My daughter turned 16 the other day and we had been discussing the birthday, the plans, her wishes, for weeks, she was turning 16 and we have been livng through a pandemic, the last 2 birthdays were low key because of the fear that was lurking, we werent so unafraid of covid as we are now. Also, 16 is a big age for her, being happy and healthy and joyous, we have been through a few challenging years with my dodgy health as well, so it was and is a celebration of a lot of things.
I spent the week leading up to her official birthday date, crying and reminiscing about how tense and stressful her birth was 16yrs ago and being thankful. Parenting while disabled is a challenge but we are at a stage where she is comfortable enough to bring her friends around and I always wonder what those conversations are like and it always reminds me of my teen years and how different our experiences are.
I havent spoken to my mother in years, as a result, my daughter has a almost non existent relationship with her maternal family, i know they talk on the phone but she cant visit her grandmother, her great grandmother chasing 90 and her many other aunts because of the break down of the relationship between my mother and I and it makes me sad sometimes, she is missing out on what the world defines as family, her coparents have her covered so Im not worried but she wont know about the women in her family, unless we talk about it and she gets to hear my side, its a multi layered lens she is missing out on and I wonder if it will ever be a bone of contention between us, so I tell her as much as I can remember about them and write what I can, she will have a different experience of the women in my family but I hope I do them justice, regardless of the kind of people they were.
My daughter’s existence was motivated by selfishness, I was so confused about what I was experiencing as a young woman and I decided to get pregnant, it made sense then and I dont think it makes sense now but its one decision I dont regret making and lately I think a lot more about my growing years and having a resentful mother while unaware, only now finding the language to describe the experiences and realising that none of them were healthy & I always wonder if it was because when my mother got pregnant, she was trying to leave my father & when she realised that she didn’t want to be a single, unwed mother, she decided to stay and tried to make things work but at what cost to me? I often wonder if she would have been a better mother if she wasnt burdened with raising a child who looked like the man she loved to resent and felt she had no other option but I wont get a chance to ask her that and I doubt she will be honest about what her mothering of me was like, same as she was dishonest about physically attacking me a few years ago (my uncles gave me a talk when all I did was defend myself by putting my hands up). its weird because I dont remember getting hidings from my mother but I remember that fight, i was a few years over 20 so there is that.
I was lying in bed undoing my daughter’s braids and listened to her breathing during the nap, i wanted the moment to last for as long as it could because here I was holding my baby and nothing else mattered, wanting to compare those moments to my teenagehood hair crisis moments & realising the different reactions we were experiencing & a small part of me wished my mother had tried harder or just outright said she wasnt cut out for the job, then we wouldnt have had to live through such a painful existence that had me running away from home every few years without understanding that I was trying to save my life, it took me 30 some odd years and a few chats with friends for me to be able to word the experiences. Running away
The shame of going back home after being victimised and having a mother who gladly reminds you that she was right about those people turning on me, speaking negativity into future unknown experiences and pretending not to know how harmful it all was, yet being manipulative enough that none of my friends understood or even believed that my mother was all those things I said and yet when I finally could afford to go to therapy, the one thing i remember telling my then therapist was that I didnt want to be like my mother and I now hope my daughter doesn’t sit on her therapist’s couch and cry about being hoping she is spared the burden of being like me, Im hoping by cutting off my mother, Ive started a new and better way of being for women in my bloodline, should she decide to extend it. I remember lying next to my mother and wanted her to comfort me and i couldn’t even get her to sleep close enough for me to hear her breathing, then I look at how my daughter will crawl under my armpit and command me to cuddle her in her sleep, how I would sleep for hours until I cant feel my finger tips and feeling my daughter breathing in and out is so comforting. And in my 30s, I still couldn’t tell you if my mother had ever told me she loved me but I know many a times I knew she couldn’t stand me.
The one thing they dont tell you is that when you are victimised by the one person you trust or trusted, it opens you up to victimisation by others but chances are you wont know until you meet others outside who have a different story to tell and I constantly catch myself taking a mental sharp turn when I find myself being harder than usual on myself, as it has been asked, who taught us to hate ourselves?
Its hard trying to build new pieces of yourself when all your life you have been victimised by those who brought you into this world, trying to reconcile who I think I am and who I am meant to be and understanding that the voices I hear when Im panicked or unsure, telling me that I was wrong to make a go at it, are not mine, the person that used to say those things to me isn’t in my life anymore and its not my fault.
Now that I think about it, my mother used to tell me that she was working so she can afford to live in an old age home because she knew I was not going to look after her, it had been something that would randomly come up every other month and it used to confuse me so much because what made her so sure that I was going to be neglectful towards her? She was my mother and I would have done it out of love, had she bothered to work on that, she didnt, that is why she was sure that I wouldnt look after her, because she didnt look after me.
You would never think she was a terrible person if you met my mother and the harm wasnt physical, I have a scar on my leg that I remember how much it hurt but the words she said hurt even more and they stuck, still ungluing a lot of them from my thoughts, my actions and my failures.
I envy those who have mothers they can miss, with a surety that if it started raining in the middle of nowhere, they know that they definitely have shelter in their lives without having to give up pieces of themselves as a bargaining tool and I hope my daughter knows that even at 3am, wherever she is in the world, she can call me and I will happily respond. So I try to heal myself by being the mother I wish I had to my daughter, a gentle, loving and accepting mother and hopefully, one day, it wont hurt so much to speak about my mother in past tense while she is living.
I think Ive made peace with being motherless while she is living, I spent 6 months in rehab and she couldnt be bothered to visit, she said she didnt know where I was, I forgave it then but I have lived through a pandemic in the past 3yrs and while everybody was packing up in a panic to be with their family, I considered packing up to go back to rehab, this was my understanding of how alone and parentless I really am, it is a choice they have made and I am happier for it. At least now I wont spend my lifetime trying to buy their approval the same way I spent my 20s thinking if I gave them everything I worked for and gave up my dreams, they would reward me with approval if not acceptance, knowing it wont ever happen has eased the burden of trying and Im glad to be here.
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