A HUNDRED YEARS OF MATERNAL MONEY MADNESS

 

As I said yesterday I am going to focus this week on the high voltage topic of families and money.  There is no doubt many freshman moms and kids are struggling with financial issues; questions of all sorts and  navigating un-chartered  dollar infested waters teaming with giant waves.

This week for the most part I am going to remove the spotlight from my relationship with my own freshman for several reasons, one is there is a back story as there is in every story and I feel a need to explore it.   I also think she is feeling some strains of being under a microscope, albeit I am under a higher wattage one than she is,   but she didn’t start this I did.  So she gets the week off and I go back in time.

 

The only thing that I will say is in terms of Freshman Mom and Freshman daughter status where we are today, Monday October 13th, 2009 she is “punishing me” by not speaking to me because she feels I am punishing her by reducing her allowance and allowing her to pay off the debt to her step-father, not because I want to punish but because as a parent even when we have a freshman or a sophomore as long as we are paying the bills, there are certain money lessons that they need to learn. And one of those is that there are consequences if one spends one’s money recklessly. I know from what I speak.  And consequences when one spends someone else’s without asking. 

 

What’s really interesting about this, is the if one looks at the full-frontal attack I took on Saturday night from “Concerned.”

 

“Yet, you appear to be threatening to cut off funds for college unless she sacrifices her independence and happiness for your emotional security – surely this cannot be right?” 

(This is a small part of the comment; you can find the rest on under the post before last.)

But as I responded to “Concerned” –  number one, this was never in the cards; I am not cutting off college. And If I wanted to use money in exchange for love I could have bought myself a bushel of love and attention yesterday with a click of the mouse.

I chose not to, not because I don’t want the love, but because I have learned from decades of watching my own family’s dynamics for multiple generations, one cannot buy love, one only buys indentured servitude masked in the guise of love which always ends up as resentment masked in the guise anger.

I have seen the destruction of relationships and families this kind of behavior results in. It’s a barter system I am not willing to take part in it. Even if it costs me phone calls and IM’s and “love” from my daughter. I can handle it.  I have weathered worse.

Decades have taught me love is earned not purchased. 

In both my families a love for money system has been in operation for as long as I have been alive and long before.

It is not unusual, I think one finds in many families who have a little bit or a lot of money, whatever the case may be, the money usually ends up being the controlling dynamic in most interactions.

It starts as early as a trip to TOYS R US where one learns that if they throw themselves on the floor they can get what they want If they yell “I hate you.” Mommy will find that so intolerable she will give in despite her better judgment. Mommys do not like to be hated, especially by their children.

At the moment metaphorically speaking, Taylor is in TOYS R US yelling “I hate you” and I’m sitting in the car with the motor running reading a copy of US.  I’m not going anywhere, but I’m not giving in either. Either she will calm down and eventually come out and get in the car or I will have to run into Duane Reade and buy more reading material to get me through it.

The thing is, if one allows this love for money system to dominate, it can continue in one form or another until the will is read; sometimes even after.

There are parents who try and control their offspring through their love/ money from beyond the grave.  I personally have been cut in and out of so many wills I have lost track. 

I cannot be bought by the threat of being left something and I will not pretzel myself into an inauthentic being in exchange for the possibility of someone else’s money sometime in the future.

A system of maternal love for money was in place in my mother’s family forty years before I was born, seventy years before Taylor was born and close to ninety years before Lucy was born.

I have watched the scene played out so many times I can do all the parts, including fainting spells, false trips to the hospital, love withheld, funds withheld, funds replaced, love replaced, with endless fighting, stress and crazy making shenanigans going on all the time.

 

It starts with my grandmother. Now I love my grandmother, I loved her very much when she was alive and I love her memory. As often happens posthumously, selective memory takes over and one chooses to remember only the good.  In my grandmother’s case there was a lot of good, especially directed towards me. She was loving, maternal, generous to a fault, she dragged me anywhere I wanted to go, was kind to my friends, stayed up all night and told me stories and as I got older she stepped up and helped with my apartments, rent, and was always there for me in any way I needed.  She was a great woman in many, many ways.

But like all people she was multiple things rolled under one skin. 

