What I Am Up to Here, or Why Am I Looking for My Mother On-line, Especially Since She's Dead?

Twenty-five years ago, the first time I sat in a therapist's office, she looked at me and said, "Fill in the blank: 'I do _________ because my mother makes me.'"

I was offended. After all, I was well into my thirties and the idea of my mother making me do anything was outrageous. What I soon learned, however, was that almost all my thoughts and actions and decisions were a function of my mother's influence on me. Therapy, it seemed, was a process of untangling my mother from me. The therapist, S., said the it worked this way: we would look at everything in my life, big and small, and try to work out where my mother's belief systems were implicated in my process.

Six years and some three hundred sessions later, I was a master at filling in that blank. I had separated from my mother, found my own identity, created an independent life for myself and, as they say, moved on.

Or so I thought. Till recently, when events have conspired to make me realize I am all too often responding to some thought or action or decision by rejecting it because it's too much what my mother did. Now I'm the therapist, and so I know that that kind of response bespeaks a less than independent state of being. It is time, once again, to look at what I do because my mother makes me.

I could go back into therapy...but for some reason, I want to do it myself. It's a big, complicated subject (or maybe not, we'll find out) that I need to see in front of me to figure out. I could just write a private journal, but, but, but --that seems so useless. My own thoughts just going round and round for only me. (note to self: where is Libby in this particular idea?)

So I've decided to do it in a blog. No one knows I'm doing this blog and I won't advertise it, but it will still be out there, which seems to satisfy some need to be public and published. This latter is definitely a Libby-inspired notion, and, yes, I will deconstruct it sooner than later.