Good or bad, on Steemit I write about the things I are most passionate about. It empowers my portfolio of work here. Being honest and authentic allows us to connect with and enlighten others, and even develop trust and new friendships that can last a lifetime. My story is as vital to the world as anyone else's, and I think it should be told. Rather than bottle it up to myself, I choose expression as a means to release toxicity away.
Introduction
Yes, this is my #Dysfunctional-Family post in which I introduce you to the strange and unusual habits of one of my family members.
In this post, I am going to talk about the discretely #passive-aggressive #behaviors of my mother. There is nothing here in this post she is not already aware of that we talked about, so I do not feel bad about sharing my story knowing that she already gossips about me plenty.
Let's start at the root of the problem.
My mother sometimes meddles in my garden. More on that later...
A related problem is she even meddles with other people's property without permission. One neighbor we lived next to (a particularly dangerous psychotic criminal menace, not to be messed with), even built a tall fence and put up a "No Trespassing" sign on it a few months after we moved in (we don't live there anymore, thankfully!).
This post isn't meant to be insulting to her, as I believe parents deserve the lifelong respect of their children and grandchildren. That doesn't give her a free pass to turn my life upside and get away with it. So this post is my chance to vent, and maybe get some insight from others who also struggle with dysfunctional family dynamics in the shared garden areas.
Prepare for another dose of an epic rant by @creativetruth.
Yard Debris
The above photos are the yard debris collected by my mother over the course of a week when temperatures were rocketing above the 90's. Most of it is pine cones.
Here's the clincher...
It wasn't collect from our yard.
It was collected from someone else's property. Collected from their front lawn to be specific.
She never asked for their permission. She doesn't even know the owner of the house. Where I live, this is considered criminal activity to trespass uninvited onto someone else's property.
She would go out during the hottest time of day, and sit under their tree collecting the pine cones. Out of concern for her safety my dad and sister asked why she would risk the hottest part of the day to collect yard debris uninvited from someone else's yard. Her rationale was that this was a fire hazard, and necessary to keep the community safe from fires. She would be more honest if she said she could not stand an untidy yard.
Now, it is our fire hazard.
The yard debris pick-up only happens once a week, and they will only take one bin of compost each week. My dad could probably haul it away in his van, but it will be messy, and he might have to pay for its disposal. He didn't ask for this problem.
You have to understand, my mother has a personality like Ferdinand the Bull. She is very docile and focused on quiet independent activities. She grabs garbage and laundry from under your hands faster than it lands in the bin. She can hear a needle drop a mile away, and will go berserk until someone fixes the perceived problem. If something annoys her, the whole world around her witnesses the drama she erupts into, and hears her re-tell all the emotional baggage she has been carrying around that led to this.
Weeding
Today, she helped out in the backyard by doing some harmless weeding. Very helpful, right?
Wrong!
All those weeds were the vetch I started growing in early Spring, only in my garden beds. The garden plan was to grow vetch and clover as cover crop. It was to provide shade and a green manure for next year to enrich the soil.
The vetch was hanging over the back of my grow beds, and providing really good shade for the new seeds that are sprouting inside the grow beds, and behind where I sowed some wildflowers. Now most of this area has a lot less shade, which will cause some stress to the plants and new seedlings. We are getting really high temperatures with no clouds or rain.
Watering
This is third year I have attempted to grow pumpkins. I have been forced to grow pumpkins in a different spot every year, because I have not found a good place to protect them from my mother's meddling.
Every day this week I have asked her to not water my vegetable plants, especially in the evening. She isn't supposed to water my plants at all. She can't recognize a flowering #carrot or see my protected pumpkin plants, thinking the whole areas a cluster of wildflower weeds, and doesn't know the purpose of the plastic screen I have shielding my plants, and still gets water all over them. She uses the jet of water from the hose to spray the tree leaves above for some reason, and pulverizes my young pumpkin #sprouts with the heavy water. She isn't blind, but she seems ignorant when I call her on it, watching from my bedroom window.
Already seeing signs of over-watering and #mildew on the #pumpkin leaves. I guess even the thick barrier of carrot leaves (yes, this was on purpose, for protection from people) can't shield out a well-aimed water jet.
The Pact
The three of us (myself, my dad, and my mother) made an agreement when we decided to live here together that none of us three would change any major or permanent features to the yard without the approval of at least one other, and communicating with the third. I often find myself on the losing side of this twisted trinity, having to quarantine more and more of my plants to pot-bound spaces which I hide from the two of them. From my dad's poisonous preference to use Round-Up and Moss-Out to toxify the yard, to my mother's frivolous planting of tulips and roses on every border.
In the areas where I have used the ground to grow things, I have to include obvious barriers to prevent people from stepping on new #seedlings, or digging holes to plant bulbs and rosebushes I wasn't consulted about. It turns into turf wars between my mother and I. She thinks I have too many plants... so she one-ups me by buying decorative perennial shrubs to fill the yard space.
