The Sins of the Mother

I've been thinking about my immediate past - about the falling out I had with my mum and the way I reacted (am still reacting) in particular. I've been analysing my feelings, my behaviour, my thoughts and my perception of them and for once not trying to make sense of them or to arrange them in to some kind of order. I've not even been attempting to suppress them or deny them, yet nor have I given them free rein either (I am not that brave yet). This time I've deliberately placed myself in a no man's land to give myself the better view of a 360 degree perspective all of it.

The one thing which I keep coming back to and is becoming glaringly apparent - it would seem - is throughout it all I only ever thought about myself. All I could think about and still do is how it made ME feel, how I was going to recover from it, how I was going to be able to find a way back or a way to move forward from it, how I was going to be able to forgive and how I was going to heal. It was all about ME. While the thought did occur to me that perhaps I might have had it coming considering the decisions I made, I still largely couldn't see beyond my assumption that I was the aggrieved party.

Despite being 30 years of age during that time I was very much a child in need of her mother. I needed her support, her guidance, her sympathy and understanding and to know that she was there for me. I felt totally abandoned, misunderstood and distraught. Perhaps some would say 'Natasha you were 30 years of age and should have let go of the apron strings a long time ago to stand on your own two feet. Stop being a baby and take responsibility for your actions.' To a certain degree I make them right - I do need to stand up and take responsibility for my actions, take ownership of my leading role in the mess and stop feeling sorry for myself. Yet somehow, and perhaps it is still the hurt child within that makes me feel this, I can't let go of the fact that yes I was a child and yes I needed my mother and the fact is she let me down. I needed her and she wasn't there for me, I was hurting and she wasn't there to heal, I was crying and she wasn't there to comfort.

Previous comments and chastisement notwithstanding, I also present the question 'Do you ever stop being a child'? Need, vulnerability, uncertainty, and conflict aside is there a point in your life when you stop being a child in the eyes of your parents? Arguably not and so with that in mind I have to say at the moment when I was feeling the loss of my mum's support, sympathy, guidance, understanding and presence she was in much the same position.

Mum's relationship with her own mother had been strained for many years, it had long passed the exchanging of harsh words with passion to not even visiting once a year. In the end they had moved beyond heated words and embittered rants to the resigned silence of 'It is what it is'. So as my mum's mother, Charlotte Frances Debono, lay dying in a hospital bed my mum held on to her grief, buried her feelings of being an abandoned child herself and instead allowed herself to believe that she was making her peace.

Its only now two years and some months later that she has admitted to me, but more importantly to herself, that she has just begun to grieve for the loss of her mother as a child. Finally she is able to see that when they said their goodbyes to each other she hadn't really forgiven her; not for the root of their estrangement, not for leaving her without having resolved their differences but mostly for leaving her - the child - motherless.

What can you do and say when faced with that reality?

It's true, I'm ashamed to say, that I've not forgiven my mum for not being there for me when I needed her. It still hurts too much and makes me angry. I'm hopeful and mindful though that history should not repeat itself and I don't want to find myself in the same situation as my mum. I don't want to awake to the epiphany there is still so much left unsaid, unresolved and unforgiven between us. I can only hope I keep this in the forefront of thoughts while I work my way toward wherever it is I'm headed.