On the flipside of her kindness  she was controlling beyond belief, she was manipulative, she was fundamentally unhappy and paranoid; I would go so far as to say depressed much of the time. She had no sense of boundaries, certainly with my mother.   She could be withholding and punitive if she wanted.  Plus she had an empirical streak that was quite bizarre.  It manifested itself in her being rude to waiters, waitresses, sales girls and almost any one she found in a subservient position. To witness it would make your skin crawl. It could be so bad my mother and I would often times have to leave the table or the room and slip the tearful, abused person some extra money and an apology for my grandmother’s horrible behavior. It wasn’t all the time, but it was often enough that it resulted in both my mother and I adopting a lifelong policy of being overly kind to anyone who  works in the service business.  And I won’t even say someone works for me, I say they work with me.  It had to be pretty bad, as we were both always in a state of fear when we went out with her. It softened a bit, as she got older but not much.

She also refused to ever own that anything was remotely wrong with her. She could not say sorry or own her mistakes, a family trait I have worked over time to break. It’s odd my mother picked it up as it drove her nuts.  Back the days we got along, which we really did for a long time; we used to have a joke with grandma, who was not the world’s most ironic character but we would say, “Do you have any faults?” And she would say, “I belch.”  This became a standing joke with my mother and I. If one would accuse the other of being blameless the other would respond ‘I belch.”

My mother was an only child, as am I,  as is my father, which in itself is quite bizarre.  But being she was an only child, and me being the grandchild, the brunt of my grandmother’s bad qualities were played out in a lifetime game of tug of war with my mother being her main opponent. I tended to wind up with  more of the good grandma and mom ended up taking the burden of the bad. This is usually the case in all families, the child takes it and the  grandkids are spared for the most part.

But this dynamic was in place long before I was born and lasted pretty much until the end of grandma’s life.

And all the manipulation and control and empirical behavior were played out on the field of money.

As complicated as life can be people fundamentally want very simple things, they want love no matter what they say and they want and need money.  Hopefully they want to be fulfilled by their work. But I would put love and money at the top of the list; so they end up co-currencies in may situations.

Now my grandmother had money, it came from my grandfather whose attitude was money solves all problems so instead of actually dealing with these two women who were locked into a terribly destructive, lifelong struggle he took the easy way out, or the only way he knew and threw more money at both of them.

This was the proverbial gasoline on the fire.

I don’t think my grandmother ever felt she got her share of love from anyone, not her mother, not my grandfather, maybe me until I was an adult, so she had to get it from somewhere, and not being the most self- confident person in the galaxy she felt she had to buy it, plus she had  her empirical streak.

So you have my grandmother in search of an empire to run and the only one she can come up with is my mother.  I think she lassoed my mother in to this arrangement when my mother was a child, I don’t really know but it had to have started then.

It’s hard to admit now as she is dead and could be so kind but she clearly pissed off many people in her 85 years.

She was convinced her mother loved her little sister more.  I was told this was true but I never was around any of them enough to see the evidence and she didn’t have many friends, only those she could sort of “buy” – more members of her tiny empire. When she died she had three living sisters not one of whom showed up at her funeral and as I have said before my mother did not go either. Something happened somewhere and it clearly wasn’t rosy. She needed to be the big dog  but didn’t really know how, so  if her money didn’t get her what she wanted she took it and went home or sometimes checked into the hospital or took a trip to Vegas where her money was deeply appreciated.

But in terms of my mother she was the feudal lord with the money and she held it  over my mother all of her life. For some reason she gave to me without strings attached – perhaps strings skip a generation or perhaps she had all the strings she needed with my mother.

But she and my mother would fight and fight and not speak and with hold love and cause each other endless misery and then like all co-dependent relationships they would both start missing the toxic link and my grandmother would start giving her money and my mother would start returning the attention my grandmother needed, but most likely never in the way she needed it as I’m not sure anyone could do that. And it would all start  all over again, no one ever yelling time out.

I’m not even sure what my grandmother really wanted. Because I remember in later years trying to make her happy and she would always screw it up.

This habit my mother decided to call her own upon my grandmother’s death.

But from the sidelines all I ever witnessed was two people driving each other crazy and who told me separately that they drove each other crazy. 

Yet my mother liked her Roger Vivier shoes, and her trips to Europe and her fur coats and all the other things her sometimes-malevolent, sometimes-benevolent ruler provided.

