*Note to the Reader: I know there are grammatical errors. But until I, as a busy Mother, writer, lawyer, Entrepreneur, and human have time to square by square (thank you WordPress) and edit it, ciest la vie.*
A couple of weeks ago, I had the overwhelming urge to publish something I’d written to my biological mother a few years ago when I had just stopped talking to her. A decision that wasn’t made lightly, and feels as heavy today as it did when I made it five years ago.
I had found it recently, what I’d written to my biological mother, and read through it again as I often do with my own writings. It seems that I always enjoy both in the suffering and the celebration of re-living what ever I wrote about at the time, as if it were happening all over again; a quality that is both a blessing, and depending on what it is that I’m re-living, can also be a curse. I thought it benign enough. I thought to myself “okay, it’s time. I’m ready to post this…” five years later.
Today is Mother’s Day. My wife took the kids so I could have a few hours to myself (something that, in my opinion, would be considered a gift to many mothers of young children). This morning (it is now early afternoon) I read more of Dr. Brene Brown’s “Dare to Lead” and enjoyed my coffee outside, sitting on the sectional outside on our deck, which itself is surrounded by 30 foot palm trees and bamboo compilations spread throughout each corner of our yard. It’s a hidden Oasis in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale. A blessing I try never to be an ingrate about. And one that I will miss dearly when we move in about two weeks.
And then I remembered… the post. It was time…
I grabbed my laptop and after several attempts at regaining access to my blog email and blog website hosting account, to figure out or remember how to even publish a blog post again after all this time. Finally, I was in!
But lo and behold, after searching my personal records, all of my writing folders and sub folders, my personal journal entries to myself, my saved folders with some personal writings – NOTHING. I couldn’t find it. Can’t find it. Anywhere. And I can’t help but to believe that this too, like the inkling, which was more like a push, that I felt come from the Universe (i.e. God, me, my Higher self) a few weeks ago, urging me to finally publish again, and to publish this piece – specifically, was a sign from the Universe.
No. Today was a day I had to publish. On Mother’s Day. And that other piece was merely the catalyst I needed to find that would, at the specific juncture I am at in my life, most certainly inspire me enough to come out of hiding. And to dive into the vulnerability that is – writing. At least for me anyway. True writing. Unadulterated, unfiltered , authenticity (except for the post-publishing re-read for grammatical prose and clear themes – thank God for the “edit” button). A complete nudity, of sorts, of the soul.
I have so much to say, and it would seem, an undetermined amount of time in which to write it. Undetermined because we are all here on borrowed time and never know when it will be our time to elevate to the next plane/heaven. If in fact there even is – another plane/heaven; I hope that there is.
For today, however, I write for and to all of the daughters of estranged Mothers (regardless of who prompted the estrangement). And I also write to the mothers of the estranged daughters. Perhaps it’s a casualty of skill in practice, or a developed quality born out of necessity, but I see both sides. That is – I see the empathy in the love, and often pain, that is born of both sides.
I often look at our daughters, Luca James and Micah Quinn – two beautiful human beings replete with vibrancy and life, and am reminded each day what truly being alive looks like. I often think to myself that I would die if either or both of them ever decided to stop speaking to me. It would completely destroy me. It would be the most hurtful thing I could ever experience. And my hope would also be that if that ever happened (God please, and knock on wood, don’t ever let our family know such a pain), that I would have learned enough at that point in my life to know when to either give them space until they were to talk about it, and respect their boundaries, and when to ask forgiveness without shame and in full vulnerability, knowing that I have no ego when it comes to them. As it should be with everyone, and most of all, with our children. Why? Because they deserve it. They are the walking incarnation of love and purity. It is we, the adults and products of society, that rob the child in each of us of love, purity, and the ability to be truly vulnerable (that is, egoless).
But I do. I think about that – about how painful and gut wrenching it would be to my whole existence if they were to ever walk away from me in the same way that I, and my other siblings, have all walked away from our biological mother at some point time. It seems to be the only way to escape the pain that inevitably results from having her in our lives. It seems that she has never been able to see or understand, and only ever gives the impression that she is the victim, and that we, her daughters, are the ungrateful, villains.
Currently, I believe only 1 of the 5 children she had still speak to her. You would think that would give us some credibility when we say “I don’t talk to my biological mother.” But I still think it doesn’t. Or at least, the shame that I know I experience still every time I feel forced to mention it, makes me feel that it doesn’t.
And so I always feel compelled to also, when I speak of the significant and still very poignant death of my step-mother, Hilda, who I often felt was more of a mom to me than my biological mother ever was, say that “technically she was my step-mother, but she was more of a mother to me than my biological mother ever was, and she’s been in my life since I was 18. I don’t talk to my biological mother.”
