'Are Boundaries Always Reasonable? I Don't Want to Be Unkind.'

Whether you say yes or no to other people is far less important than whether you say yes or no to your own emotions, needs, desires, and endless capacity for love.

The Mauve Hour (1965), Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

My mother has documented much of my life through meticulously labeled photographs neatly organized in dozens of albums. There are thousands of photos documenting birthday parties, sporting events, and graduations, but also first vaccinations, dental visits, dinners out on a Wednesday night, and everything in between.

When I was younger, I mostly cooperated with picture-taking, though it often made me deeply uncomfortable. I sometimes felt embarrassed, especially in front of peers; other times, I felt like frequent pauses for posed photos took away from the enjoyment of an experience. I was scolded or punished if I didn't cooperate with photos, or told that my smile looked forced or "stupid."

I'm now in my mid-40s and often feel overwhelmed or impatient when my mother takes photos of me. On a recent visit home, my mom took photos of the menu at dinner (for reference when labeling photos), several posed photos of us toasting our drinks, then more when the food arrived. The next morning at breakfast, there were photos taken of the pastries my dad had picked up from the bakery, photos of us taking our first bites, and, later, posed photos of us leaving for the airport.

My mom had a difficult childhood. Her father was abusive and her mother was cold. Her older brother was violent, once killing a family pet. I believe my mom did her best to raise me differently. Growing up, I was afforded many opportunities she never had. But her mood and behavior were often chaotic, vacillating from warm and affable to callous and emotionally abusive, likely the result of her own trauma. Once after becoming upset, she took down every framed photo of me in the house, saying she couldn't stand the sight of me.

While documenting our lives has been important to my mom for as long as I can remember, to me, it is a reminder of the more painful aspects of my childhood -- of striving to look like the picture-perfect family when this unspoken pain lurked underneath.

As an adult, I've thought many times about asking my mom to take fewer pictures of me, but I'm afraid of upsetting her or hurting her feelings. I don't know if this request is even reasonable. My spouse and I now live in a different state and see my parents only a couple of times a year. They are very generous, often taking us out to dinner or on extravagant family trips. If my mom wants to document these moments, is it unkind of me to stop her?

Overwhelmed

Dear Overwhelmed,

Your request is reasonable. It is not unkind.

YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

I want you to take that to heart. Feel it. Say it to yourself every single morning when you get up, and every night before you go to bed. Because from your letter, I’m guessing that you’re already someone who works very hard to be loving and considerate in every context of your life. You can trust that kindness, feel proud of it, and serve yourself at the same time.

One of the upsides of having an unpredictable and sometimes oppressive parent in your house as a child is that it tends to form you into a thoughtful, scrupulous, hard working, and idealistic person. One of the downsides of that upbringing is that you often believe not only that your desires should be treated as secondary to the desires of others, but also that behaving otherwise would mean that you’re selfish, callous, and even downright cruel.

In other words, an overbearing and disordered mother like yours will naturally project every last one of her fears onto you until they are indistinguishable from your own fears. When you tell a child “You’re so bad and unacceptable that I can’t stand to look at you!” what you’re revealing is that beneath the façade of friendly surface appearances, you experience yourself as a repellent fraud.

The path away from echoing your mother’s shame and self-hatred inside your own body is this: You grant yourself the right to do what you want and need. You allow yourself space to seem selfish and therefore repellent to others. You honor your deepest desires and preferences. This requires, let me add, noticing that you encounter those desires as sick and disgusting, as forces inside you that will inevitably lead those you love the most to reject you, out of the blue — to withdraw their love and affection permanently. It also requires noticing your shame, see also: the sounds your mind and heart make when you’re threatening to show respect for your own needs even when they conflict with someone else’s, even when they put future love and affection at risk.

So the path that leads toward “You can do whatever you want” is a frightening one. Doing what you want, for you, means that you’re disgusting. Doing what you want, for you, means that love and support and safety could be snatched away from you, never to return. But that path is also likely to transform your entire life into something that doesn’t just look or seem but FEELS rich and satisfying. When you say to yourself, “You can say no. You can leave. You can take a minute. You have choices.” you’re also teaching your body that it doesn’t need to absorb and metabolize other people’s projected self-hatred and shame or their wild misunderstandings of you. You don’t have to soak in the cruelty or even indifference of a world that encounters your independent needs as morally corrupt and repulsive. You can become the gentle protector and defender of a different universe inside your body, coaxing your needs and desire to dance and play and show you new ways of experiencing joy every single day.

