All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [11]
My grandmother Anna Manning and me
And as I’ve grown to believe, so was the childhood of my parents and probably their parents. As my friend Richard Rohr said, “If we don’t learn to transform the pain, we’ll transfer it.” I realized my mother wasn’t the dragon; she was another victim of the dragon. But the dragon doesn’t die easily, so the shame just kept passing down the generations. I fear I’ve passed it along as well.
Vow. It’s an old-fashioned word, usually heard only around weddings and even then not so much anymore. I made a vow with myself following my mother’s cruelty: I would become a good boy. These words from Alice Miller explain it perfectly:
Children who fulfill their parents’ conscious or unconscious wishes are “good,” but if they ever refuse to do so or express wishes of their own that go against those of their parents, they are called egoistic and inconsiderate.… If a child brought up this way does not wish to lose his parents’ love (And what child can risk that?), he must learn very early to share, to give, to make sacrifices, and to be willing to “do without.”1
So I decided, at the ripe old age of eight, to accommodate and do whatever it took to ensure approval, especially my mother’s. I would not talk back, not ask questions, and be seen but not heard.
What I had no way of realizing at the time is that there is a fine line between vows and deals, and deals can be sneaky, under-the-table things. At the very least, the deals I made with myself to be a “good boy” cost me my voice, my sense of wonder, and my self-worth for most of my adult life. The invisible dragon roared, I cowered, and what I call the “impostor” was born, a shadow to my eight-year-old life. The impostor is a fake version of yourself, and that’s exactly how I started living. I faked being happy when I was sad, I faked being excited when I was disappointed, I even faked being nice when inside I was really angry. I still looked and sounded like me, but I wasn’t me. I was a fake. I lived as an impostor of myself. But living as the impostor will do nothing but harm. Here’s a quick list of how the impostor functions, bullet-pointed because it can just about kill you:
The impostor lives in fear.
The impostor is consumed with a need for acceptance and approval.
The impostor is codependent; in other words, out of touch with his or her own feelings.
The impostor’s life is a herky-jerky existence of elation and depression. The impostor is what he or she does.
The impostor demands to be noticed.
The impostor cannot experience intimacy in any relationship.
And last but not least, the impostor is a liar.
Shakespeare described love as an “ever-fixed mark.” In a healthy family, you know how love is defined: It’s clear, has boundaries, and is attainable. Unfortunately, in a shame-bound family, love is a moving target; one day it’s this and one day it’s that, and just when you’re sure you’ve got it figured out, you discover you don’t.
One Christmas—I must have been ten years old—I spent some time walking the creaky wooden floors of Woolworth’s five-and-dime searching for a gift for my mother. I happened upon a little notepad, the kind people used to keep beside telephones. It was multicolored, pastels of pink and green and blue. I’d never seen anything like it. I thought it was gorgeous, surely something that would thrill my mother. Christmas morning came, and we were all there—my parents and grandparents, my brother and sister and me. As my mother began opening my gift, I held my breath in anticipation. She tore the wrapping paper