Grab a cuppa and a comfy seat, and let’s chat a while.
It’s Monday again (well, it was!) - and, around here, that means it’s time for Coffee and Conversation.
When I was six, my family was driving on an interstate highway late at night. Streaks of headlights and taillights painted the dark. For the first time, I realized that each car held people living their lives, lives as important to them as mine was to me.
I wanted to see what those lives were, and to share my own…
I strive to reach that understanding through offering ideas and tidbits from my life. Settle in for a while, and share something of yours.
Last week, I read this post by Kristen Lamb, and it resonated with my own volatile childhood, a quagmire of emotions and reactivity where people argued and attacked far too often. My three siblings and I were often pitted against one another, egged on by our parents.
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I became a wary victim. I learned to read the signs of the coming combustions. I was a master appeaser. Conflict twisted my insides almost to the point of panicky sickness. Certain sounds, postures, and expressions triggered instinctive protective responses. I apologized when I felt I had been wronged; I still find it nearly impossible to confront someone when I feel they’ve wronged me, preferring avoidance to the tumult of powerful negative emotional energy.
My own children were seven and four before I began to understand how much impact these patterns had on me. And I was repeating the pattern with them. I decided that I needed to change. It was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done, to stop and learn to be the mother my children needed me to be.
As I began to learn new and more peaceful ways, the reactive and dysfunctional patterns I thought normal when I was a little girl became transparent. I began to resist the bullying and manipulation, which led to more stress and conflict with family members who were liked the status quo. I wanted to keep my family bonds, and still live in this new way that was making so many wonderful changes possible in my own home.
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So, what does all this have to do with Star Trek: Enterprise?
Eventually, there was an extremely unpleasant and public backlash. The crux played out on Facebook, where I posted a casual update on my wall, and returned to find eighteen hours’ worth of flaming posts from two siblings. My character, emotional state, mothering, and life choices were openly and often falsely ridiculed.
Because I hadn’t been online, and I had changed, I could see something I hadn’t before – these attacks weren’t about me and my opinion. . I had unwittingly provided a fuse for deep, seething wounds, and they responded in the way we’d learned as children – gang up and attack any perceived threat.
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When I posted that the nastier messages would be deleted, and a set of guidelines for how I expect people to comport themselves in my online space,one sibling ‘needed a break from me and my energy’. My brother, with whom I had always been close, demanded that I have no further contact with him or any member of his family. It’s hurt, these last years, to think that we may never be friends again, that we’ll never have another wandering, easy conversation.
And that’s where Enterprise comes in.
You see, Star Trek was ours. Of our whole family, we were the only two who enjoyed it. It was our touchstone, our secret language, and, even as adults, we would spend hours, sometimes, exploring plots, books, what-ifs, and favorite characters.
When Enterprise came out in late September of 2001, I was the mother of a newborn, preparing to drive cross-country fromYellowstone National Park to upstate New York. I was skeptical of both that guy from cheesy Quantum Leap as a viable starship captain, and that the show seemed to have trotted out yet another token Vulcan. I didn’t see the show during its four-year run. But my brother did, and thought that I would like it, too.
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I wish that I could tell him how right he was, how Trip makes me think of him, how so absolutely not a token Vulcan T’Pol turned out to be, how I cried for two days after watching the last few episodes, and the way they reminded me of deeply personal pain and loss. I even wish I could ask if his dog was named after Captain Archer’s beagle.
I wish I could tell him how desperately I want more…
More Enterprise – and more connection between he and I.
My son and daughter are friends, at 12 and 9. Minecraft is their thing. They spend long hours creating, separately and together. They make plans and create games and stories around their play. They laugh and cry and sometimes get mad at each other. Because their lives are peaceful and conflict resolution is an important part of our family life, they are getting steadily better at expressing what they feel, listening to one another, and releasing anger in favor of enjoying one another’s company again.
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They’ve lost a brother. He died in infancy, and nothing can ever bring him back. That’s tragic, but not as tragic, maybe, as losing a living sibling because of an inability to overcome a damaging family dynamic. Not as tragic as loving someone fiercely, and feeling the empty place within my soul where only he fits. Not as tragic as knowing that it might be forever, and that there is nothing I can do about it without sacrificing a way of life that brings joy and fulfillment.
But how we are treated as children has bearing on whom we become as adults, and volatility can become a way of life some people never overcome.
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This might be the deepest tragedy of all. If we had been raised differently, maybe I could share Enterprise with my brother, or tell him how much I love and miss him, or share how changing those patterns has healed the little girl I was.
It’s worth the pain, though, to give my children the chance never to feel this hurt.
And that’s worth it.
Have you ever needed to make peace with something in your life, at the cost of something else you treasure? Can you see how your childhood affects your life, now? I’ll provide the hot beverages, and a listening ear.
