You're driving me crazy (I love you so much)

I had a very vivid dream right before I woke up. I won't describe the whole thing, because dreams rarely translate well. But there is a part from late in the dream that is really sticking with me.

After many dream adventures, W. and I were at a dinner (or something) at the home of a family who are our friends. The teenaged daughter was having some kind of argument with her mother, about teenage-type struggles. At one point, they hugged. Her mother was looking over her head, and had the most poignant look on her face--simultaneous aggravation, frustration, and such a deep love and worry for her kid. The phrase that came into my mind, seeing it, was "You're driving me CRAZY (I love you so much)."

Analyzing things, as I often do, I can't just take this as a random dream. That it was this particular mother and daughter makes sense. The rest of the family is white, the teenager was adopted, and is black. It's not hard to see that, given certain similarities, the daughter represents me--I was also the only member of my family who was black (my family's approach to race was, shall we say, complex; they still insist that I'm not "really" black, despite the evidence of my skin).

I think her mother represents two things simultaneously--my wishes for connection with my own mother, and the need for my adult parts to approach the teen parts with that simultaneous love and frustration.

My mother was never simultaneously furious and loving. If we did something that upset her, anger was the only emotion present. I am realizing that my own discomfort with anger stems from never having seen it expressed appropriately in intimate relationships. I hold my anger in, because I am afraid that simply being angry means doing devastating harm to the people around me. I'm working on learning that it's not the anger that caused the abuse, but rather, how that anger was expressed. And I am working on methods of owning my anger, and learning how to let it out in ways that won't hurt anyone.

I am also learning that I need to love my teen parts, perhaps even more fiercely than I love my child parts. It's a struggle, but it's necessary.

It's early, this post makes no sense, and I have things to do, so that's all.