Stories, Sensitivity, and Creativity

Mothers, daughters, and humpback whales

My mom passed away in April and would have turned 80 this week. As I was reflecting on our relationship, it dawned on me that I am the last of my female bloodline. This obviously isn’t news to me, but it sits differently as my acute grief has begun to ease.

I am now the final voice for my women ancestors, the last who can tell their stories.

And so, in honor of my mom, I’d like to share with you a family story about women and girls, about mothers and daughters, and about the stories we tell and the stories we keep secret.

This story one that my mother would tell with some regularity to anyone who asked about my academics or my interest in writing. Here it is.

When I was in third grade, I announced to my teacher and my family that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I was drawn to creativity and crafting stories, and my teacher encouraged me to use my imagination as part of my regular classroom assignments. In practice, exercising this creativity caused my mom anxiety about whether I was adequately completing my homework. This anxiety came to a head when, as part of a report on humpback whales, I wrote not only the facts I’d found in our local library, but an elaborate story told from the point of view of a calf about her and her mother’s migration.

Nothing in the assignment called for this fictional sojourn. My mom was adamant that it had no place in a report. She made me sit at our kitchen table, crying the entire time, until I’d removed all traces of my story. The final draft was, she insisted, the right way to do this assignment. The A+ that I received confirmed her perspective.

My mom maintained for the rest of her life that this incident is the reason I became a writer. A good writer, whose academic and professional writing was conventional, acceptable, recognized. My mom would say that she saw my potential in third grade to write better and had helped me unlock that potential.

According to my family, the moral of this story is that I have always been too sensitive, especially if people were trying to help me. If I cried in response to her quietly delivered advice, that was my problem, not hers. I needed to toughen up and learn to take feedback. And when I did, good things would happen. If I thought I knew better, I was being too proud and needed to listen to people with more experience and expertise.

There are some ways that this story is emblematic of who my mom and I are, what my family values, and how imperfectly I fit into my family, even though we love each other.

Lest you think I’m implying otherwise, let me say that my mom wasn’t being a monster in this story. She was calm and never raise her voice. Mom valued education, accomplishment, and communication. As a single mother, she worried about me getting the kind of education that would let me avoid the poverty and underemployment she had known. Her intentions were noble, despite the poor delivery.

And I wanted to please her, to write in the neutral, formal voice she expected. I felt the pressure to perform, to be the good kid/daughter/student that would make her daily life easier and soothe her anxiety. The pressure at that kitchen table was weighty, and my tears flowed freely.

In response, my mom looked the other way, as if she hoped I’d quickly gain control of my emotions and return to the task at hand. I tried to breathe the tears away, get through the assignment, capture her approval in the moment. My eight-year-old body shuddered with relief when I was dismissed and could run to my room, ostensibly to put away the assignment. You know that I cried on my bed, right?

Mom would tell me decades later that she was trying to model fortitude and grit. I cried too much, she said. That wasn’t the right way to go through life. It certainly wasn’t her way of getting through life.

Even as a child, I knew that my mom’s way and mine were diametrically opposed. For me, fortitude shows up with emotion. My feelings are not separate from how I solve problems or respond to challenges. Tears are a part of nearly every significant experience in my life, part of how I emotionally regulate.

I’m highly sensitive and was born with this temperamental trait. I think deeply and am exquisitely attuned to other people and the world around me. I’ve learned over the years that I can’t “toughen up” if that means being emotionally flat. My sensitivity is part of my identity, and it shows up in all areas of my life.

And my mom? Well, she was definitely not highly sensitive. Feelings were never her primary awareness or her top priority. My mom met the world with logic and reason. In her mind, you got accomplished tasks first, then if you really couldn’t help yourself, you allowed yourself to have your feelings. “Never let your feelings run the show,” she would say.

Part of my mom’s tendency to lead with logic stemmed from her efforts to transcend the legacy of women before her. Her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother were notoriously anxious people. Nothing was too big or too small for her female ancestors to worry about.

My mom’s solution to her own fears was to face everything head on and never admit to the anxiety that plagued the women before her. In so many situations, this strategy served her well. But when faced with her worries about how her third-grade daughter was doing on a random report, her emotional shutdown reverberated through our relationship.

She felt frustrated. I felt misunderstood, dismissed, judged. And my sensitivity became, yet again, the butt of a family joke. How funny that I cried over a report on humpback whales.

How funny that they thought it was about the report.

I’ve always hated hearing this story told. It felt like a judgment of me and my sensitivity (and let’s be real, it was told in that way). But in the last few months, I’m embracing these sorts of family stories and choosing to own them.

The universality of the struggle of parents and children to understand each other is central to my work as a psychologist. As we learn more about epigenetics, we understand that there are multigenerational transmission patterns at play, stories of emotion and interpersonal struggles written into our being. My mother’s anxiety and my own; my sensitivity and her non-sensitivity: none of these can be viewed without a lens to the context in which they arose.

For my mom, control was central to how she managed her anxiety. Get all the information, make a plan, dictate the outcome, never be surprised. Her female ancestors used these strategies, too, but relied more heavily on avoidance, on constraining their worlds to a safe, manageable sphere. I don’t think my mom could have responded to her concern that I hadn’t done my third-grade assignment well enough in any way other than how it played out between us.

Her controlled style carried over to how she envisioned me as a writer. My mom’s idea of me as a writer was the image of a factual reporter, or maybe, at a stretch, a persuasive arguer of logic. My vision of myself as a writer has always been so much more. Each of us were looking for a way to bind our anxiety with words on the page, despite how differently we went about the process.

As I recall this story from 40-plus years ago, it no longer holds an emotional charge. My own journey through adulthood and as a mother has softened my understanding of my mom and helped me bring empathy to her and even to this anecdote. She and I were both showing up, fully ourselves, to carve a path forward.

We were oil and water. At our best, we combined into something wonderful, but requiring a consistent input of energy to hold us together. That kind of energy was not always accessible to either of us in the midst of everyday life, daily interactions, school assignments.

There are many things I admire about my mom. I have no shortage of memories of feeling cherished and celebrated by her. I know that she loved me.

In the end, I’m learning that it doesn’t matter if she could embrace my sensitivity or if I could embrace her dispassionate stance. There is so much each of us has struggled to understand in the women who have come before and after us. My mom and I have both staked out unique ways of carrying forth and transcending those ancestral legacies of anxiety, accomplishment, and interpersonal relationships.

There is room for all of our ways of being in the world.

What I never told my mom was that I saved the fictional story that she made me cut out of my report. I shared it with my teacher, who recognized my sensitivity and my creative potential, and who was delighted to read it.

I kept that a secret as a child for fear of getting in trouble. I kept it secret as an adult because I knew that my family wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t my job to convince them that my creative, sensitive, emotional outpourings had value. And still do.

So, mom, I release the energy of trying to maintain the mixture of oil and water. Let us separate into what each of us were meant to be, valuable and whole in her own right. I will tell my own stories and find my own morals to the stories we shared.

My sensitivity and creativity are my birthright and my treasure.