Now if she is reading this, which she is, she will say well you enjoyed the stuff too. I would say yes, but I did not enter the Faustian bargain and quite frankly because of many reasons beyond my control I did not pay the same price. Those Vivier shoes cost my mother a lot; I think her sanity.

I never saw these two women have fun together I can tell you that.

I don’t have one memory where they just enjoyed each other’s company. It was a chore for my mother to be around her as my grandmother was always not getting something she wanted from my mother.  They sat there both gulping antacids trying to connect and never really accomplishing it.

She got along with her father and in any warm anecdotes from her youth she has shared, her father is always in the starring role.

I think my grandmother was so in her face and suffocating that she just didn’t know what to do and when she did try and break free my grandmother would lure her back with more money.

This went on for over sixty years.

And neither one wanted or knew how to claw their way out. It was all they knew. But watching from the sidelines I knew I never wanted that kind of relationship in my life. I saw the damage it caused. It was not pretty.  I think it turned my mother into ultimately who she became, which is strangely a version of my grandmother the last thing she wanted.

She is brighter than my grandmother and very accomplished in ways my grandmother was not. But she tries, unsuccessfully to use money as the cudgel and she always takes her marbles and goes home and often times closes herself in her closet.

When my grandmother died is when our big problems began as she felt the need to keep up this dynamic with someone. Since she couldn’t really use money with me as I was making my own, there were  fewer  cards at her disposal.

 I told her when my grandmother died I will not play you, to her; no way no how.  And I have not. And that really pisses her off. She doesn’t understand how to play any other way. But she is the kid and I’m supposed to be her mother. She is at TOYS R US on the floor yelling I hate you, (for god knows what) and I eventually had no choice but climb in the car and drive away.

But back in the old days I had fun with both of them,though never at the same time.

I had fun with my grandmother as she did all the things I loved and despite the fact I have ended up in the emotional equivalent of Basra with my mother, for years we had a grand time. A truly good time.

It had it’s problems.  But we had years of good trips, we laughed, I enjoyed her. She was fun. We had fun. I think if my she had not been embroiled in the buy and sell game with grandma she would have been OK. But it screwed with her head and I can’t undo it.

What Vanessa says about remembering “doting.” I don’t know that she was doting as maternal was not in her nature, we were friends, and I took care of some of her emotional needs and she in turn  she was  a buddy. I felt it was my job, she was single, with a mother who was driving her batty, I was  one of the few people back then who gave her uncomplicated pleasure – until I didn’t’.

What Vanessa remembers was we got along, and at that age as I can tell you when most teenagers and mother’s don’t  – we did – it had it’s own dysfunction but unlike my mother and grandmother we actually got along and because the money stuff for both us was covered by grandma that toxicity stayed out our relationship for many years.

And that is why part of this whole Freshman Mom thing is hard for me. I didn’t go through it – it was not my experience with my mother;  perhaps if it was we would not find ourselves in the mess we are in today: Or she had not spent a lifetime playing Charles Schwab with grandma. But to quote Larry “ The fair is in Pomona.”

After my grandmother died, my mother reinvented their entire history. When I hear snippets, I wonder how she ever came up with it?  It has not one connection to the truth. But if it makes her happy, at eighty-one despite he fact she hates me, she deserves to find her happiness where she can.

Once I was older and was in therapy where blessedly I still am, I would always ask my mother why she wouldn’t go see a therapist?  She needed it, really needed it. And she would respond time and time again, “I don’t want to end up hating my mother.”

The sad part is if she had gone into therapy, she would have maybe ended up understanding her mother along with herself and then she wouldn’t have had to reinvent their whole life together. And perhaps she and I would have a relationship and  she could enjoy the girls.

This  for me was the lesson of what happens when you let yourself be bought by another.  You do end up hating them and yourself for allowing it to happen.

I will not do it with my kids – I want them to make their own money when the time comes, be independent and be able to love me for me and have the freedom to tell me to go fuck myself if I turn into a dotty, old, controlling fool.  Genetically I fear the cards are stacked in that direction, so I have to work overtime to avoid it.

I mean that. You may not think I do – but I really, really do.
That is why I’m sitting in the car. I’m learning a lot about Jennifer Biel!

 

FRESHMAN MOM