Conflict Management
I used to be a resident assistant at college, and I was well trained at handing a diverse variety of conflicts between roommates, and managing crisis situations. Empathy is one of my best qualities in relating to people, and it usually gains me their respect in return. None of my training and personality strengths have prepared me to successfully manage conflict with my mother. As I put out one fire, she starts another behind my back.
None of my communications with my mother seems to make any sense to her. "Don't touch." "Don't water." "Ask first". "Don't move my bonsai trees." "Don't get water on the leaves." "Don't prune my plants." "Don't harvest my plants." "Don't remove the seeds." "Don't touch the flowers when they fade."
She always has an excuse.
"It was a weed." "It was dying." "It was brown." "My dad always said..."
Those were my future harvests. Those were my seeds. My cover crop. Gone.
I thought leaving someone else's property alone would be obvious, but she has violated all my requests. She can't not interfere. To her, she thinks she is making things better, into the yard she wants. As long as my plants are on the property she and I share, she sees no reason why she should not have full influence over it all. This is something deeply ingrained within her personality. Can it ever be stopped?
Channeled Anger
Sometimes I ask her calmly. Sometimes I try yelling loudly to scare her from taking actions against my requests. #Anger and yelling are not in my nature, but I have found it effective in the past to sternly snap, "Stop!" in the midst of #abusive actions to remind when social laws have been overstepped.
This is my evil eye. @creativetruth has been known to make guilty souls beg for mercy with a single half-glance. You have been warned!
When I am discovering much too late what she has done after I get home, I am hoping maybe if I create more drama than her, so much that she is incapable of knowing how to deal with me, then she will retreat and refrain from repeating her mistakes. It isn't fair if I let her get away with her abuse, with no consequences. It does not work. She says I want to hear to make me stop. The next day, she is at it again.
Maybe this is foolish of me to think shouting will help any damage that has already been done, or cause anything to change.
Some Things Will Never Change
Nothing I have tried psychologically to be constructive works in altering her behavior. We learned this years ago, after our entire family had an intervention with her, and had to put her under psychiatric care to deal with larger #personality-disorders ( #schizophrenia, #multiple-personalities) that were escalating into abuse on all of us, even her toddling granddaughter who would cry from her random outbursts at the sky. She will not change her ways unless she wants to.
She thinks I am wrong. She think she knows more than me because her dad used to be a gardener. Look at the amount of content I have posted on Steemit showing my gardening success, my bonsai tree collection, and that is only a tiny bit of what she sees me accomplish. To think I know so very little after laboring in the yard to make things happen she never achieved, she must be #delusional. In truth, she has a very brown thumb, but she forgets. Every plant she has ever bought or has been gifted, eventually suffers until she helps by eventually killing it with kindness.
Again, I don't say these things to be cruel and nasty. This is the evidence. The facts. This is why I think she is delusional when she refuses to abide by my requests to stop meddling in my garden areas. There is a superiority complex. She does not think I should own anything without her self-assigned freedom to alter, destroy, or get rid of it. I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
This is a metaphor for what my home garden often feels like.
Aftermath
I don't know what to do anymore. I am all out of ideas. I keep catching her too late. She keeps meddling with my garden plants and bonsai trees, when I am not home. It makes me go on a non-stop rant. I am turning into... her!
Gardening was my one peaceful activity to help me find balance from stress with people, and to develop a sense of home that I have felt robbed of in my life. It was something I always wanted to do since I was a kid, but was always told not to. One day, after 30 some years, I said "screw that!", and started growing bonsai trees, and later started gardening in my own grow beds, and I have been studying and learning with experience how to become better at it.
There is very little actual privacy I can fully appreciate in a 24 hour day. Watching TV seems to be the easiest way to drown out pointless negative thinking. Limited use of the kitchen forces me to eat out nearly every day. My interest in cooking has dwindled to zero as a result. My preference would be to enjoy peaceful gardening with a bounty of food to harvest and cook for my health and well-being, and personal sense of accomplishment to fuel my sense of self-worth.
Maybe this is a fruitless endeavor while living with so much #conflict around me.
Feedback
Let me know if you bonk heads with family members over how to live together or dealing with the yard. Most families have a few rough spots, even if they don't like to admit it.
Do you have certain family members who can't be reasoned with?
Obviously, moving away would be a solution for me, but I am too financially strapped to make that a reality for now (that's another story).
Moving away from eachother seems like a sad solution for family members who would rather maintain a family unit if they can. I believe if your respect/love for family is deep enough, you should be willing to endure eachother's bad #behaviors over trivial matters that do not harm anyone.
Conclusion
Ultimately, having truly matured in character and soul is about empowering my thoughts and mind over what outside things I will allow myself to affect me. This #philosophy represents the ongoing choices I make in the journey I am on in life.
Unless I am being tortured, I know minor #annoyances do no bother me unless I choose to let it have power over me. Annoyances can rule my state of mind, or I can rule my own #attitude and behaviors, and enjoy inner peace even in spite of annoyances. After defeating such things as #Toxic-Relationships, #Depression, and #Social-Anxiety through trained #self-empowerment, I think I can endure a few cut leaves from stinging me.
Bonsai!
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Never give up on your own happiness. It is within reach. Drop the baggage. Embrace yourself.
