As I emotionally work through Mother's Day, motherhood and what it means to be a mother whose role has changed from being her children's hero to something different, I reflect on my own mother. As a person she is broken. Her unresolved childhood living with an aggressive alcoholic father, who would have preferred the first born be a son, and an anxious mother, left deep scars.
Her father had four siblings, all brothers. His own father was a hard, harsh man. Growing up in an era when emotion was not something to share. He never learned how to share. He was a masculine man and wasn't sure what to do with a daughter.
My mother is an accidental mother, during her first year at college as the semester came to a close she and my Dad had a dorm room fling. She spent the summer living with her grandmother, she was pregnant and her mother didn't want her father to find out.
When my parents met back up at college in the fall my Dad was in for a surprise. Their entire life trajectory rearranged. It was a quickie marriage. Marriage was something you did at the time, no discussion, no other choices, you got pregnant, you got married.
They drove East from college in the opposite direction from my mother's parents, to the small town where my father's family lived. Got married, moved into an apartment, and my Dad got a job at the Oscar Mayer meat processing plant. Before and after work he'd drive out to the family farm to help milk the cows. He worked, my mother waited. For me to be born. For something unknown, something else.
The broken bits of my mother languished. Stuck in a place where her youthful plans withered. Unable to fully embrace the role of mother or wife. She tried. There is photographic evidence of these attempts to validate her life as happy, fulfilled. Yet, the walk-offs outnumbered these attempts. One minute she is present, the next drifting off path. Unable to fully engage with herself or her daughter.
The broken unvalidated unseen child became the un-validating absent emotionally immature mother.
Over the years there were times when we seemed the best of friends. Turns out it was the subconscious tool of enmeshment which led to the appearance of emotional attachment and acceptance. Over time we have been estranged for months at a clip. Barely talking. Separate orbits, separate lives.
Then my father died.
She needed me, for a while. Then she hated him. Then she hated me. Even turning a blind eye towards her grandsons. All those broken bits resurfaced. Scars exposed and raw.
Sometimes I can hear my mother's tone in my words, sometimes I can see her in the mirror. I wish these glances were filled with good memories but they're not.
We carry these parts of our parents within us, the good, the bad. The negative aspects show themselves when we least expect it, when we least want them around. Therapy can help us recognize and process these negative bits when they unbury themselves bleeding into our adult relationships and life roles. Yet, there is no overarching cure.
I will never fully be cured, if cure is a word for these negative influences because in truth there's nothing she or I can do to change the past. I can't rid myself of them. I can't wash it out. I can't burn it out with acid or fire. I am the child of two people who raised me in the best manner they knew how at the time, one being broken, both being young, barely adults.
My childhood upbringing, the positive and negative emotionally nurtured traits impact the relationships I have as an adult. The relationship with my husband, with my children, my friends, relatives, with people in general.
If you look for it you will find these broken pieces hiding in plain sight. Each day is work to dampen their history. To change the narrative. To pass along only emotionally mature behaviors and to recognize that these negative bits are not part of my true self.
A true self that is human. Imperfect. Slightly damaged. Filled with self-compassion and doing my work to embrace the healing truth of my own story.
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