That grandiose notion about desire dancing its way toward joy inside your body is as real as the nose on your face. Trust that. Discovering your right to do what you want will set you free. THAT is the most important lesson for you. Focus on that first and last.

Now, does that necessarily mean that the so-called ‘right’ answer here is to tell your mother to stop it with the photos forever or you’ll refuse to visit? No. Again, it’s within your rights to do that if you want to. But it’s crucial that you consider who you are right now, what your principles and ideals are, and how you want to feel moving forward. Which choice is the most caring and protective toward you, your emotions, your past, and your pride in your own kindness?

Even though those photos kick up real trauma for you, my gut tells me that you would not enjoy setting a strict boundary with your mother at this moment. That doesn’t mean everything is just fine. It’s starting to feel extremely bad — physically bad — to bear witness to the distance between the images your mother collects and the reality of your family life. You’re probably more aware than you’ve ever been that, underneath your love for your mother, there are layers of anger and sadness that are strong and inescapable. You’re depressed by this sediment of despair that’s accumulated under the surface, and you fear it, because it reminds you of the callousness and cruelty that your mother heaped on you as a kid. In other words, even though your anger springs from your mother’s ill-considered words and behaviors, you (subconsciously) consider your rage at your mother morally wrong and deeply corrupt.

Your anger is justified and you should respect it. Moreover, it’s natural to have mixed feelings about people you love. Love is complicated and living with people over the stretch of your life can be difficult even when they don’t have a history of cruelty that they paper over with bright and cheerful acts of make-believe.

So clear out some room for these dark emotions and let them breathe. This anger and darkness is actually good for you. When you give it space, you’re saying, “My body, my heart, and my mind have been through trauma, and I don’t have to choke back that trauma and smile for the camera. I can acknowledge it. I can sit in my mother’s company and feel nothing for her, or feel pissed off at her, or pity her, and I don’t have to turn that anger or shame against my own body. It’s not my fault that this is how my cells react to being in the company of someone who randomly told me that I was too disgusting to look at or to love anymore.”

It would be easy enough to move from that grief straight to a rigid declaration: No more photos! No more playing along! Truth everywhere, all the time!

For many people, that would be the best path. But given what I perceive as your empathy for your mother and also your strong principles and ideals — which, whether they grew out of your mother’s authoritarian, unpredictable ways, have still become a real dimension of your personality — I think that a headlong rush into confronting her might not serve you well. In fact, I think it could feel traumatic to do so.

From what I can tell, you’re comforted by your steady commitment to showing up for your mother EXACTLY TWICE A YEAR. That’s a boundary. You’re not giving her more than you want to give her. I also believe that, in spite of your discomfort, you actually want your mother to continue to enjoy the peaceful bubble of fantasy created by her photos, in part because you suspect that she’s not capable of the growth required to move past that fantasy.

As bad as you feel, you don’t want to rob your mother of her delusions. In fact, some part of you wants to help your mother in her efforts to capture a fake reality. Because even though it feels disruptive and ridiculous and unfair, it’s also one small way for her to experience what it might be like to feel happy and loved and at peace.

I think you’re conflicted because you actually want to give her this gift, even though you fucking hate doing it. I also think the part you hate the most about the photos isn’t your mother’s compulsion or her interruptions, it’s THE PHOTOS THEMSELVES. Because in those moments when your mother is foisting her make-believe reality on you and asking you to play along, you believe that you look ugly. You imagine that your buried anger, hidden under a fake smile, makes you a bad person. You believe that your ambivalence towards your mother makes you unlovable.

So even though it’s natural to hate that experience, there’s a possibility of healing and growth and expansion and joy that opens up in those moments. Because allowing your mother to continue taking photos isn’t just an act of love, it’s also an opportunity to feel where you are in real time, without shame. When she points that camera at your face and asks you to smile, you have this window of a few seconds to let what is true and real and therefore beautiful — your glorious anger, your emancipatory sadness, your stubborn desires, your serene apathy — rise to the surface. Those seconds are blessings that can stretch out into infinity, time standing still, while you’re hit with the realization that you are lovable right now and you were always lovable as a child, too.

