My mother died
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To some people this is one of the most traumatic events in their lives. My mother wasn’t like other mothers. We had what you could call a difficult relationship. I was the middle child and my brother is only 11 months younger than me so I had to grow up pretty quickly to make room for the new baby AND he was a boy. Add to that that I looked a lot like my father – shiny black curly hair and even if Isay it myself, I was cute. My father adored me. I suppose that’s what started it all.
I don’t ever remember receiving a compliment from my mother. All A’s in school were never enough because she thought I wasn’t working to my potential. Imagine how soul destroying that was for a kid?
I’ve sat here for 2 1/2 days with old memories pouring into my head. Some of them make me sad, some make me angry and some even make me feel guilty. What if I was a shit kid all that time and she was right not to like me? Consciously I know I wasn’t a bad kid. I won the school’s good conduct medal, didn’t I? I was in the National Honor Society. I had a part-time job. Still, the doubt exists – what if I’d been a nicer person, would she have loved me.
My sister tells me of course she loved you. Easy for her because I always wanted to be treated like she was. Maybe she DID love me and just had a funny way of showing it to me.
There were good times and there were funny times and there were the awkward times. Like the time she was eating breakfast and leaned across the table to reach the newspaper and plopped her breast into her coffee cup. Okay.. you’re laughing now, aren’t you? Well, we did too. All of us did. Even dad laughed. Well folks, she didn’t think it was one bit funny. The angrier she got the funnier we thought it was. I deserved her wrath that day because she really was injured with the scalding coffee and we thought it was funny.
How do you sort out your feelings when you’ve lived years and years bottling up resentment?
Not sure but I’ll let you know when I figure it out.