When I was an adolescent (speaking in a strictly chronological sense, because in many ways I am still an adolescent), I wrote faithfully in a journal. I recorded the mundane events in my ordinary, teenager life. I manufactured fictitious events that were much more exciting than anything that ever really happened to me. I wrote pages and endless pages of imaginary conversations, some with real people, some with imagined people. The turquoise pages of my diary were safe haven, refuge from teen angstdom and a less-than-perfect reality.
Safe haven until my no-boundaries, snoopy, privacy-busting mother decided she needed to read my journal because she had a right to know what was “really” going on in my life. It wasn’t the last time she’d violate my privacy, certainly not the only time.
The last time she violated my privacy was 7 or 8 years ago, when I was in the middle of a contentious divorce. She came to my house(invited, but I wasn’t there), went through my personal papers, read my correspondence with my almost-ex, my attorney, God knows what else. Mom warned me that I was getting screwed in the divorce settlement. She was right, of course, but that wasn’t the issue for me.
The issue was that for more than 15 years after her first intrusion into my private space she was still pulling the same shit. She made excuses and told lies. The letters and papers were just laying there, she said. I couldn’t NOT read them, she said. You never tell me what’s happening in you life, she said. If I want to know anything about what’s going on with you, I have to read your private correspondence, I have to open your mail. I have to violate all your boundaries. If you didn’t want me to read your letters and peruse your divorce papers, you should have put them away. She said.
Right, Mom. That makes perfect sense. I understand. If I expect you to respect my boundaries, I need to install a safe in my house. I didn’t leave anything “just laying around.” I put it in my desk drawer and you went on a treasure hunt.
I haven’t forgiven her. She’s never apologized or expressed contrition. She is a great, boundary-free, amoebic blob. She means well. I’ll give her that. But she’s so intrusive. She can’t stop telling people what they should do, think, feel, etc. She’s never figured out where she stops and others start. She bleeds like ink on wet paper into the lives of those around her.
I have accepted that she is who she is. She’s not going to change now. Not to say that she couldn’t if she wanted to, however, at this late date I can’t imagine what would motivate Mom to become a different sort of person, a person who respects boundaries, who recognizes the edges of herself.
It’s easier now. I moved far away after that divorce. I took my children far away so that she couldn’t wrap her tentacles around them, too. She can’t come by my house unannounced because I’m a thousand miles away. She can’t snoop through my drawers and read my mail. I had many reasons for moving and when I packed up and left town, I didn’t count among those reasons that having a bit of distance from my mother would be a very good thing. It was a pleasant side effect. In retrospect, cutting those apron strings my mother was strangling me with would have been a better reason to move than the ones I insisted were truly behind my desire to relocate. Neither here nor there, I suppose. Just a good thing that I got away.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother. She has been generous and supportive. She has shown me great love and kindness. Her motives for intruding in my life inappropriately were good, not evil. Good intentions, however, do not erase harmful effects.
(This is a long, sad story. Please be patient, dear reader. The ironic part is coming.)
In the years since my divorce, since my migration to a mountainous state, I’d taken up journaling again. I even went to a psychologist who used journaling as a therapeutic tool. It was hard at first. I held back. I censored everything I wrote. I could not trust that what I wrote in my therapeutic journal would be safe. Dr. Psycho-Journaling said You need to work on your trust issues. Make a point of leaving your journal accessible, on the coffee table, in the kitchen by the coffee maker. Explain, she said, to your partner (I was living with a man at the time, not Mr. Shitlist. More like Mr. Shithead) that you need to trust that he will not invade your privacy, that you can trust him to resist the temptation to read your journal. Mr. Shithead did a lot of shitty stuff but he respected my privacy. He never read my journal. Or maybe he did. If he did read my journal, he never used what he might have learned there against me, he never hurt me with information I would never have chosen to share with him. Kudos to Mr. Shithead. He wasn’t all bad.
So I learned to trust. A little. As much as a damaged person like me can ever trust. I dumped the therapist but kept writing. I grew complacent. I didn’t worry about privacy violations. I left letters and journals and random bits of fiction a poetry sticking out of drawers, stuffed under sofa cushions, loose in the backseat of my car.
After Mr. Shithead moved out, my abandonment of worrying about privacy violations was complete.
Then I met Mr. Shitlist. For reasons I am unwilling to explain or discuss at this time, I married him. I will say that it was a huge mistake. Maybe the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. But…but ….but I didn’t know it was going to be such a disaster or I wouldn’t have married him. OK. You’re right. I probably did know that Hurricane Shitlist was going to destroy my trailer park of a life. But I don’t want to talk about that.
I told Mr. Shitlist that I had privacy issues. That I liked to write, that I needed to write, that I needed assurance he would not violate my privacy, would never read my journals, letters, electronic documents or anything I wrote without my express permission to do so. He said that would be no problem. He was a journal-keeping sort of person, too. He’d lived with a journal keeping woman. He’d never been tempted to sneak a peak at her private pages. He understood the sanctity of one’s journal.
You know what’s coming, right?
He admits now that he’s read everything I’ve written that he was able to find. This isn’t just a matter of seeing a journal left carelessly open on the dining room table and a reading a few lines.
This is an active hunt through every room, every closet, every box stacked in the basement to find anything I might have put down on paper. And upon finding anything I’d written, using this ill-gotten knowledge to attack and injure and belittle and betray me.
I said to Mr. Shitlist How could you do this to me? I told you from the beginning the way my mother violated me and ignored my boundaries and refused to recognize that I had a right to some safe place to record my private thoughts. He said You won’t tell me anything about yourself. You won’t tell me what’s going on with you. If I want to know anything about you, I have to read the things you won’t share with me.
That’s a little bit ironic, no? Yes? I moved three states away from my mother so she’d have a more difficult time invading my privacy and violating my boundaries. Then what did I do? That’s right. I married her. I guess I didn’t really resolve those mommy issues after all since I’ve had to marry the bitch and try again.
I don’t keep a journal anymore. I gathered up everything I’d ever written, every journal I’d filled over the years, and I shredded every page. Sort of sad – all record of me gone to the landfill. Sort of empowering – snoop all you want; you won’t find a trace of me. It’s just not safe with Mr. Shitlist around the house.
OK. Finally. Here comes the irony thing. The only safe place to reveal myself is here. In this public place. Hiding in plain sight.