You were always lovable.

You are still lovable, right now.

What if you allowed these realizations to shape your expression in the moment? How would it change your expression, to believe that you are still lovable right now — even when you feel angry, even when you feel sad, even when you feel nothing at all?

Your expression might be more neutral. It might be a little wistful. It might be calm and serene. It might be open and warm. It might be skeptical or even angry. But no matter what, it will be beautiful. Because when you understand yourself as lovable, as vulnerable, as worthy of respect, as DESERVING OF YOUR OWN DESIRES? You are also beautiful.

We are *all* divine and magnetic when we dare to cherish our deepest desires and honor our capacity for love even in the face of enormous pain.

Your mother’s interruptions are opportunities to feel your own power. When she fumbles and stops all action and makes everything awkward, it’s a reminder — almost like a creative cue — that you’re allowed to take up rebellious space inside your body, even when you’re not shouting FUCK NO or OKAY FINE or I HATE YOU or I LOVE YOU BUT YOU MAKE ME SO FUCKING SAD.

Let her take the photo. But do not smile. Wait for your face to manifest how you’re feeling in the most natural way possible. And when she says, “You need to smile,” say very calmly, “I am doing what’s natural. What’s natural always looks best.”

A gentle rejoinder. A beautiful form of protest. A way of offering your mother your love while also acknowledging your conflicted heart.

You’ll still probably feel shitty at first, but that pain might just shape-shift into something much wilder and more expansive and freeing IN THE MOMENT. And if that happens, your mother’s actual photographs will change, too. What we’ll see in them is not a woman who eats her feelings and obeys out of shame, but a woman who believes in the enormous tidal forces of her own desires.

That looks different. It feels different, too. When you stop believing that your hopes, your desires, and your dreams are selfish and start understanding that they’re gorgeous and divine, it wakes you up from a deep sleep. It sets you free. It’s the most romantic and beautiful thing you can witness in someone else.

You can do whatever you want.

Just remember that when you’re open and fully alive and free, pain is inevitable. Feeling pain doesn’t automatically mean you should be pushing back or punishing someone else. Anger and hurt can coexist with love and care. Our lives are complicated and surprising. Allowing space for contradictions and complexity is a great way of honoring your own contradictions and complexity.

It’s your choice. But whatever you do next, I want you to find a path forward that doesn’t just feel emotionally sound but also makes you feel proud of yourself. I want you to witness your mother’s sudden rush of gratitude for how loving and mature and empowered you’ve become. I want you to feel inspired by your own generosity and also inspired by your conflicted emotions in those painful moments. Instead of encountering your mixed emotions as shameful, I want you to experience them as invigorating and romantic. And I want you to LET ALL OF THAT SHINE THROUGH ON YOUR FACE.

That’s the heavy lifting here: refusing to stigmatize what you desire, who you are, what you believe in. The heavy lifting is not just doing the opposite of what you were doing before, simply because that’s what most people define as healthy or strong. The work is showing up and saying:

“I know who I am and what I care about. I am going to be real, stand up for myself, and follow my instincts. When I refuse to pretend, when I tell the truth without apologizing, when I take up space and respect my turbulent soul, when I show calm compassion and use direct words, when I reject the shame that was heaped on me, when I acknowledge the trauma knocking around and also blossoming into creativity and joy inside me, when I honor the sweet child who chased love and wonder above all else, I am beautiful.”

That’s your new reality: Honoring who you are in all of your wonder, in all of your kindness, in all of your contradictions, in all of your love.

Celebrate your endless capacity for love. Take a picture of it, so you never forget.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Which parts of you were misunderstood or punished as a child? Which buried desires reflect the wonder and joy you were born with? How can you manifest that delight and that love today? How can you take pride in your ideals and principles, and use them to fill your life with more love? Maybe Ask Molly’s extreme pride in her ideals and principles will help!

We’re on a quest for joy this year. so buckle your seatbelts, motherfuckers! It’s time to go all in. Send letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.