Tag: separation

Alone, at Last.

Last week, my husband took my beautiful children camping for two nights. It was an adventure that my husband needed to explore with them, without me there. A moment for his relationships to strengthen and bond. And the kids were super excited, camping is their absolute favourite!

But it wasn’t only a big adventure for them but also for me. It was the first time I had ever had a night away from my children and I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it.

Certainly in the lead up to the trip, I ran through a gamut of emotions from terror, excitement, anxiety, curiosity, sadness and joy. The day before, as they erected the tent in the garden to try it all out and jumped around with the unfettered joy that only exists in those depths of childhood, I felt tears and rage at not being a part of this. And woven into those intense feelings, was the knowing of how important a moment this was for them and for my husband. With that, I bade then farewell with conscious lightness, ease and blessings. Wishing them the happiest of journeys and discoveries together.

Then I turned back into my house and embraced my alone time, at last, over 8 years since the birth of my first child. 52 hours of me.

I loved it. I loved walking into town at my own speed; I loved wandering around the shops without a schedule to return to; I loved coming home and turning lights on that would otherwise have woken the babes and reading a book before bed without using a torch. I loved waking at 8am (!) just as my body asked rather than being dragged from slumber by pokes, prods and requests. There was so much that I loved, yet I missed them every minute too. And I realised how much I adore their company even with the bickers and the ‘why’s’ and the pestering because mostly they bring just the extraordinary joy of innocence, discovery and love. And whilst I loved my 52 hours I would happily have swapped it for 52 hours with them.

I know that these 8 years have flown and so will the next 8 and soon after that they will be leaving. I have plenty of time to be alone in the years ahead and instead I want to be witness to as much as I can of their childhood. Yes, I will bless them in their adventures, I will not hold them back in my arms when then want to fly, but whilst they are here, I will savour every precious minute: happy, challenging, sad or funny. Each one matters to me before I really am alone, at last.
** The picture are the gifts they brought me. Heart shaped stones and one they found with a letter F, for ‘family’.

Emancipation

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’.