And by the way, every time I say that, a piece of me cringes to think of the pain of my expression of that ever get back to “her.” I never wanted to hurt her. None of us did. That was never our intention when we stopped speaking to her.
Growing up, I can still remember the several and likely triple digit times that she, our biological mother, would threaten to kick us (the girls anyway) out of the house if we didn’t do “X,Y, Z” or would threaten to never speak to us again if we ever “[you name it/it was probably most of anything that we didn’t agree with her on].”
After years of experiencing emotional, and when we were younger – in my opinion- physical, abuse (also in my, unlicensed as a psychologist, and thus, unprofessional opinion),we each – at various and different times – had had enough and would finally cease all communication with her. I remember I stopped talking to her once for about 9 moths when I was either 18 or 19 years old, right after I’d just gotten legally married to my now ex-husband. I stopped talking to her because when I called her in the middle of one my trips to visit my now-ex-husband’s family in Puerto Rico, and I think it was even to wish her a Happy New Years Day or something like that, we got into a huge argument when I told her I’d gotten legally married in the Courthouse because it was too much pressure and stress for me to think about paying for the cost to fly her and my still-at-home-siblings to Puerto Rico, which is where I wanted to host a small and intimate wedding, and what I had shared with her. To which she had responded that I should also cover the cost of flying her, my step-dad, and my three younger brother and sisters (my older sister, Mercy, had already moved out of the house by this time) out for the wedding since I “insisted” on having it in Puerto Rico. This was, of course, a ridiculous and (in my opinion) controlling, not to mention nearly impossible, request that there was no way that I, a freshman or sophomore in college living off of student loans so that I could go to school, comply with. This discussion is what eventually lead to the wrath of the “Molahoyo” (this being the name my ex-husband and I came up with after comparing her to the boxer, Oscar De La Hoya, using a play on words).
You would think that after moving out of our house she wouldn’t have had that much control over us. Or at least not over the girls, which we always felt were treated differently than the boy, our brother. But she still did.
Sometimes, I still have to work very hard, using therapy tools, to not let the thought of her control me. I’ve also learned, after five years of consistent dialectic therapy sessions, that it was natural for us to feel, and let ourselves feel, guilt, shame, and anxiety over many choices, decisions, and actions we would take (or not take) as it relates to her. Our biological mother.
And from the little that I’ve learned and researched (which has actually been quite a lot) of behavioral psychology and attachment-theory, I believe it lends itself to the very real likelihood that we (my siblings and I) all grew up in an environment that would almost inevitably be classified as resulting in children who have an Anxious-attached attachment style, and even more likely, a Disorganized attachment style, instead of the coveted Secure-attachment style that is the ideal for any child to grow up in an environment that allows them to be more likely to be able to emotionally regulate, and to be non co-dependent, and generally be able to navigate, in a healthy way, most relationships. I also know that these styles resulted because as a survival tool, they benefitted us and allowed us to better predict which mood our bio-mom would be in. This, however, as adults would be subsequently replicated into the dynamics of all of our existing relationships (yes all, love, work, friendship, play, etc.), making things – in essence, much harder than they had to be, and requiring each of us to heal in order to break the cycle and not pass these emotional dis-regulated attachment styles to be replicated onto our children.
All of this to say that, I do think often about the pain it causes her and it hurts me. It hurts us. The siblings who, at any given time, have chosen not to have her in their life to protect themselves, or maintain a healthy boundary.
Then again, I also know that the real reason we live with the guilt and the shame of that pain, as if it was our burden to carry, is because we STILL, at 40+ years old, feel responsible for her feelings. But here’s the thing that I’ve also learned… therapy has taught me we are not responsible for her feelings. We are only responsible for the way we react, and for our own feelings.
If she were to ever come to any one of us with truly open arms, an open heart, and an open mind, and say “I’m sorry I hurt you. I may not understand how, or why, but I know I hurt you none the less, regardless of my intent. And for that I am sorry. I love you. What do you need from me to heal our relationship so that we can move past pain and move toward love and acceptance of one another?”
But my bet is that she would never say that. It’s a pipe dream. I am fantasizing about a mother that doesn’t exist. And in the mean time, I am trying to be that mother for our daughters. So that, God forbid, we should ever hurt them, Nichole or I would be emotionally mature enough, and have healed enough, to be capable of saying to them “I’m sorry. My intention was never to hurt you, although I see that what I [did/didn’t do] still did hurt you. Help me understand what I can do to bridge the gap between us and move toward healing.”
Meanwhile, it’s been almost a year to the day since my step-mom, Hilda, passed. And it still hits me like a fu%&ing ton of bricks any time I have more than 5 minutes of solace to reflect on, or feel, the loss that always looms underneath every thing I have going on in my life at any given time.
