I saw a Facebook meme this past week that made me smile. It was an old man sitting next to his wife on some kind of bench, but they are turned away from each other because they're angry...but, as fate would have it, it's raining...and the man is holding an umbrella above his wife's head...even though he's very clearly angry with her.
Even when we're angry with the people that we love, we still love them.
This truth is the greatest complexity of our human relationships...how we can love someone and hate them at the same time. And not just this particular emotional dichotomy, but an infinite combination of relational emotional states that are just as unique to each relationship as the fingerprints of the persons involved.
For the past several weeks I have been processing my relationship with my mom, particularly how much I hated her and resented the roles that she and her life circumstances unfairly thrust upon me. It didn't start out that way, of course: at three years of age I only knew that I needed to help mommy. . .and, so, I did. . .time, and time again.
At age 3, I didn't even know what resentment was. But by the time I had turned 10, I not only knew the word, I knew from the core of my being exactly what resentment felt like, and it only grew deeper and harder with time. And now, all these years later, I am still processing the layers of resentment that have settled and hardened into a sedimentary relationship geology that remains my burden to excavate and understand.
Resentment doesn't simply "go away" just because a person dies.
What I can see now is that (just like the old man) I never stopped loving my mom even when I was angry with her. But this longstanding anger and resentment became a concrete wedge that made it impossible for me to feel the warm and loving feelings for my mom.
I never stopped loving my mom, but the resentment made it impossible for me to feel it...or express it.
As I sit here today writing this blog, it feels like resentment is nothing more than an empty word that has been assigned to a very complex collection of relational experience...almost as if resentment in and of itself doesn't really exist on its own...sort of like how a long list of symptoms are collectively classified as a "syndrome" of disease.
Resentment really is a syndrome that gets assigned to long list of emotional symptoms. Resentment can be acute, an immediate response to something. Or, resentment can be chronic, building slowly and progressively over time. But either way, resentment is a state of a disease in a relationship.
For me, my resentment was the long, slow, chronic category of resentment. And the symptoms along the way were insidiously invisible, yet they were very, very real. Every time my needs were diminished, discounted, or destroyed by the unfair imbalance within our relationship, the pain was an unacknowledged symptom of the state of relational disease that was developing within the relationship with my mom in the exact same way that cancer grows in the human body.
My mom and I had a cancerous relationship. Her needs fed off of my life, just as the cancer cells feed off of the healthy cells within a body...a long, slow, painful process that left me feeling angry and resentful, that's true. But underneath it all, the core emotional symptom that ulimately made me feel angry and resentful is the endless pool of sadness created by the love for my mom that had no way to express itself...no way to be felt.
I may have hated my mother growing up, and resented the way that my life had been sucked away to feed my mom's cancerous emotional needs...but I never stopped loving her. . .
. . .and the pain of that dichitomy feels unbearable in its truth.
