On Baggage

(This post was originally written on May 25, 2007.)

I receive email occasionally. Most emails come from mothers who
have been estranged by their adult kids. Much less often, maybe twice a
year, I get an email from someone who has estranged their mother or both
parents. (I rarely get emails from men who are fathers or sons. I may
have received two emails from men in thirteen years.) Invariably the reaction
to my website and blog is different for mothers who have been estranged
by their kids from the reaction of adult kids who have estranged their
parents. (I can’t recall EVER getting an email from a parent who has
estranged themselves from their kids.) I’ve written on the baggage we
all carry previously. I made a series of posts about baggage which can
be found in the Creative Expressions category (see link in side bar).

As for me and my baggage, of course I have baggage like everyone
else but I think I am
more aware of my own baggage than many people for the simple reason
that I have experienced estrangement from more than one perspective.
Consequently I can relate to people who have estranged their parents
while also relating to mothers who have been estranged by their kids. It
is also true that it can be easier for both groups to relate to me because I
have experienced something of what each has experienced. However, most
people, whether mother or daughter, relate to me based on my experience
as a mother estranged rather than as an estranging daughter.

I am frustrated sometimes by people who presume things about me
because they pigeonhole me into a category such as “mother” or
“daughter” or “parent” or “woman” or “older woman”. People carry such
stereotypes of people in their minds. I find this less in real life
where people who have experienced estrangement meet and get to know the
flesh and blood me as a human being. It is so easy on the internet to
take a bit of information and draw conclusions about someone and ignore
the fact that the gaps in the information are being filled in by
whatever is going on in the reader’s mind. We look for things to relate
to and understand in what we read. The “filler” that we have is the
memory of our own experience to use to create information to fill in the
blanks. We use whatever we’ve got lying around in our minds which are
loaded up with BAGGAGE!

I first noticed this phenomenon ten years ago when I began writing on
the internet about estrangement. Some people began to react to me as
though they knew me well.

Strangers sometimes react as though they know what I want, what I
think, why I do what I do, why I’ve done what I’ve done. People react as
though they know me better than I know myself and they feel sure that
they can educate me about my own mind. If they met me in person I doubt
that they would do this or if they did, that they’d feel some hesitation
in drawing such definite conclusions. But in the more anonymous more
impersonal internet, they feel confident that they are experts on me and
that analyzing me and giving me their opinions on my flaws as they see
them is their obligation and duty. They are most often daughters in
conflict or estrangement with their mothers.

My observations of that kind of reaction, which felt quite dramatic
to me when I have been certain that I haven’t done anything that fits
the person’s vision of me, has been the inspiration for the Baggage
Series in the Creative Expressions category.

What I think is interesting and sad about “baggage” is that having
baggage and not being aware of baggage prevents people from
understanding themselves and from understanding the humanity of others
about whom they draw such firm conclusions. It’s much harder to discern
the truth about people when we stereotype them. It’s much much harder to
be angry at people when we let ourselves relate to them as human beings
and as people who have some similarity to ourselves. Even when people
are different in so many ways from each other, there still are things
that they have in common. Maybe the purpose of baggage and stereotypes
is to make it easier to put up walls between ourselves and others when
we feel unsafe and angry?

Being aware of our own baggage might not change our decisions about
whom we want to allow to be in our lives but we can make better
decisions if we open up our minds to the possibility that we don’t know
everything there is to know about other people.

People are always surprising me. I imagine that those who try to
pigeonhole me might be as surprised by the reality of me as I’ve been
surprised by others. In general I think we’d all do better with a bit
less baggage to carry around. Putting some of it down might be a relief.

I will say before I finish this post that 99% of the emails that I
receive are from mothers who are in pain over their estrangements from
their kids. They don’t write to tell me about myself. Women who see
themselves as mothers who miss their kids write to thank me for sharing
my story on the internet. I appreciate every one of them who has written
to me to say that. It is one of the things that makes my efforts feel
worthwhile.

Ginny