I never thought this day would come–when I’d write about making peace with my mother. My mother was difficult, and that’s an understatement. It’s not that I’ve ever known anything different. When some people read my book, Mothering Mother, they ask how I could have forgiven her, much less taken care of her. The reason is simple: caregiving is more about you–your character, your journey–than it is about them.
While my mother was demanding, domineering, rather self-serving, somewhat violent (I grew up in the day when spanking, whipping, and even slapping your child across the face (which she did more times than I can count) wasn’t all that unusual–mine was just a bit more extreme), but my mother was also funny, bigger than life, and she ironically adored my daddy and me.
I spent my 20s pretty darn angry–about being adopted, about her rages, and in general, just one big hot mess. Eventually, I got tired of being angry. I got tired of carrying such a huge “life isn’t fair” grudge around all the time.
So, in essence, I simultaneously wore it and decided to let go.
Not because she did or didn’t deserve it, but because I did.
And in full disclosure, there were many times (teen years especially) where I was not the ideal daughter and she had every right to be beyond frustrated/irritated and at a complete loss as to what to do with me.
We continued to have our tiffs and rifts. I still had to stand up to her–toe to toe–and she still managed to wield her emotional knives and sometimes I didn’t see them coming and would once again buckle under the hurt. Still, this formidable woman gave me more good than ill. I honed my strength, my courage, and my faith by having it tested again and again. And in time, as I married, birthed and raised children, I became aware that all mother-daughter relationships are fraught with a tangle of emotions, regrets, and misunderstandings. I have more compassion for my mother these days and I ask mercy from my own adult daughters. Yet I know there will be so much I won’t understand and they won’t understand until it’s time. Until then I will be their whetting stone and they will sharpen their axes on me just as I, in turn, did to my mother.
I am finally at peace with my mother. Not in some Pollyanna way. I am at peace now because I am somehow able to open wide and embrace all of it–I can remember and absorb the pain and it no longer poisons me.
I remember the day I opened Jack Canfield’s book, The Success Principles and read his first entry:
I am 100% responsible for my own life.
That day I finished growing up (not that we are ever done growing).
The angst of a mentally ill birth mother, a alcoholic-addictive father, a cold grandmother saddled with grandchildren to raise, being abused and being adopted by the age of four to a mother wrestling with religion and force and hardened old and narrow ways–all of it burned by some holy fire, no more than ashes.
I am 100% responsible for my own life.
Peace.
Only by loving what is–all that she was, that I was, all that we are and will forever be–am I now capable of holding us in that sacred and loose place. I can smile and say with an open heart and wide arms,
“Oh, we’re such a mess, aren’t we?”
