Yesterday morning...oh dear...
...yesterday morning was not one of my shining mornings, but then neither was it one of my mother's. I'd been running on an extraordinary energy surge that had lasted for several days and allowed me to accomplish amazing feats with little sleep. I'd gotten so used to the surge that I had been planning my days around only a few hours of sleep a night. Tuesday morning was my Waterloo. Although I didn't have to haul myself out of bed, my body hadn't achieved that level of stubbornness, I felt as though I was down three quarters of a tank. My primary physical behavior yesterday morning was yawning, over and over and over.
    I managed a few good ones before I stumbled out to our main living area. Although it was somewhere between 0930 and 1000, Mom was up, sitting at the table looking as bright as her new yellow bathrobe. She'd been up for about 15 minutes, she said.
    I was pleasantly surprised but my fatigue betrayed me and I continued yawning. Each time I started a good yawn my mother said (one of her teases she's been doing for years), "Close your mouth."
   I've always found this mildly irritating but have tolerated it without thought just to humor her, closing my mouth over the yawn, which frustrates a yawn just as efficiently as having someone say, "Close your mouth," and produces a facial distortion that she finds humorous.
    Yesterday morning I was not in the mood. I needed several good, deep yawns just to get going and she was interrupting each one. Without warning, 52 years (well, a few months shy of 52 years) of frustration poured out of me. I lit into her. I told her I was severely sleep deprived and I needed to yawn. I told her that the more she did this, the angrier I was becoming. I asked her to stop in no uncertain terms. Then, falling into my usual anger mode, I quickly whipped up the icing and began spreading it on the cake. The following is paraphrased from memory.
    "You know, Mom," I began, "you've always done this, ever since I can remember, and it's always been both irritating and frustrating. Yawning is not only triggered autonomically, it's necessary and it's pleasurable. You need to stop interrupting people's pleasure. This isn't the only thing you do to keep people you love from feeling pleasure. Your habit, for instance, of offering a back rub and then, when you're done, slapping the person right where you've been rubbing them is just as frustrating. You know, I give you very pleasurable foot and leg and foot rubs every morning and every night. I do all kinds of things that give you physical pleasure and I purposely go out of my way not to disrupt the stimulation and relaxation these give you. You need to stop doing this to me and, for that matter, to others. You are a sensitive woman with much personal dignity and awareness. These ploys are beneath you. It's time they stopped."
    Whew! Did you get that?!? It's rather like the time I severely corrected my mother for interrupting people when they're talking and announcing, "Oh, she/he doesn't know what she/he is saying." It's in the history. Now that I'm reading my paraphrase above of what I said to her this time, it feels so fresh that I'm sure it probably is much closer to what I said than I imagine.
    The funny thing is, when I raked her over the coals for belittling what people say she never did it again. Although we haven't had occasion to test yesterday's correction, I suspect it will work as well.
    I don't know if I was unnecessarily severe. I do know that within minutes I felt horrible and began apologizing for my method, although, I continued to point out, the subject was important. I also launched into a litany of apologies for some behaviors that have been habits of mine and not only irritate my mother but sometimes confuse her and certainly make her feel as though she has no control over her life, one of the things I've been trying to change (search out archived post from some days ago regarding the possible psycho-causes for my mother's anemia). The worst example is my habit of giving her a choice of just about anything; food, activity, timing, etc., and then canceling her choice and telling her the opposite is more practical, wiser, etc. I told her I won't do that again, and I won't.
    The matter, however, was her interruption of other people's pleasure. After the episode was over I gave some serious recollective thought to it and realized that it is my understanding that my mother has habitually and 'teasingly' interrupted other people's small physical pleasures because she may have continually had her own physical pleasures either belittled, interrupted or ignored all her life, by everyone in her life. A previous subterranean consideration of this is precisely why I instituted my personal policy of giving my mother physical pleasure and allowing her to enjoy it without interruption (although I'd never consciously thought about it). It gives me a great deal of pleasure, sometimes physical pleasure, to do this for her, in part because I know no one else has.
    The curiosity in all this is that almost every time I rub my mother's feet and legs she offers to rub mine in return. I have a standard oral essay to which I subscribe and which I repeat every time she offers. I tell her that massage is so pleasurable that it should never be 'traded' in return for a massage. It should be given freely with no thought of return by either the recipient or the masseuse. When someone gives a massage 'in trade' they usually don't pay attention to the body they are massaging, to the reactions of the recipient, they don't massage thoughtfully with involvement, they simply complete a barter.
    Not that people should never ask for physical pleasure but the pleasure for which one asks should be granted only if the one asked wants to give pleasure without trading it. I know, I'm going against all the 'good advice' of a couple of generations of sex therapists. As well, people should become more habituated to giving physical pleasure without waiting to be asked. Otherwise, the person giving the pleasure is not focused on the recipient but the result, their payment for the pleasure given, and don't devote themselves wholly to the task of sensitive pleasure giving. Thus, the person receiving the pleasure is never allowed to really relax into the experience and receive its full benefits. Again, I know I am facing down centuries of 'satisfied' johns and janes. But none of this disproves that as a society (I'm speaking of this one in which my mother and I live) we may very well be in the habit of not knowing what heights of pleasure and relaxation we can achieve because we're trading pleasure favors instead of freely giving and receiving pleasure.
    If you doubt what I'm saying, those of you who enjoy being licked by your pets (who invariably stop if you begin to pet them while they're licking you), think about how enjoyable is the reception of free pleasure, how much longer the afterglow lasts when you know you are not being expected to return it and how, often, your instinct in that relaxation is to reach out and scratch and stroke your pet, your fingers seeking out exactly those places where you know your pet most enjoys being caressed.
    The above anecdote is an excellent example of how my mother and I learn and grow with each other. Sometimes it get tense and maybe a little out of hand. But, one way or another, we manage to understand each other, make amends and increase our level of mutual enhancement, which is possible even when a day begins in a very bad manner.
- posted by gail rae @ 21:04   email...this post