My Mum, bless her, was a bit of a prude. If anyone so much as kissed on the TV she would stiffly look away or concentrate on her sewing. But her prudery was about more than sex, closer perhaps to the Mirriam Webster definition:
Prude: a person who is excessively or priggishly attentive to propriety or decorum;
It came from her village upbringing in the west Country, first by my grandmother and, when she disappeared to nurse in Africa, in a country vicarage. Later she was sent to a small boarding school. I suspect these environments had in common a ritualised, almost cultish, attention to good manners and propriety. I suspect there was a stiffness about them that she acquired herself in order to survive. Abused by the vicar and bullied at school, perhaps my mother grew up using manners and propriety as a veil behind which to hide the tumultuous, disordered things she must have been feeling.
If this had led only to her exhibiting a slightly excessive politeness, I would think no more. But I remember times all through my life when I sensed my mother’s resentment of what she saw as my father’s lack of gentility. I’d catch her wincing in disapproval if he made a noise while he was eating, didn’t put his knife and fork down sufficiently often, or spread butter too thickly on his toast. After sixty years of marriage, she was still like this right up till when Alzheimer’s started to chip away at her faculties.
The motley family of parts that constitute my psychological make-up includes it’s own Prude, no doubt developed in response to my mother’s excessive focus on these things. Bad behaviour and rudeness has always made me uncomfortable and my Prude still pops up in an almost visceral reaction to littering, drunkenness and any kind of unthinking behaviour that might cause offence. This prudishness can, I suspect, lead to others seeing me as reserved and standoffish.
I can indeed be “priggishly attentive to propriety or decorum.”
That might seem anomalous, given my licentious philandering, but perhaps that recent behaviour was, in part, an over-reaction when I finally broke out of the emotional and behavioural straightjacket in which my inner Prude had forced me to live much of my life.
However, my Prude is still quite capable of being mean and destructive. When I’m with my brother I can feel it surge up inside me in pursed lipped disapproval whenever he chomps noisily on a mouthful of ice cubes or eats half the plate of Serrano ham I’ve put out without passing it round to others. These little acts of inconsideration prompt a disproportionate reaction deep inside me and trigger my fight or flight response. Just as I could read these reactions on my Mum’s face, I suspect he reads them in mine.
I’m the same with my oldest friend who I still ski with occasionally.
I used to hate myself a bit for these irrational and overcritical feelings and for the damage they could cause in important relationships.
But I’ve come to a deeper understanding of these things,
Using the logic of Internal Family Systems therapy, I can now identify this part of me and understand how it might have arisen from my upbringing, something learned directly from the equivalent, but much more severely damaged, part in my mother. Understanding that her Prude probably developed as a defence mechanism against the unspeakably horrible things that happened in her childhood, only deepens the compassion and love I hold for my poor mum.
What I’m trying to do now is to make the leap to feel that same compassion and love for the Prude in me, in the hope that, once recognised and understood, it won’t feel the need to jump in with its unwarranted disapproval every time a friend or relative exhibits something less than perfect Victorian, middle class manners.
That would be progress, that would.
I’ve read this again and I’m worried my lovely, caring mum comes across as strait-laced and cold and she was never that. If you could get past her prudish exterior, as my brother did one Christmas with a whoppee cushion under my dad’s chair, she would break down into uncontrollable giggles. This would just go on and on, a new bout starting every time the whoppee cushion reappeared.
Her grandchildren knew all her buttons intimately and could induce these giggles at will. That’s is, I would like to think, how they most remember her.