Sit down with a cuppa, and let’s chat a while..

When I was six, my family was driving on an interstate highway late at night. Streaks of headlights and taillights painted the dark. For the first time, I truly realized that each of those cars held people – people living their lives, lives as important to them as mine was to me.

I wanted to see what those lives were, and to share my own…

Here, each Monday, I strive to reach that understanding through offering ideas and tidbits from my life, …won’t you settle in for a while, and share something of yours?

Yesterday was Mother’s Day – a paradoxical celebration, for me, for several reasons.

• I am a daughter estranged from her mother,

• I am a mother supporting my children in forming a mutually equitable relationship with their maternal grandparents.

• I am the mother of two thriving and amazing young people….

• I never got to know our second son, who died at 12 days old, never hug him on Mother’s Day.

• I don’t get the whole breakfast in bed, make Mom queen for a day treatment. Usually, Jim is working early, and all day. By the time he’s home, there’s not much left to the day.

  

  Elijah James. Our beautiful second child, still alive in my soul.

It used to be a stressful, often unhappy day for me. I spent much of it with my mother – an obligatory appearance demanded by society. I gave her gifts that she would compare with the others she received, and then measure the love offered by the result of the comparison. Frequent passive-aggressive acts that kept me on my guard, unable to truly relax and enjoy the time and the company. Sometimes, these became outright antagonism.

There are too many undelved matters, too much truth I am not free to express, with her. There is pressure, always, to fill a role rather than simply be myself. The ways in which I differ, make other choices, live and speak my own truths, seek to heal the damages of my childhood, to bring meaning to it, are vital to me, and affronts to her.

It is a less constant, less violent continuation of my childhood, and one that I have outgrown.

I don’t miss the angst, the seemingly endless cycle of wooing, feigned peace, building tensions left unspoken, withdrawal – and then a tirade of emotional (and occasionally more physical) attack.

I do miss the people my parents are, at their best.

Living the sweet life after a trip to the NY State Museum, November, 2009.

I wish that:

• I could speak my truth to them: that my childhood had both light and shadows, and that there was beauty and ugliness in it. The beauty I have long freely celebrated, but for too long, I ignored the ugliness, shoved it down, crumpled it up, tried to pretend that it wasn’t there, and that it didn’t change who I am – and that I was not broken by it.

• I could tell them, in a way that they could hear, that my insistence on speaking my own truth in exploring my childhood is not about damning them. It’s about my own healing.

• I need to look squarely at the ways in which I was damaged, in order to learn how to heal.

• I must heal to be the mother I want to be to my own children, to be the mother they deserve.

• I could help them to see that I no longer name the abuse as a way to indict or shame them, although I once did (and that, too, was a way in which the uglier parts of childhood damaged me; indictment, shame, and humiliation were everyday parts of my childhood, and it took more than 40 years for me to learn that blame and shame only throw energy into protesting what already is, rather than into finding ways to improve it, or at least to learn to live with it peacefully).

• I could say that I am not estranged in anger, but in compassion. There were too many instances where simply my presence triggered animosity. It affected everyone, including my children and their cousins. The unpleasantness awoke uglier, wounded places in me, too, and I ranted and obsessed – and, in the process, I became a meaner, uglier version of myself. The people I love had to live with that, and it wasn’t fair to anyone.

• I could go back to the time when my mother was a child, or her mother was – to the time in my family history the cycle of abuse began, and raise those children with a focus

  

  Hugging the children I can. Invertebrate House, National Zoo, Washington, D.C., September 2008.

  on kindness and developing the skills necessary to live peaceably with others.

• I could, on Mother’s Day, or anytime, hug my mother and all three of my children with love and tenderness and genuine, unforced, unguarded affection.

I can’t do these things. Some I never will be able to, and others…perhaps the inability is less permanent…

Instead, I move forward. I am honest about my paradoxical feelings, now. I don’t stuff them into the metaphorical junk drawer, anymore. I explore them, and accept them all.

And I hug my living children, their father, and myself, too – many times each day, simply because we enjoy it, and I can.

Most of my life, these days is sweet and happy. When it isn’t, I hope for the sunshine to break through the shadows….and I do what I can to shift things to a sweeter, happier place, still…

Are there holidays or festive occasions that are difficult for you? Do you feel at odds with the prevailing spirit of the day? Pleas leave your comment in the receptacle below and join the conversation.

Hot, rumpled, and happy after touring the Mayflower II, in Plymouth, MA, July, 2010.

Related articles

• Why I’ve never given my mother a gift on Mother’s Day (ilovegifting.me)
• Such is the Joy of Motherhood. (marriageconfessions.com)
• Mother’s Day Blues – You Are Not Alone. (clharbridge.wordpress.com)
• May Mother’s Day, 2013 Be the Day We Declare: “Let Us Be Transformed!” (pathwaytoascension.wordpress.com)