3:38am January 20, 2015

Public apology to my mother.

I know to some people, apologies are something you should do in private. And sometimes I agree. It depends what I’m apologizing for and why. This apology, like many of my apologies, is public because:

It’s easier for me to hold myself accountable when I have hundreds or even thousands of witnesses to the apology. (Applies here.)
It’s sometimes easier for me to write to a lot of people than to just one person. (Not sure if it applies here or not)
I learned a lesson that made me want to apologize, and I think that lesson may help other people too. (Absolutely applies here, especially because the answer came to me out of nowhere, and I hadn’t even realized it before.)

There’s one big downside to public apologies. People who don’t like you can use them against you, especially if you learn later that the thing you did wasn’t that bad (and that the public apology makes it look far worse than it is), or that you were set up for making that apology by the exact same people who are going to use it against you.

Best example from my life: Public apology for pretending to be plural. Apology made as a teenager who thought everything I did was wrong, and that I was the worst person on earth, who did not deserve even to live.. Basically I had severe depressive delusions and that made me trivially easy to manipulate — “maybe if I just do this, I won’t be the most horrible person on earth anymore”.(1) More details in footnotes.

Anyway, I realized something today that I don’t know why I never realized before. Other than that it’s as social thing, and I’m autistic, and however many social skills we do have, we sometimes can’t even communicate with our “cousin” (has a condition that has social or sensory features in common with autism, but isn’t) or “BAP” (Broader Autism Phenotype, a medical term coined when they realized that close relatives of autistic people could have autistic traits without being full-on autistic.) My mom lies in that boundary zone, cousin/BAP. But she’s better at the-world social skills than I am, and sometimes it makes it hard for us to communicate across that gap. Plus, even if she were autistic (and she might’ve qualified for an aspie diagnosis as a little kid, we just don’t know).

So…

For years, I have gotten aggravated when she praised my art, my poetry, any of my creative endeavors. Because I thought “She’s my mother, of course she likes it.” Then I would seek out constructive criticism elsewhere, all the while grumbling to myself about “She’d say I was good even if all I did was dip a rock in yellow paint and throw it repeatedly at a canvas.

But then I realized:

She’s not trying to critique my art as art. She’s trying to connect with me as a human being. She’s trying to say “I love you.” She’s trying to form a connection between us, and by insisting on absolute accuracy, i’m inadvertently pushing her away. I’m accidentally saying that her expression of love for me isn’t good enough.

This still doesn’t mean i’d go to her for constructive criticism mind you. But for love, for validation, for connection, i can use my artwork to do those things with her, and I will no longer get annoyed that she likes pretty much all of my art. Because she loves me, and she loves nearly anything that comes out of me creatively.

Anyway…

Anna, I’m sorry for not recognizing sooner what was going on. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize that sometimes you like my art for what it is, and sometimes you like my artwork for who I am, and that both of those things are totally valid ways of approaching art. I now recognize your reactions expressions of love — regardless of why oyou like the art. I love you too, and I hope that you aren’t too mad at me for being slow on the uptake where this is concerned. I hope I haven’t hurt you too much over the years with my responses. I resented what I didn’t understand. I don’t resent it anymore.

I promise that when you praise my art from now on, I will remember to take part of the praise as meaning “I love you”, and part of the praise being the rt iself. I know those two things get so tangled together you can’t easily tell them apart, and tha’s fine by me. I love you too. And after Ron’s death, it’s reminding me that love maters more than anything.

Footnotes under cut. I’m experimenting with making my posts shortby putting the longer tangets into footnotes, and putting that under a cut and a straight line when I can, and just the straight line when I can’t.

________________________________

(1) And anyway, the people who now parade that around as proof that I like faking diseases, are the same people who handed me the FAQ for a plural community. I didn’t really understand what a FAQ was for so I read it as an instruction sheet on how to behave, so I began to behave plurally. That’s’ not the whole story but that’s a lot of it. And the people who now wave that apology around as proof that “Mel likes faking diseases”, are the same people who claimed to be plural themselves. One of them might have been a plural system, the other was a guy who was not plural in the least bit but pretended to be so he could pick up vulnerable women in support groups

Notes: