The author reflects on the experience of feeling trapped by their mother's established narrative of who they were as a teenager, drawing parallels with a friend's experience and considering the challenges of being a parent and narrator to their own children.
As a teenager, I often felt confined by my mother’s narrative about me. I didn’t appreciate her knowing reactions to certain things I did or her surprise when I behaved in a way that she perceived as out of character.
This is probably a nearly universal experience betweenbut that doesn’t make it any less excruciating. A close friend recalled that once, while home from boarding school for the holidays, he got into an argument with his mother, who told him, “I don’t even know who you are anymore.” “Of course I had changed,” he told me recently. “I was 17 and she hadn’t seen me in three months.” After that visit, his relationship with his mother took aand never recovered. “She couldn’t look beyond her own version of who I was. If I wasn’t fulfilling her expectations, I was a disappointment.” This friend’s mother was a writer — and so was mine. Nora Ephron’s famous maxim that “everything is copy” may sound cute, but the problem with turning your life into a story is that it can be hard to change a story that you’ve gotten accustomed to telling a certain way. Narrating your life is an act of creativity, but when you’re a teenager and the narrator is your mom, narrative can feel like a cage. What my friend and I wanted as teens was for our mothers to both attentively notice things about us and exercise restraint when incorporating these noticed things into a narrative. We wanted the freedom to change without it representing an alarming plot twist. We wanted the story to change along with us. My mother and I were close as adults, but when I was young I mostly kept my own counsel. Now that I have one teenager and one almost-teenager and, I often think about the kind of narrator I have become. I want to narrate with a light touch, the way I wished my mother had. It’s not necessarily easy to bring your full attention into the intimate confines of home, where most of us just want to relax. At work or out in the world, we might hold ourselves to certain standards of critical awareness that we let slide when we’re around our family. We might be sensitive and responsive to the shifting priorities of our boss or clients while allowing ourselves to be oblivious to our kids’ waning enthusiasm for the same old games or our partners’ ambivalence about date-night routines that are starting to wear thin. We might feel this ourselves in how a loved one might not seem that curious about us, might not notice when we experiment with a new look. Sometimes the last people to notice how we’re changing, or aging, are the people who see us the most., he writes about the difference between the remembering self and the experiencing self and how the remembering self often overpowers the impressions of the experiencing self . In this way, we ignore the accumulation of new information in favor of what we remember to be true. Within the lifelong relationships we have with our partners and children, this tendency can have serious consequences. It’s easier for us, on a cognitive level, to relate to people the way we remember them being than the way they are in the present. These biases may be baked into our brains, but we can compensate for them, and we should, by paying attention to one another with sincere curiosity. Kahneman argues that most of what people notice as exceptional intelligence is simply prolonged attentiveness to a given circumstance. When we apply open attention to something, we tend to really learn about it. And human cognitive biases often work in our favor, not just against us: As much as our minds can operate like pattern-recognizing machines, our consciousnesses can be mysterious and surprising. Any of us, at any moment, are capable of noticing something that challenges our previous assumptions about our children, our partners, or ourselves. The question is, Do we give ourselves the opportunity to do so?by the writer Derek Thompson in which he tries to come up with accurate ways to describe what it’s like being a father of two young children. Usually I’m not a big fan of “reasons to be a parent” arguments because I don’t think you should be applying the same cost-benefit logic we use for say, choosing what car to buy when you’re considering something that will remap your entire emotional life forever. But Thompson got through to me when he wrote this: “When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.” To me, this reads as a poetic invocation of Kahneman’s notion of what it is to think slowly rather than fast. Raising a child means adapting to very rapid change on an ongoing basis for about two decades. You can either take a “set it and forget it” approach to knowing your child — deciding who they are and then assuming they’ll keep being that person — or an approach of ongoing curiosity where you might find out that you were wrong again and again but will also have the chance to really know your kid. If you’re lucky, they’ll feel that open-minded attentiveness. It feels really good. This applies to partnerships too. So much of learning about anything, let alone about who your child or partner is, is attentiveness. Kahneman writes about how people love to ascribe a certain rare brilliance to chess grandmasters, thinking of them as having an otherworldly attunement to the board. But in fact, he argues, their skill is mostly just the result of long hours paying very close attention to the game, identifying patterns, mapping new patterns onto old patterns, and, through all this prolonged attention, continuously updating the prediction models we’re automatically building in our minds with newer data. The frustrating thing about attention, as we’re all painfully learning every day of our lives, is that it seeks the path of least resistance. We’d rather do almost anything than stare at something until it starts to make sense to us. I wonder if this is part of why advice columns are so popular. Rather than attend to our problems, which is to say pay attention to them until our minds start to form ideas about what a possible way forward might be, we would much rather talk about our problems with a stranger. But our love of advice columns is a harmless byproduct of our aversion to our own problems when compared to our more powerful and ubiquitous techniques for avoidance. When, late last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Jimmy Fallon that he can’t imagine having raised a newborn without the help of ChatGPT, I felt, along with what must have been every other person who saw the clip, acute sympathy for the Altman infant. Sam Altman would rather perform the tired party trick of talking to a smart machine than provide the one thing every baby wants more than anything else: a trusted person’s undivided attention. I don’t mean to suggest that if we simply stare for long enough at a croupy infant or a depressed teenager that patterns will align magically in our minds offering us directions. Asking for help is probably the most important thing a parent can do. But knowing how to apply advice to your own family’s circumstances, and knowing the difference between good advice and bad? That is on you. And the only way to get good at the cognitive puzzle of “What’s best for my family?” is developing your attunement to the people in it. There are some ways this line of thinking can go off the rails. Attunement should not be confused with intensive parenting. It is not hovering like a helicopter or worrying yourself sick. Attention is not necessarily surveillance with the aim to control outcomes. Too much focused attention can smother a person and make them want to hide. Everyone needs to be left alone sometimes. But to bring a sense of sincere curiosity to our loved ones is to show them humility and respect. This kind of attention holds our assumptions in a loose grip. It lets us admit we were wrong without feeling ashamed. The difference between the attentiveness I craved as a teen and the unwelcome attention of a parent’s hypervigilance is the capacity that each of us have for ongoing transformation. We can adapt to one another subtly, gradually, and almost unconsciously, the way organisms in an ecosystem do.The Woman Having Amazing Sex With a Boring Guy This week, a 28-year-old who works retail at a toy store gets ghosted and hooks up with her second choice.Star Says He Can’t Go to Oscars Motaz Malhees said Trump’s travel ban on Palestinians means he won’t be able to attend the awards ceremony.Leaked audio allegedly shows Melissa Nathan and Jed Wallace plotting to paint film producer Amanda Ghost as a “madame” for a Russian billionaire.A month before the season-three premiere, the show’s composer wrote in an Instagram post that he’s “DONE WITH THIS INDUSTRY.”Now’s the time to get 20 percent off linen sheets at Brooklinen, 40 percent off cardigans at Gap, 30 percent off flats at Everlane, and much more.Any illusion I had that being a “perfect mom” is an attainable, or even worthwhile, goal has now been thoroughly destroyed.*Sorry, there was a problem signing you up.
Mother-Child Relationships Teenage Years Narrative Parenting Identity
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