Why? Because I talked to Hilda about everything. Work, family, sex, friendship, politics, life in general. I’m not saying it was a perfect relationship either. No relationship is. There were times where she or I would staunchly disagree with a specific view of point on a subject, although it wasn’t often. We shared a lot of values. Integrity being one of them. We saw that in each other, and loved and respected that about each other. Not just as a mother or daughter, but as women. As people. And so, in that way, I didn’t realize it until after her death, but I lost a best friend.
I didn’t really realize until she got sick just how much I talked to her about things. If we spent more than 2 weeks without speaking, things would feel off. And when we did talk, it was almost always a long conversation, followed up by us making plans for the next time her and my dad would be coming over.
Once I had kids, I got used to seeing her and my dad almost every week, if not every-other week. Holidays were always with them, unless we were in Ohio with my wife’s family, and making these plans with her was one of the highlights of our mother-daughter relationship. I almost always answered the phone when she called. Because she knew me so well, and knew my schedule so well, and was so considerate, that I knew if she was calling it meant business, or maybe she just wanted to connect.
She was the matriarch of our little family. She made sure that her son, and his girlfriend and her son (both up in Asheville, NC), my older sister and her husband (in Central Florida), and myself, my wife, and our kids (all in South Florida along with her and my dad) made time on the calendar to get together at least once during the holidays, sometimes – if we were lucky- multiple times in the same holiday season, and eventually, also one time in the summers. With her, with all of us, we formed the family I always dreamed of having and finally had, and a large part of that was thanks to her and the role in she played in it.
I miss her… so damn much. She may not have birthed us. She may not have “put a roof over our head” or “birthed us,” as our biological mother was so often primed to remind each one of us, but she loved me and my older sister in a way that we’d never known…. unconditionally.
We didn’t have to “win” her love. She didn’t keep score over how many times they’d come over to our house before we went to her house. We didn’t have to spend enough time with her, or show her enough “effort” in order for her to love us back. She just did. She loved us as if we were always hers. And she refused to ever let us talk bad about our biological mother, until she finally (I think) got fed up with seeing how hurtful our biological mother could be. And even then, she wouldn’t talk bad about her. She would say “I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t want to talk bad about your mother. She’s still your mother.” Because that’s the kind of integrity she had. She wasn’t perfect, but she also never tried to be. And because of that, to us, she was.
Some of my siblings thing our biological mother may have an undiagnosed mental condition that makes it difficult for her to manage relationships with us, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that. AND, as someone who is NOT a clinical physician capable of making such a diagnosis (no who lacks licensure is), I still rest on the fact that at the end of the day, mental condition or not, we all get to choose who we want to be.
And you either choose to be someone who wants to grow and learn, and become a better human being in this lifetime, which requires humility, accountability, and a vulnerability that many who have dealt with traumas are unable to overcome. That is, until they CHOOSE to.
My sisters and I, one by one, have ALL chosen to work on our healing.
In one form or another, in different ways and on our own individual journeys, we have each worked on ourselves. We’ve (collectively) read a ton of books, watched a ton of videos, used talk-therapy with professionals and a select few group of friends who know our family’s history, meditated, medicated, done Ayahuasca, you name it – all in the name of healing. All in the name of giving our children, our friends, our spouses, something different than the conditionally-qualifying-love-environment we grew up in. An environment that lead to us questioning our worthiness of love, and to creating self-fulfilling prophecies until we self-destructed so much that we had no choice but to find our way to healing.
And each time we’re all together, the 4 sisters, I feel a bewitching power in effect. I feel our collective power in our strength and all that we know we have survived, and in some cases – are still surviving.
Thus, my heart goes out to all the Mothers who are – instead of victimizing themselves as to why their children stopped talking to them – doing the work to heal, to figure out why that is, and to do the work required to opening your hearts to evoke change so you find yourself moving purely from a place of unconditional love, I truly believe – your children will return to you. I hope that they do. But only after you’ve taken the time to heal. Since you owe that to yourself, and you also owe it to them.
And to the daughters who are now mothers, know that you are NOT your mother. You do not have to fear that your children will abandon you, leave you, or forget you. Why? Because look at how you love your daughter. Look at how much you care that you have taken steps to look at your own weaknesses or areas of development, all so that you can show up better for your daughter or son. You love your daughter or son so differently than you were loved. You love them unconditionally.
So the likely reality is that they won’t even grow up even entertaining those thoughts, because you have given them, your children, an environment where they know they can be their authentic selves – where they are safe. You have shown your child/children that they don’t have to earn your love. You love them simply because they are. No strings attached.
And that will make all the difference. Happy Mother’s Day.
Love,
Michelle K. Notte
Notte a Blogger... 