Current Events - pt 2

     You need to take responsibility for your actions. You haven't taken responsibility for your actions! When are you going to take responsibility for yourself?
     Those are words I heard him say to me and assume it is what he says about me to others. Words I know he says to himself about me when he tells himself why it's ok that he's behaving the way he is.
     She seems to minimize her behaviors and shift responsibility off herself. ...blames others... Has minimized her role in this matter. Explains away events. Does not accept responsibility for personal role. Did not cry or show emotion, was serious.
     Statements and fragments of statements written about me by a "professional" after a "brief interview" with me and then a lengthy discussion with him.


For more than a week now I've thought nonstop about these things, about the theme expressed by those words. About the constancy of it's being brought up over the past year.  If I remove all emotion from my thoughts, remove my attachment to the meaning and my need to respond, then I can see the way in which these things might have a foundation in truth. But only if I remove emotion and attachment and involvement, only if I try to stand outside it all. And then I see too, how my every effort to explain ANYTHING about my behavior, my actions, my FEELINGS even, appears to be blaming, shifting responsibility, minimizing.

If the shoe were on the other foot.... as the cliche states so accurately.


I don't necessarily accept that the statements and resultant theme held over me are true or valid - but I do accept that it is a believed (and believable) stance from which he has made his argument. And only by doing that, by seeing how he's arrived there at that point and how he's made it his absolute truth, am I able to finally, finally, oh God finally, let go of my futile attempt to figure out what to do to make this whole thing better.


I can't change his truth. I can't change his perception, nor can I change the tremendous damage I have done over the past year in my efforts at trying to change his truth (aka blaming, shifting responsibility, minimizing...).


What I can do is accept all of that and work with it instead of against it.

I can do what I expect HIM to do and that is to accept responsibility for my actions regardless of WHY those actions were committed.  I can stop explaining why I've done something and simply sit with what I've done and the way that is perceived by others... and then respond to that.  Not by explaining any reasons, but simply by responding.

I will do this because this is what grown ups do: take responsibility.  I will do this because it is what a mom does, what a mom wants her kids to do, and I am, after all is said and done, Still The Mom.

Love, Mia