shared traits

In reading Kerry's letters & some from Mom, am struck with similar traits the two women shared that would have made it easy for them to read & respond to each other's communications, while making it tough going getting & replying to mine.

Neither seemed to show the slightest interest in developing an on-going, constructive discussion, with give & take, on substantive issues.  Consider one attempt by me to share key info with Mom, who was down with Mike & Kerry on an extended Australia visit.  I'd become frustrated that she apparently hadn't a clue who I was, that she was content with a false image of me.  Mom responded in a fury - How dare I say that she didn't know me?  She knew me better than anyone!  

She didn't ask, "What are you thinking of that I don't understand?"  ~or~  "I am stunned that you say that. What do you mean?"  Instead, Mom totally blew off what I'd written.  She was still too massively vulnerable at that point to have any interest in hearing more.  

There's a similar quality in Kerry's letters.  She is totally engaged in presenting her point of view, rather than hearing someone else's.  If something galls or wounds her, instead of asking for more info, she leaps immediately to her own defense.  

Praise be, my life was blessed by two beyond-my-control realities ~ I took after Dad, who was curious about the why & how of someone else's thinking -and- the right people came into my life at just right times.  

Dave, and then Candy, came into our lives on the very day Dad slipped from us.

Dorothy Rhodes moved in next door soon after, just as I was beginning to break away from Mim's orbit.

In time, being close to Dorothy connected me with Lach & Rob & Roger, three men who would forever change my life by taking the risk of asking if I knew that I shadow boxed, a new term for me - if someone disagreed with something I'd said, within a few moments I shifted my original statement to be in agreement with them.  

Perhaps more than any other AH HA! in my life, that one share from those three guys started a cascade of fresh insight moments.  

The strange thing wasn't that I shadow boxed in conversations, but that I'd assumed everyone did.  Tweaking your opinion to be in safe agreement with others wasn't the norm?  That was news to me! 

It's clear to me, looking over these ancient communications, why I'd drive both Kerry & Mom right up a wall.  Mom did her best not to see, not to ask for clarification, not to seek deeper awareness of a given situation.  Kerry was interested in...  actually, I don't know.  The only thing that seems clear from her letters is what feels to me like a disinterest in anyone else's opinion, take on things.

Part of me feels sorry for both Kerry & Mom, being saddled with such an irksome, challenging communicator as yours truly, always wanting to dig deeper, to root out the core cause of whatever was afoot.  Can understand why Kerry could feel that I was over-the-top rude & Mom could experience it as just plain scary, but felt okay with the other.  At least until Mom's final years, neither of them had to worry about the other looking into corners better left in shadow.  

In that, the two women shared very similar traits which put both on a communications collision course with their difficult daughter & irksome s-i-l, aka little ol' me.