Mother’s Day When Mom Was Not Such a Peach

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

When my adoptive mother was alive we did the traditional Mother’s Day thing…presents, dinner etc. I don’t remember there being too much angst on that day (unusual for my family) or anything terribly spectacular. My mother seemed better behaved on Mother’s Day than on a lot of other holidays. Some of the long-time readers might remember my Huckleberry Hound In The Garbage On Christmas Morning post –> HERE and a few other choice posts around my mother’s not-so-spectacular behavior throughout the year.

But there was a nurturing side to her which is what could make us fairly insane most of the time. No one would beat you like my mother but no one would care for you when she was in nurturing mode. I learned SPLITTING –> HERE early on from doing it with my adoptive mother.

She was truly both sides of the spectrum….the most loving and caring and doting mother you would ever meet and the most critical, mean and abusive mother you would ever meet. She would put you in a lose-lose situation so that you absolutely could not win. She was the world’s greatest martyr and she could beat you to within an inch of your life. But she cooked apple pie like no one’s business including homemade crust. She would iron your clothes and run errands for you and run to be there……..and then she’d turn into nutty mother for a night or a day or a few days…then the nuttiness would be over and she’d be making your favorite meal and bringing it to you in front of the television. INSANITY.

When I went to purchase Mother’s Day cards for her, it was easy to split off and just concentrate on the loving mother, the one who did so much for us when she wasn’t telling us we were worthless (well me anyway, I was always more worthless than others.)

After she died, I did a full Grief Recovery grief group around the loss of her. The next loss that I did in the same group was the loss of my biological mother.

This was much more of a grey area for me. I was so angry at her. Not just for giving me up…but for letting me languish in foster care for 7 years. That was the tough part for me. I had so much anger and so much pain over someone I didn’t even know. Doing the relationship inventory with her and writing the letter was tough…but I processed through a lot of anger…and eventually was able to find her and meet her.

Mother’s Day was tough as there are no “I know you gave me up but here I am!” cards in Hallmark.

When I would look for cards and read through all the “I know you took care of me when I was a little girl….” more anger and hurt would come up again even though I was trying, really hard, to mend the relationship with her. I had some more stuff to work through obviously. On one Mother’s Day I included a note in her card that said I understood her and forgave her for everything and I just wanted to have a relationship with her from here on in. And I meant it. I truly did.

A year or so later my biological mother would stop speaking to me for no reason. And she didn’t even let me know she didn’t want a relationship with me anymore. My aunt was dying and she was someone who had welcomed me back into the family very lovingly. I didn’t want to overstep my bounds so I asked my mother if she wanted me to pick her up and go see my aunt. She said, “We’ll see.” I didn’t know what to do. My mother, the great procrastinator (”oh do I have a kid in foster care? now, where did I leave her?”) dawdled because she had, arbitrarily, decided to sever ties with me only she didn’t tell me. So my aunt died and my mother didn’t tell me and I had to figure out (by reading tea leaves or some shit like that) that we weren’t having a relationship any longer.

Can you say “wanting to put your mother through the wall”? My anger shot up from 1-100. It was a Charlie Brown and the football moment for me. Arrrrrrrghhhhhhhh. How many times was I going to try to kick the stupid thing???????????

And the next Mother’s Day was hard.

I felt like I had hit the Motherlode of Not So Great Mothers. I mean, COMON.

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Mother’s Day tends to be about our traditional notion of mothers. It also tends to remind those of us who didn’t exactly have that about our tremendous loss.

There is a book called Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman (link on right) that really helped me when I was trying to deal with the loss of my biological mother and the complexity of my relationship with my foster/adoptive mother. Although Motherless Daughters tends to focus on losing your mother to death at a young age it also talks about living life in bereavement for something you’re never going to have: your mother and the traditional idea of what your mother is for….someone to trust, someone to go to, someone who would be there for you no matter what….it’s also about being a woman and growing into that identity without a clear idea of your relationship with your mother.

Working through the complex and complicated relationship that is the one with our mother (or in my case, mothers) is never easy. Mothers know how to push our buttons because they installed them. They also are part fantasy and part reality.

My mothers had difficult childhoods. My adoptive mother was put in an orphanage by her alcoholic father when her mother died when she was 5. The orphanage was abusive and she was went to a foster family when she was 9. She adored her foster mother and always told the story that she was so overcome with grief when she died that she tried to throw herself in the grave with her. And she met my father who came from an alcoholic family and he had to leave school at the age of 13 to help support the family. Long story short: they danced the dance because they both knew the steps but it was not a happy pairing.

My biological mother grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father and fell in love with my biological father who was a married man with 2 kids. She thought somehow he was going to leave his wife and marry her if she got pregnant. Well he was a good Irish Roman Catholic (adultery yes, divorce no) and would not leave his wife. So she grew bored with the child experiment (that would be me).

Both of my fathers were invisible. Both of my mothers were withholding and abusive.

So these are the four gems that were my parents. Not being in a rubber room for my entire life is a plus, I think.

But if you look at the history of my parents, especially my mothers, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot you could really expect from them. Poor them. Poor us.

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Grieving for what you never had:

One of the ways I’ve come to terms with my mothers and their downfalls of mothering was to try to understand what they came from. The second way was to grieve the relationship I never had with either of them and would have wanted. The third way was to try to be a better mother to my children.

There are things I will never have and one of them is a “normal” relationship with a mother or a “normal” history. When I started this recovery journey I had to find mother and father substitutes. People who cared about me and supported me and gave me really good advice from their hearts.

That is something I didn’t have from my parents and I had to find people in my life to fill those roles and I have. I had tough-love women and gentle women. I had tough-love men and gentle men. I had mentors, sponsors, therapists, teachers and friends who loved me unconditionally and were people I could trust. Finding these new parents was essential for my long-term growth.

I’ve gotten past the hole in my soul and I’ve harnessed a lot of my “look at me, ma!” tendencies into good things. When I was younger it was 3 D’s of destruction: drinking, drugs and dangerous men. Over the past 20 years I’ve put my life together, gone back to school and gotten multiple degrees, raised my children and stopped the family cycle (all the families and all the cycles) of abuse, abandonment and alcoholism.

Being the black sheep and lost child has worked in my favor because I’ve made it work in my favor. If you come from 2 (or 4) crazy families and you don’t really belong to any of them, maybe you should thank your lucky stars. Maybe what you’ve never had is something you don’t really want. I do know that a lot of my success is some back-handed way of saying “I Matter” and I should have been born. I feel as if I’ve been trying to make that point for most of the last 20 years. Every degree, every success is my way of saying, “See? I do matter.” I don’t know if I would have been so driven if I had a normal nurturing relationship with my mother.

As in all things, with my parents I need to grieve my losses, learn from my own mistakes, live my life and try to be the best I can be DESPITE all of it.

Grieving mother-loss whether she’s here or not is always always hard. It’s a primal wound; it’s a deep deep longing for something on some molecular level.

But it’s possible to get past it…to mother ourselves and to find people to place our trust in who will love us and support us and give us good guidance.

Mother loss, or mother “never had” is tough…but like everything else you can heal from this and move on and live your life a glorious day at a time.

Be good to you…and if your mother wasn’t the greatest on the planet…give yourself some lovely mothering on Sunday and give yourself a nice little gift. And keep remembering to give yourself nurturing.

You deserve it.

REMEMBER NO MATTER WHAT: You deserve all good things. And you can have them.

Happy Mother’s Day

BE GOOD TO YOU.