I wasn’t sure if I would ever write this post, if I would ever talk about it so very openly. It is delicate, because I am not wanting to hurt those involved and yet inevitably, just by broaching the subject, I will. So the choice becomes between knowingly causing pain to another and healing myself.
I have chosen to heal myself.
I have chosen to withdraw contact from my mother, for the time being. It has not been an easy or light decision, but after 40 years of a very fragile and damaging relationship, it is time for a break.
The rain is buffeting ferociously as I type these words and I feel the chill run through me from the safety of my sitting room. The fierce rain reflecting the power of my tears.
I am not going to discuss the minutiae of wounding that has occurred to create this breaking point, that would be unnecessary pain for all involved, but it is important to know that it goes against every aching cell of my body to cut the energetic life line to my mother; that this has been the very last resort of a gazillion resorts. To feel that I have no longer have a mother, and not by death, is the most painful thing I have ever had to experience.
And I write about it because there is huge shame surrounding these dynamics in life. Shame that my mother can’t love me enough; shame that I have failed as a daughter; shame that the most primal and most basic of relationships has been severed; shame that I deprive my children of their grandmother. Shame, shame, shame…
We went to therapy before Christmas, my mother and I, one of those last resorts….. It didn’t bring us closer as I had hoped. It didn’t help to create a mutual understanding. It did help me to see that I cannot keep asking, begging for something that cannot be given. It did help me see how the shame I carry for not making it ‘work’ poisons my own family, the heaviness of rejection and pain leaks out in unhealthy ways.
And with that I saw that I needed to take a break. To give myself a chance to be the best I can be without the burden of being a ‘difficult daughter’. To give my family a chance to start afresh without the binds of ancestral suffering.
I hope that one day I will be able to walk beside my mother again in total acceptance of who she is, but for that to happen I need to be clear and strong and grounded with who I am without her.
I need to emancipate myself.
With grateful thanks to Bethany Webster and her phenomenal work ‘Healing the Mother Wound’.