April 18th will mark the two year anniversary of my mother’s death.
I am just now reading her journals.
If you don’t know me or haven’t read any of my other posts, I feel I must inform you that I did not have a good relationship with my mother. I was brought up in an abusive, alcoholic home. I did not know my father, and was never able to meet him, even after finding him online 5 years ago. The alcoholism and my father are why I am here.
My mother was also mentally ill, and was most likely mentally ill her entire life. I can’t say for certain that she was born that way or if her own tragic childhood shaped and formed her mental state – or at the very least, made it worse. I can recall the manic-mother and the depressed-mother. I learned to parent both.
I escaped the madness when I was 17, but not without a heaping dose of guilt and pleas of “how can you do this to me?” or “how can you leave me?” Did she expect me to take care of her forever? Like the dysfunctional mother & daughter in Grey Gardens, did she envision a life where we occupied the same space until one of us passed away?
I ran away as fast as I could, and tried my hardest not to look back.
But I looked back....
A daughter needs her mother, right?
At 18 I found myself pregnant, and although I was living with my husband and his family (who were extremely supportive), I still wanted mother’s approval. When I told her that I was pregnant, her response was,
“Oh no, Anna, no. Oh God no…”
And that pretty much sums up our dysfunctional relationship.
I spent the next 29 years trying to navigate life with an abusive, mentally-ill parent, who in her mind, believed I actually owed her something. I would get emails from her with a list of the 10 Commandments, with the 5th Commandment HIGHLIGHTED, followed by a list of reasons of how I had failed to keep that commandment. Once I was scolded for trying to arrange a Mother’s Day lunch for both she and my mother-in-law. She refused to attend because she was jealous. She called me selfish, rude, ‘little miss priss’, the ‘hostess with the mostess’ unloving, disrespectful, uncaring – and many more names that I can’t remember. I was the one who was a shame to the family, because I kept my distance to avoid the crazy.
I tried – I tried so hard to keep the peace. I tried to avoid conversations that would get her upset or start the guilt parade. I would try to come around just enough to let her see my kids, while trying to keep them safe. I was always walking an emotional tightrope with her. I could never do enough, be enough, say enough – she always wanted MORE…and I didn’t have anything to give. I didn’t even WANT to give, but the guilt was too much. I always gave into the guilt.
Why did I keep going back for more? I was waiting for the change.
The Biggest Gap
In 2013 I began to see a therapist.
During a session we were discussing the ongoing dysfunctional relationship that I had with my mother, as I was once again describing a stressful conversation that she and I had engaged in. My therapist asked me what my hopes were for my relationship with my mother? I distinctly remember my reply,
“I just want to have a normal relationship with her. I want to have normal, rational conversations that aren’t centered around constant guilt messages.”
To which my therapist replied, “What if that never happens?
She stood up from her chair and began to write on the dry erase board. She drew two parallel lines with a perpendicular line in the center of them. Then she wrote three words, ‘EXPECTATIONS’ (on the top line), ‘REALITY’ (on the bottom line) and ‘FRUSTRATION’ (alongside the perpendicular line).
She said, “Anna, the frustration you are feeling in your relationship with your mother is that you have not come to a place of acceptance. You have unrealistic expectations for her and for your relationship. Your expectations do not match reality, and the gap between reality and unrealistic expectations is frustration.”
She went on to explain that I had spent my whole entire adult life wishing for something that was probably never going to happen. It was time for acceptance.
Accept The Things You Cannot Change
Buried deep down inside of me (well maybe not so deep) was this desire for my mother to change or for me to find a way to make her change. I had no clue how completely powerless I was. I didn’t have the power to change anyone. Unfortunately. my mother didn’t have the power to change herself. Enter, acceptance.
I had to learn to accept this woman, the woman who gave birth to me. I had to learn to accept that she had limitations that I had not even considered, and that those limitations prevented her from having normal, loving relationships. For her, it just wasn’t possible. I also had to learn not to take it personally. Her issues were deeply entrenched before I ever came on the scene. She probably should have never been a mother, because she clearly never developed any skills to overcome her circumstances and never sought help for her mental illness (while I was growing up). I had to come to a place of acceptance that I was probably never going to have that fairytale mother/daughter relationship with my own mother, and I had to let it go. I had to grieve a relationship that would never exist.
Once I finally accepted my mother for who she was and then put good boundaries in place, we were able to have a somewhat civil relationship for the last 3 years of her life. When she tried to make me feel guilty about something, I just let it go. I knew she didn’t have the capacity to understand the dysfunction. While she had finally sought help for her mental illness (and was diagnosed with bi-polar I) I believe her mind was too damaged and set in dysfunctional thinking. I had to accept that too.
Accept the things you cannot change…
The Journals
A couple of weeks ago I was cleaning out my closet and came across the box that had my mother’s journals inside. There were only two spiral notebooks, and her journaling covered the timespan of about 6 months, from the summer of 200o until a few weeks before Christmas.
I’ve learned a few family secrets from reading them, but this required some careful observation, because my mother spent a great deal of time writing down the plots of movies she watched, the lottery numbers she played, or the ongoings of the upcoming presidential election. Basically, she rambled on paper as much as she did verbally. I also read some things that were hard to read. Now I understand that the purpose of a journal is for someone to release their innermost feelings and aren’t usually intended for someone else to read. With that being said, journals are honest, and brutally honest at that, and I would have to guess these were my mothers true thoughts and feelings.
Here are some of the more poignant passages that I pulled out of her writings:
But tucked away inside the pages of this blame shifting, guilt flinging diatribe was a tiny moment of clarity. A thought (truth) that she never once verbalized to me, but I now know existed. What this proves to me is that she did KNOW, on some level, that I had every right to protect myself from her….that I didn’t owe her anything.
I was actually afraid to read her journals. In some ways that fear was legitimate, and I cried angry tears over some of the things that she wrote. I’ll admit that I called her a few names, names that I couldn’t bring myself to call her when she was alive. Processing grief comes in many forms.
Change never came for us, my mother and I. She couldn’t change; I couldn’t change her. Our relationship was doomed from the start.
I felt compelled to write about this because I know people right now who are stuck. They are stuck in a relationship with someone that they desperately want to change. They want the relationship to improve, if ONLY that other person would see the ‘light’ and behave better, be more sensitive, pick up on the passive-aggressive clues that are being sent out. Unfortunately the only person that can change is YOU.
The thing about acceptance is that you get to decide what that means for you. In my case, I made the decision to accept my mother for who she was (limitations and all) and love her the best way I could. No expectations. But see everyone gets to decide that for themselves, what they are willing to accept. I’ve discovered that most people just are who they are, and trying to manipulate and passive-aggressively get a desired behavior from them never works. It just leaves you frustrated and angry. I spent way too many years frustrated and angry because I was pursing something that I would never be able to get.
Acceptance is a beautiful thing….
Always interesting doors of thought opened for readers in your writings. It is nice your overall writing style is geared to help people see things through their own experiences; and to stop allowing others around them closing doors to their own thinking and comprehension of the life they are living. I realized after reading this the perpetuity of this problem often lies in the depth of the view. For instance – my mother did not receive what she was designed to need from her parents. As a result my whole life she has manipulated views, beliefs, positions, etc of our… Read more »