Thursday, April 10, 2014

Reply to Debbie's farewell, part 3

Continuing some more ....
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3. This is something we have not talked about.  I see a pattern in your Mom’s relationship with your Dad and Wife’s relationship with you that worries me.  Your mother is very, very passive in her relationship with your Dad, and remains super-calm and non-reactive in response to him.  While Wife is not passive – she acts out- over the years she became helpless.  I really don’t want to step into this pattern of women who do not function to their full capacity. 

This is the easiest one of all to deal with, because your interpretation is simply wrong.  Yes, my mother is very passive around my father, super-calm and non-reactive.  What you fail to see is that she is the active and competent one.  My father is the helpless one.  So if you want to compare my parents’ relationship with mine-and-Wife’s, it is wrong to see them both as cases of helpless women and active men.  The real parallel is that Wife is like my father and I’m like my mother.  It’s the same pattern, all right, but with the sex roles reversed.  The pattern is that one partner is loud, self-centered, belligerent, and helpless; while the other is quiet, passive, self-effacing, and gets things done.  What interested me so much about our relationship (yours and mine) is that you are like my mother.  You even look like her, a little bit.  So I did kind of wonder what it would be like in the long term, for the two of us to be together with each other … since we both fall on the same side of that equation.

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