Different definitions

I had an interesting conversation with my psych today. I was talking about how I am stuck, in that I can’t let go of wanting mum to be the mum I want and how much I want to let go of that because of the hurt that it brings. I was looking for a magic answer to break that connection, that hope, that desire. Needless to say, I didn’t get it. But what I did get was something equally useful. My psych asked me if we took all of her criticism and her failure to protect you etc away, "would I say that mum cares for me?” Lying underneath all of her actions, does she care? My response was “I think she thinks she does” and my psych said “so is it a matter of different definitions of what caring is?” I think she’s got something there.

For me to know I was cared for as a child I needed a mum who was:

• Emotionally available
• Able to show unconditional love, not love based on whims, moods and hoops
• To protect me from abuse
• To nurture me – my hopes, dreams and goals
• To acknowledge my emotions and emotional needs
• To control her emotions so I didn’t feel responsible to making sure she, and only her, was ok to the detriment of me
• Who didn’t take out her anger or frustration at others on me
• Who I could go to with my problems, trusting her and knowing she would help and support me, not save it up to hurt me with later. I will never forget the humiliation when I got my first period of hearing the words I had used to tell mum parroted back to me by my brother.… I wonder why that memory has been haunting me a lot lately?
• To not be a martyr just because she was doing “mother duties” – cooking, cleaning, driving us to things etc
• Was able to face and resolve her own conflicts instead of taking it out on me

I think for mum, she is so messed up herself, that caring for someone involved putting food on their plate, cleaning the house (grudgingly or otherwise), a roof over the head, clothes on their back and fulfilling perceived societal obligations like:

• Driving your kids to sport
• An obligatory/perfunctory kiss on the cheek when leaving the house
• Good night hug & kiss
• Being seen to be doing “the right thing” – attending sport days, school concerts etc if you had to and had no excuse not to

So perhaps I have been believing a lie all of my life. I have believed that mum doesn’t love me; that I am unlovable and that if she couldn’t love me, no one possibly could, not really, not deep down. Maybe that is a lie. Maybe mum really does love me, but she is such a damaged person herself with her own mental health issues that she just can’t show it in the way I need.

So maybe there is nothing wrong with me after all, nothing damaged, flawed and hideous deep down that makes me unlovable by anyone.

At the moment I feel sad and very tired. I feel like I have completed a marathon or something, just pure exhaustion and I think it is the emotional journey and the toll it has taken. I am not sure why I feel sad. I just do. And I think perhaps some of it is because I have felt so unloved, so unlovable for so long and I didn’t need to and a lot of it is sadness for the mess that is mum, that she is so incapable of showing care and love in anything that approximates normality and so she too probably feels completely unloved and uncared for.

And perhaps there is a glimmer of hope that one day I can have a relationship with her again, knowing that she does care in her own very messed up, hurtful and twisted way. But it will need to be on my terms and my timeframe. Perhaps I will be able to see through her actions to the person underneath and feel loved, and if I don’t feel loved, know that it is not because of me but because of her very twisted self.