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Mentoring–from the Greek word meaning enduring-

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I am thinking this morning about my mother’s attitudes about women coupled with her own self imposed isolation.  She complained about being lonely at the same time she told her mother things like what I find in her March 9, 1964 letter as I try to decipher what it is she might really have been saying here:

March 9, 1964

“P.T.A., which I never attend when up here – and I detest groups of women anyways!  is putting on a play and wants me to sell ads in program so I said O.K. as couldn’t refuse.

Am supposed to go see about it – at Mauldin’s (ugh) and Thomas’ – Darn.

[ME:  How could she have any friends with this attitude?]

Oh Mom, I realize this year life is so short – I am getting grey streaks – no white in my hair!  What’s life all about?  I don’t enjoy it the way I once did – I feel such a loss!  Why?

I try so hard to get enthusiastic but I can’t.

I’m lonely for someone to talk and bubble with.

Bill works nites here and is so quiet and un-bubbly.  He knows I’m different and doesn’t seem to know what to do about it.  How can I tell him?  I’ve tried.

[ME:  Dad worked days at a professional civil engineering job, had incredibly long and difficult commutes, and worked after he got home hauling water from the creek, plowing roads, repairing the tractor, cutting and hauling firewood, running errands, transporting children back and forth to school – – – ]

David is so dear but sometimes I tire of him and Laila is a nice neighbor but Mom, I’ve seen too much of her.  I wanted those classes Oh Mom, I need to be part of the world after 15 years.”

[Me:  David turned three two weeks after this letter was written, and was no longer a baby.  As I’ve described in my previous writings, once my mother’s children, her ‘imaginary friends’ outgrew their allowed baby-doll status, my mother had increasing difficulties in getting her needs met through them.  In fact, she had another baby 11 months after this letter was written.]

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I think about how my mother’s ‘time’ was before so-called ‘women’s liberation.  I think about how she was descended from a mother who was educated with her masters degree in 1918, from a grandmother who was highly self-educated and while did not work to support herself or her family, owned her own property that she ‘managed’.  I also think about my mother’s mental illness as I come to understand that it permeated every aspect of her mind and of her life and limited her ability to live a happy, healthy and fulfilling life in every dimension, including friendships.

I think about how my mother did not know what a person really was, and could therefore not ever participate wholly in friendships of any kind.  In this March 9, 1963 letter mother is alluding to taking a university class as if it would have provided her with her ONLY possibility for getting her social needs met.  Yet these ‘classes’ were really an unknown for my mother, something she could dream and fantasize about because they were NOT a part of her reality in any other way.

Yet every time something ACTUALLY became real in my mother’s life, she suffered from disillusionment and disappointment.  She was a master at fault finding with others.  That was a part of her disability, of her mental illness.  As long as her perceived opportunities to have her social needs met remained invisibly ‘out there’ – rather than within the very real opportunity she had to make friends and to socialize with the real people in her life – she could keep the invisible not real people in her imagination as hoped-for ‘imaginary friends’ — and evidently ‘bubbly’ ones at that.

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I had no frame of reference growing up from which to understand that my mother’s mind was sick.  Looking back, it’s not only what my mother did do to me that was a problem, it was also what she did not do.  One of those ‘not do’ things is that she never showed me, or any of my siblings, how to have genuine nurturing caring supportive friendships with other adults – particularly with women.

Fortunately I was able to overcome my biases about ‘hating women’ fairly early in my adulthood so that I have several long term friendships even today.  But I still do suffer from something very subtle that my mother could not show me:  How to find and use a mentor, particularly a female one.  I’m not even sure that I could define for myself today what I think a mentor is, or what a mentor would do, or what I could gain from having one.  I only know that I am missing one in my life.

I don’t think there would be the same kind of mutual reliance or give-and-take between a mentor and ‘mentee’ as there is between friends.  I would want my mentor to be so clearly, strongly and firmly walking ahead of me in her own chosen path that she would never need me to further her own life.  Yet perhaps my thinking about the matter of mentorship is all mixed up with what having a mother would have meant to me – because I never really had one.

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What a novel thought it is for me that parents should mentor their children.  Certainly I am old enough now that my parents are naturally dead.  But I will never NOT suffer from the deprivations from my childhood – until and unless I can truly recognize and make up for some of them.

So, at present, I simply invented a mentor.  I found two beautiful black and white full page magazine pictures of Meryl Streep.  I bought two $6 black frames and now have Meryl’s pictures hanging on my wall.  When I have a question, I simply ask myself, “What might Meryl do?  What might Meryl think?  Would Meryl tolerate this?”  I don’t, of course, have any real idea what the answers to my questions would REALLY be, and it doesn’t matter, because Meryl is my imaginary mentor!

It has certainly been easier for me to make real friends in my life than it has been to find a real mentor for myself.  Just having Imaginary Mentor Meryl Streep in this role in my life helps me take small steps forward in my thinking toward what I believe is a more positive direction in my life, one question at a time.  This might seem silly, but it helps me – and I know there’s really nothing silly about that.

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Borderline Personality From The Inside Out

My parents left me like a rudderless ship.  I don’t like that feeling!

“Mentor: Someone whose hindsight can become your foresight”

My mother’s brain didn’t work right!  She had no properly functioning foresight, middle sight or hindsight!  She didn’t even have mindsight!  So she certainly could not see me, could not see what I needed – and could not provide it.

It’s up to me to figure out what I need — and then to find ways to get those needs met, even with an imaginary mentor!

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