Wednesday, November 17, 2004
I'm not sure why I'm back here, today...
...maybe it's the exhilaration of discovering a few more readable and interesting comments to a post, my last one.
I especially enjoyed the one about how playing games with an Ancient One is exactly like playing them with a Young One. When I play games with my mother I often remember playing games with my older and younger sisters. For the first year or so as the younger player I thought that the reason I always lost was because I wasn't old enough to have mastered the game skills and understand strategy. After that year I realized that my losses were often chalked up to being ripe for cheater's pickings. Later, as my younger sisters became interested in games I realized that I could cheat them, although from experience I knew I'd be able to do this only for awhile. I think of this as I play with my mother and how easy it would be to reinstitute the Sibling Cheat Rule with her if my ego needed the approbation of winning at any cost. I'm long beyond that phase but remembering it spurs lots of enjoyable conversations between my mother and me about our memories of our childhoods, our childhood learning curves and how our siblings inadvertently promoted learning by taking advantage of our innocence.
Contemplating this also reminds me that now I often use our games as a way of nourishing whomever needs to be nourished at the time. If I perceive that my mother's ego could use a few solid wins I 'think' her through the game so that she gets them. If I need the wins (sometimes I do) I withdraw my 'thinking' on her behalf.
My history in competition has been that I'm a sore loser and a graceless, in-your-face winner. Although this has softened (a little, not much) through my years of adulthood and even more in caregiving for my mother, she and other members of my family have always taken self-satisfied delight in this quirk of mine. Sometimes when she and I are facing off across a board or a deck, I perceive that she'd very much like to game me into one of my "God damnit, I lost!" fits or watch me perform my ugly version of gloating through a win so I think her through to whichever she's wanting and let myself sink into my behavior at its worst. She loves it. So do I. It's a way for her to keep in touch with the family history she is most likely to always remember.
I'm sort of aimless today. I spent yesterday rethinking and resorting my project. Then, to clear my mind, my mother and I spent the late afternoon through evening and night watching back-to-back episodes of our mutual guilty pleasure, Sex and the City. At one point during the first season disc I was finishing the preparation of our Cobb salads and let this disk linger for several minutes in the episode selection phase where sensational bits of conversation from the episodes are replayed. My mother tends not to distinguish between previews and actual programs and I noticed from the kitchen that her attention was riveted on the replays. As I began to set up her TV table with pills, supplements and utensils I said, "Give me just another minute, Mom, and you won't have to listen to, 'He's Mr. Pussy...he loves going down on women,' again."
She looked up at me, startled. "Is that what she was saying?!? I couldn't make it out!"
Hmmm...I wondered, "You know what that means, right?"
She glanced sardonically at me and promptly blew me out of the water. "I knew what that meant long before you were a gleam in my eye."
Sometimes when we're watching these shows I wonder if her natural reticence toward talking about sex, which translated, when I was a kid, into not ever having a sex discussion with my mother, wasn't really natural but instigated by her own 'don't talk about it' youth. Maybe she always wanted to talk about sex freely and now, in her Ancient years, her parents long dead, this program is giving her the pleasure of doing so. One's Ancient Years, I think, have their compensations.
I especially enjoyed the one about how playing games with an Ancient One is exactly like playing them with a Young One. When I play games with my mother I often remember playing games with my older and younger sisters. For the first year or so as the younger player I thought that the reason I always lost was because I wasn't old enough to have mastered the game skills and understand strategy. After that year I realized that my losses were often chalked up to being ripe for cheater's pickings. Later, as my younger sisters became interested in games I realized that I could cheat them, although from experience I knew I'd be able to do this only for awhile. I think of this as I play with my mother and how easy it would be to reinstitute the Sibling Cheat Rule with her if my ego needed the approbation of winning at any cost. I'm long beyond that phase but remembering it spurs lots of enjoyable conversations between my mother and me about our memories of our childhoods, our childhood learning curves and how our siblings inadvertently promoted learning by taking advantage of our innocence.
Contemplating this also reminds me that now I often use our games as a way of nourishing whomever needs to be nourished at the time. If I perceive that my mother's ego could use a few solid wins I 'think' her through the game so that she gets them. If I need the wins (sometimes I do) I withdraw my 'thinking' on her behalf.
My history in competition has been that I'm a sore loser and a graceless, in-your-face winner. Although this has softened (a little, not much) through my years of adulthood and even more in caregiving for my mother, she and other members of my family have always taken self-satisfied delight in this quirk of mine. Sometimes when she and I are facing off across a board or a deck, I perceive that she'd very much like to game me into one of my "God damnit, I lost!" fits or watch me perform my ugly version of gloating through a win so I think her through to whichever she's wanting and let myself sink into my behavior at its worst. She loves it. So do I. It's a way for her to keep in touch with the family history she is most likely to always remember.
I'm sort of aimless today. I spent yesterday rethinking and resorting my project. Then, to clear my mind, my mother and I spent the late afternoon through evening and night watching back-to-back episodes of our mutual guilty pleasure, Sex and the City. At one point during the first season disc I was finishing the preparation of our Cobb salads and let this disk linger for several minutes in the episode selection phase where sensational bits of conversation from the episodes are replayed. My mother tends not to distinguish between previews and actual programs and I noticed from the kitchen that her attention was riveted on the replays. As I began to set up her TV table with pills, supplements and utensils I said, "Give me just another minute, Mom, and you won't have to listen to, 'He's Mr. Pussy...he loves going down on women,' again."
She looked up at me, startled. "Is that what she was saying?!? I couldn't make it out!"
Hmmm...I wondered, "You know what that means, right?"
She glanced sardonically at me and promptly blew me out of the water. "I knew what that meant long before you were a gleam in my eye."
Sometimes when we're watching these shows I wonder if her natural reticence toward talking about sex, which translated, when I was a kid, into not ever having a sex discussion with my mother, wasn't really natural but instigated by her own 'don't talk about it' youth. Maybe she always wanted to talk about sex freely and now, in her Ancient years, her parents long dead, this program is giving her the pleasure of doing so. One's Ancient Years, I think, have their compensations.
