Still pretty sad

There was another memory that led to a song of the day. In this case, the song was part of the memory. My song for 1981 was "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. That was not when it came out, or when I first heard it, but it is from my most vivid memory of 1981.

That was the year my father cheated on my mother for the first time. I did not understand what adultery was. I knew it was shameful, because I was always attuned to that. There was a sense that we had been rejected, because he was spending time with a family other than us. (She had a son. I don't know how much time my father spent with the son, which would really be pretty irresponsible, but at least once when he went "out" he gave the son's name as the person he was going to see, not knowing that we knew.)

I am sure there are people who will think that Mom should not have told us. I know she didn't really tell us that much, but there were two ways in which knowing helped. Dad completely stopped going to church at that point. That would have been pretty abrupt, and confusing, but knowing that was going on did explain it and kept us from pressing the issue. Sometimes I think maybe we should have pressed the issue more, but he was always hard to talk to. That only got worse.

The other thing is that Mom was really sad. I'm not sure it would have been possible for her to hide that, or that it would be fair to ask her to hide it, but I do suspect that unexplained sadness would have been more unsettling for all of us. Yes, we were upset by what was going on, but we weren't left wondering what we did, or if there was something even worse happening.

The memory I have is one night she was sitting in the living room, and very sad, and I wanted to comfort her. I started crooning to her. I guess crooning is the word. I wasn't singing words, but it wasn't humming either, just notes, and the tune had some improvisation but was mainly "Baby Mine".

I believe the reason that I remember it so clearly was the feeling of helplessness, but then it was also this pattern for my life, where I would focus on other people's needs, and trying to help them.

I do not hate this about myself. Kindness and consideration of others are beautiful things. It does feel good to help someone. It just feels like it was also dangerous in conjunction with the lesson that my emotions didn't matter. For one thing, you can actually be much more useful to your fellow man if you practice self-care too, but I didn't.

So let's say ages 3-6 was learning not to let people see you cry, which really meant not to cry, and age 9 was learning that the way to cope with that was by putting others first. Written about some time ago, there was also learning at 6 that I was fat and disconnecting from my body, and at 14 that boys wouldn't like me. All of those lessons were wrong to some extent, but they shaped me. Given that, it's really not surprising that some things played out the way they did.

In retrospect, I believe the most damaging lesson was not to cry, because it kept me from examining the other things, when I really needed to not accept them at face value. There are good reasons against wallowing in self-pity, and it is totally true that some of the things that would make me cry when I was a little girl wouldn't now, but that wasn't the message I heard.

I saw a quote recently from Mr. Rogers:

People have said "Don't cry" to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is "I'm too uncomfortable when you show your feelings: Don't cry." I'd rather have them say, "Go ahead and cry. I'm here to be with you."

When we don't want someone to cry, I don't think it has to be all selfishness, because we probably also don't want them to be sad, which can be altruistic. But if the message is not to show the sadness, rather than to help with the sadness, we fail. It fails some people more than others.