and specific you) want to do as long as it doesn’t harm others. It’s interesting because at Ask A Manager, there is so much talk about what is normal in terms of at work. That differs for different industries and companies, of course, but there are some general things–like wearing pants at work, for example. It’s pretty universal for all blue-collar and white-collar jobs.
You start getting into heated debates when you branch out from there. Like bras. Do they need to be worn at work? Depressingly, many women seem to think so. There was a letter at AAM about someone whose…coworker? Intern? One of those built a blanket fort at work. The letter writer wanted to know how to address this with the…new hire. That’s what it was. The letter writer wanted to know how to talk with the intern about not doing this. Alison gave a great response about how she would want thing s to be and how they actually are. She said while theoretically there was no reason the new hire shouldn’t work from a blanket fort, well, it would be viewed as strange in most offices.
This is assuming there’s no medical reason for it. But it underlines the silliness of professional norms. I do all my work from my couch. I’m lying on it with my back propped up on one arm and my keyboard on my lap. The laptop itself is sitting on the coffee table. My cat is sleeping on my legs. This is how I type most days.
I did not read all 500+ comments, but there were several who were sympathetic to the new hire. And pointed out that it might eb a medical thing. I didn’t expect to find so many people pro-pillow fort, but it was heartwarming. I am pro-pillow fort myself, obviously. However, in reading more of the comments, there were plenty disparaging ones, too, including one who said she would consider firing the new hire for being so far out of the norm.
I mean…fire her? Come on. How are people supposed to just intuit business norms if they had never been in an office before? This was her first job post college, and we just went through a pandemic. It was very possible that she had never been in an office situation. Why would you even consider firing her without talking to her first? The letter writer hadn’t seen the fort for themselves, which was the first step they were going to take.
I think the bottom line is how comfortable you feel going against the grain. As several people pointed out, someone in her first job wasn’t goingto have the political capital needed to be the weird one. That comes with seniority, ounfortunately.
How the hell did I derail myself that thoroughly? Damn. Back to my mother. We have never been close. She likes to think we were, but she has always bent reality to fit her fantasy world. She could not tolerate being viewed in a bad light, so she had to rewrite everything in order to make it so she was the victim or the martyr or the hero in some way.
It’s frustrating. When we have a disagreement or an argument, her tactic is to try to guilt me into walking back whatever I said. Deflect, deflect, deflect. She could not tolerate being wrong or the bad one, so she had to turn it on me. In addition, many of the things she said to me were because my father yelled at her about something or the other, so she had to offload it onto me.
The one thing I have to remind myself about my mother is that she will always, and I mean always, put my father first. The second daay I was home from the hospital, she admitted that she should not have brought my father with her because he would be jealous of her paying any attention to me. Then she cajoled me into showing my father a stretch to help with his bad back. On the second day I was home frome dying twice and being unconscious for a week.
But, hey. My father’s bad back! That was definitely more important than what I had gone through and how exhausted I was upon arriving home. I cannot tell you how fatigued I was for the first two weeks I was home. All I did was eat, sleep, and sit. And pet my cat. And messaged my friends.
When my mother was here, she got in the habit of saying I must be cold when we went on our daily walk. She said this for three or four days in a row. I told her I wasn’t and that she knew I wasn’t. My voice was sharp, and she said in a reproachful yet mournful tone that she just didn’t know what to say to me any more.
First of all, she never did care about what to say to me, but she did know! She knew I did not get cold and that I was more than capable of putting on a coat if I were cold. It wasn’t until much later that I realized my father was probably being nasty about it to my mother because he was obsessed with me being cold. This was an ongoing argument we’d been having since I was a kid. He would tell me to put on a coat because HE was cold, which made me angry. He never asked me if I was cold because that did not matter in his head. He maintains that I was mad at him for not saying ‘please’. No. I will not allow him to rewrite history. I was the one who was angry, and I know why.
My mother knows what she needs to do and say (or not do and not say as the case may be) if she wants us to be closer. I can’t say close because that won’t happen. I have no interest in being close with her as she is now. She needs to respect that I don’t want to hear about the troubles in her marriage, which will never happen. She also has to actually care about the things I’m interested in, which also will never happen. In other words, we both would have to be completely different people–which, once again, will never ever fucking happen.
It’s yet another fantasy that she dreams of, yet isn’t willing to put in the hard work to make it happen. Story of her life, and she’s too old to change. Well, not if she actually wanted to change, but she doesn’t. She’s just giving lip service to something she has no intention of doing.