The Agency I'm Taking Back

Continuing the story I started in Facing the Darkness.

I run a company, Northstar Digital Design. I make decisions all day for my clients, my team, and most importantly for myself. And every so often, in the middle of a normal workday decision that should be easy, I catch myself second-guessing my own read on a situation for no reason I can point to. This little voice inside of me is still expecting to be told I got it wrong. Funny, for a guy who named his own company Northstar - the one thing that’s supposed to always know true direction.

It took me a while to trace that feeling back to its source.

Before I go further: my mother is still alive. This isn’t written to hurt her, and I’ve thought carefully about what to include and what to leave out. My purpose is the same one I had writing about my father, namely to set the record straight about how I see things, and to be honest about where I’m at now in my life at the age of 49 with a loving wife and two amazingly beautiful and inspirational children that mean the world to me. If she chooses to have a relationship with me going forward, I’m open to that. But it has to be a healthy one, on terms a doctor would recognize as healthy, not the terms I grew up with.

The first time I brought my girlfriend (now wife) to meet my mother, summer of 2006, we sat down for dinner with her and my stepdad, who were married on May 22, 1999. Almost immediately, my mother pulled out a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I don’t remember the exact words that came out of my mouth, but I do remember what I was feeling: shocked, hurt, embarrassed, and doubting myself in real time. And underneath that, something closer to fear: the woman I was falling for was watching this happen, and I was terrified it would scare her off before we’d even gotten started.

I remember learning as a child that you can judge a man by how he treats his mother. I believe that. I’ve just spent a long time trying to figure out how you’re supposed to treat a mother who has done this consistently since my adolescence.

I spent a long time not having language for what that was. I do now: DARVO, triangulation, gaslighting, a kid pulled into the role of managing the adults in the room instead of being one of the kids. I’m not going to turn this into a clinical glossary. If you’ve lived it, you don’t need the definitions. You just need to hear someone else say: there’s a name for it in the DSM, and you weren’t imagining it, you are not alone.

My mother, brother, and I are spread across three states now, and most days we barely talk, but distance was never really about the miles. For as long as I can remember, I was waiting for something I’ve since stopped waiting for: the moment she’d say I was right. That the way things happened is the way I remember them happening. I don’t think that moment is coming, and I’ve stopped needing it to. I know what happened in my childhood, I was there. Her version doesn’t have to match mine for mine to be true.

That shift from needing her to agree, to just knowing is the north star I was looking for in my journey.

I’m not angry writing this. The opposite is what I hold to be true. With a clear mind and heart, I want to publicly say that I love my mother, and I don’t trust her with the parts of me that are still tender. Both of those are true at once, and I’ve stopped needing them to resolve into one simple feeling.

So here’s where this chapter ends, and the next one starts: I’m getting professional support - the kind doctors and therapists actually recommend for exactly this - instead of carrying it alone or writing my way through it solo forever. That’s not a failure. It’s the most agency I’ve taken in a long time.

If you’ve spent years waiting for an apology that never came, or you’ve quietly started keeping your inner life somewhere your parent can’t reach it, I see you. You’re not the difficult one for needing terms. You’re allowed to love someone and still protect yourself from them.

This is chapter two. There’s more to come.