Parents and Polyamory: The Voices In Your Head
I’ve been finding recently that the more I talk about polyamory with my mum, the more evident it becomes that the insecure, jealous, angry, sometimes hateful, voices in my head are the voices that listened the most to her own insecurities growing up.
I’ve reached a point now where I’ve realised I can talk to her about issues I face in my relationship, but that anything along the polyamory route quickly becomes her echoing my insecure and jealous voices back at me, helping them to grow louder and stronger rather than tamer as I process and work through them.
It’s not much help when you’re struggling with jealousy over your partner failing to communicate, reassure or stick to commitments with you to have your mother say ‘well of course you’re upset, he’s ignoring you to go off bonking some other woman’. That particular exchange resulted in a full-page angerspread of all the vile things in my head about M. Those are the pages in my journal I don’t like, but I’m glad they’re there for me when I need to vent some bile. This is why my journal has become sacrosanct: if it is opened and read by others they’ll see not only the sickening bursts of gooey, drippy love, but also the occasional extreme Page of Rage, which contains no truths, only vitriol siphoned off to clear my mindpipes.
My mum’s gone through her share of grief and upset in life: my dad died back in the nineties and she was celibate for 16 years until she met a nice-seeming rocker who turned into three years of verbal, emotional and psychological abuse, agony and torment. One of the biggest issues was his having always cheated in his relationships, being extremely controlling and jealous and possessive to the point of isolating her, whilst constantly accusing her of a lack of trust in him.
For her, fidelity (and by that she means monogamy) is incredibly important, and anything else is incomprehensible. For me, honesty and willingness to grow is paramount. And growth sometimes means immediate discomfort, which as my mother she desires to shield me from.
So we come at these issues from very different experiences, and we’re both learning and healing, but it’s important to recognise where we just cannot help each other, and the subjects or viewpoints that the other does not need to hear, particularly in times of hurt and stress. In other words, we are finally going through the adult, rather than parent/child, boundary-setting process.
Still, it’s good to identify where some of these voices have grown from, and in turn, learn some of the demons that plague her too.
