My connection to my mother is strong. In many ways I have become her. Sad childhood, left home at 18 to live on her own, put the past behind her so she could be someone else with a new life. Not the poor, sad, abused child from a broken home. She could reinvent herself and so she did. Just like me, created a persona who was pretty and kind, well dressed…dreamed of marrying a prince. Thought that would solve all of her problems. I am sucked into my mother. Hours and days spent with her watching her drink, watching her rage, watching her slowly kill herself. I choose life. I eat healthy, exercise, take vitamins, sleep. I don’t want to be like her, but I cannot get out. We dance together, round and round, my unhappiness a testament to my great love for her. Look mom, I’ll be just like you…then will you love me? A child’s question trapped in the body of an adult, always longing for the sense of home and never finding it. Stuck in her own life, stuck between the future she grasps for and the past she cannot let go of. I am trapped here with you, unable to leave you. I feel responsible to make you happy, heal your pain. But you are gone and I don’t know how to heal your pain from the grave.
My connection to my mother…I remember always feeling like I had to make her happy. Nothing is coming right now…my monkey mind is getting in the way and I have a headache…waking up with my teeth clenched but I don’t feel my rage. Making my mother happy…her jealous if I had something that she liked. “Why didn’t you buy anything for me,” she would ask. “I would like that, too.” The heaviness and guilt of not providing for her or making her happy. This from a woman who was so self-sufficient in her youth. She became helpless as she got older…unable to create a happy life for herself so she looked to everyone to do it for her. My guilt and sadness over never being able to take away her sorrow. So I’ll be sad like her and no one will totally please me. Everything is lacking in some small way. I wish I could enjoy and appreciate more. We have so much but it never feels like we have enough. My husband is lacking, my job is lacking, I am lacking…it never ends.
Marta: This is very touching and very sad. Your writing expression is poignant. How do you feel reading what you wrote? I wonder what keeps you making your mother so important, more important than living a life of passion. This lack is about receiving and expressing. It is about feeling the deeper anger, which is passion.
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