If we do not love ourselves…unconditionally...we cannot love others unconditionally. As mother’s ww can forget we are human and we make mistakes out of not knowing better and we can turn on ourselves, and stop loving ourselves. When you lose an adult child, it can throw back some shame and guilt for not doing better. Thing is, we all COULD have done better, but we did not know what better was. We were busy living in the moment.
Kids grow up and so do we. Kids leave home and make their own way and we grow up and find we have only ourselves to deal with. Parenting may feel like forever when you kids are little, but on the time line, it is but a short time. Suddenly kids are grown and we have learned so much more than we knew. And, I believe that Mother Guilt is universal. It is like we mothers are expected to feel that we did not do good enough.
We are human and we have our own psychological make-up that may not be fully remembered, and understood, and those things played a part in our parenting. We swear we are going to be better parents than we had, no matter how good that parenting was. We think we know more than our own parents and we only begin to see them as real people with real issues once we have a few years on us to begin to analyze such.
When we all grow up…do we ever?...and who defines it?... It is easy to begin to look back in awe that we made it through it all. I have seven children and every one of them had their own distinct little personalities. I had no training as to howe to be a mother and I look back, now, and smile, in wonder, that we all lived through it. I was leaning how to be a mother, with each one. The kids were teaching me how to mother. I was working blind.
When an adult child dies before the mother, the mother can slip, easily, into the negatives, and remember, in critical view, how NOT a good parent she was. We can identify ever little moment of a time when she could have done better. But we forget the biggest caveat of all: the WHY. If I did it wrong, there was a reason that can go back decades before a child was born. And we forget that, when we know we made a mistake, that we make restitution for it. I got better at mothering as the children came.
Each of the children’s personalities took a different kind of mothering I found. My daughter... beloved, adored adopted child that she was, began showing signs of being bi-polar, at puberty. I did not know what I was dealing with. I did not go to university and learn more about life and mothering until she was 14. And, at time, I was learning how to be a university student on top of it all, and being a single parent, and she was living with her grandparents and father and I was crushing university classes and environment while being single-parent mother to the four little ones. The chaos and drama of it all did not help her. The “choose sides and throw stones” environment I found myself placed in, did not help her. She became a bitter, angry teenager who had her target. Her mother. I knew it and let it be. You can not fight it. I simply had to be the person she took her whole anger out on. It was episodic through the years. But she was a personality that had to hate someone all the time. As she aged, she became mean and, sometimes, truly awful in her hatred. She could never maintain any relationship except that one with her husband. I do not know how she did, but they loved etch other. At least, through it all, she had one person she was able to maintain a relationship with. Apparently, it was loving. We have thanked him for loving her. We had not spoken for a decade. Her choice. And I stayed out of the fray as he turned on every one of the family. I could only do what I could do. All of us could only do what she allowed us to do. She abandoned us.
And ow she is gone and all hope of reconciliations are gone. That is the hard part. Some of the kids have simply worked on finding love for her and sending her off on her journey with that love. Some of us are having to accept, no more secrets, and learning to accept that she was mentally ill and we could do no more than we did. W will have to all gather and do some family work on how we cope. I have gone from tough grieving, to acceptance of her and my own frailties. I have come to a sense of, dare it be said, …relief.
I have spent days going through her timeline when she was that adored child, the one who loved her mother dearly, and the one who loved herself and her life. There were those years, and then the years she lived with us, when she we a young adult, and when she became pregnant and she lived with us again. I quit work and took care of them for two years. That was the last time she lived with me and I had a real mother-daughter relationship with her. Her new husband did not (does not) know the whole story, for sure. She manipulated her story. It is not our story. Maybe some day he will.
It has been a week and a half of waves of sorrow for that baby girl I adored. She was soo wanted. And I remember the closeness we shared when she allowed it. And I realize that I have grieved for her many times. The losses of her in our life were traumatic and episodic. I am able to forgive her…and myself... over this week and a half. Once she was an adult, the ball was always in her court.
The mother grief is no longer darkened by mother guilt. I did the best I knew how with her when I di it. Once she was an adult, she became harder to mother. Then she rejected my mothering all together. So, as I said, I have grieved her loss many times. I grieve now that she had to have had the saddest, most traumatic life as she rewrote the script of her past. She had to be lonely. We know she was angry. I can only hope, now, that she has peace.
The outpouring of love from my children has been phenomenal. I have made sure I paid more mothering towards the ones who were hurt the most by her. I have been proud to see how they each worked through the grief. For her funeral, every one of my boys took a lead part. I am proud of them for that. I hope they have come to some authentic understanding of their own troubled relationship with her. They all spoke to me of how I was the best mother I was allowed to be. Their love and compassion for me has been awesome. I am ok. They are ok. And, wherever she is now, we can only hope that she is able to unburden herself and know there was and is great love for her in spite of it all.
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