My Mom (or mum, where I grew up)

So I have been thinking a little about my mom lately, she has popped into my mind a few times in the last couple of weeks and each time I think about writing to her again.

But, what to say?

She hasn’t responded to the last three cards (with enclosed letters) I’ve sent.

In fact, we haven’t spoken since the “India fiasco” of 2013. (Too much of a story to write for you here, but it may appear in the memoir Mother, My.) Though, full-disclosure, I may have received a birthday card that same year from her but I am not certain…it’s been a long time.

The last words I said verbally to her were “you are making me feel so angry right now” followed by a hang up of the phone.

Right now those words send little rivers of silent tears down my cheeks to pool just under my chin. I hope that her sometimes addled mind has forgotten those words and remembers instead kinder words from a different time.

This has been our sad cycle for as long as I can remember.

We clash, we don’t talk for years, and when enough time has passed and I forget that she is not the mother that I imagine (or hope, or dream, or wish) she could be I start to feel that longing for a mom – any mom – and I start to believe that perhaps this time is the charm.

It’s the Absence of Adults that I’m feeling again I suppose.

Not that I don’t love and appreciate the family of friends I have, including the ones who sometimes step in where a mother probably would… I love them with all of my heart and soul. They are my family forevermore, and I am so grateful to have a family of choice around me.

Sometimes, though…when everything is quiet…I wish I had a mom on my side, who I wanted on my side, and who in turn deeply wanted to be in my life.

Perhaps that feeling will never fully go away, and will always be a cyclic yearning that will return to me periodically for the rest of my days.

I have friends who look forward to visiting their family, who miss them, and call them daily even to update them on life. Friends who feel separation anxiety when they don’t see their parents for more than a few months – a few months! I can’t even wrap my head around that feeling, and feel suffocated just imagining seeing my ‘growing-up’ family even one more time.

And yet, that’s what I hope to create with my children; a warm, open, loving environment that they want to be a part of for as long as I am living – and that I want to be a part of for as long as I am living!

I do still wish for a family like that for myself too, with a parent or with “Adults” that I love and who love me equally. I sometimes wish for the “Parenthood” kind of family (if you’re familiar with that show), or any other TV/Movie kind of family where everyone actually wants to be together and where they can’t imagine a life without each other.

How lovely that would be, to feel as though you belong somewhere, as though there is always somewhere to return to, or go to, or share with when anything ordinary or out of the ordinary happens in your life.

And yes, I have that with my family of friends. I have the most amazing friends who are my family in every way. It’s just the idea of the warm embrace of someone older and squishy (sorry older people), someone who feels and smells like home, who has known you since you were born, who is predictable and safe, who always listens, who has watched you grow and is a little in awe of who you have become.

Perhaps it’s too late this time. She is now in living in elderly care in Australia, with what appears to be Alzheimer’s (according to the doctor that contacted me a few years ago). I don’t know all of the details; I only know I’m not receiving responses to any communication I send through.

The last three cards I sent have been through a third party: the aged care home address I was given, and the person I was advised was her court appointed ‘guardian’.

Have the cards reached her? Do I have the right address? Has she moved? Died? Would anyone tell me if she had?

Has her mind left her completely and she just doesn’t know who is sending the cards, and who Ali is? I hope that is the case.

The alternate reason is that she knows, and truly doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore. Which were the last words she said to me in that phone call, “How I live my life is none of your business; I don’t want you interfering; I don’t need you in my life.”

It was one of the many moments I have experienced where our roles were reversed, and I was the mom. My phone calls to her last known friends around the globe to find out where she was after being told by others she was missing only to find her happily sitting on someone’s couch sipping tea… was not appreciated by her – or by me.

Her words cut me to the bone. I cursed myself for getting sucked back in, for worrying, for caring, for opening myself up to another painful reminder that our relationship is not the ideal mother/daughter relationship. I know who she is and who she is not…but still a little part of me holds out hope every time.

That doesn’t make her bad or wrong (or me either), she just is who she is. And because I have grown into a woman I admire, I appreciate that I am who I am in part because of who she is and was in my life. I wouldn’t be who I am today without my past. Nor would I continue to grow in quite the same way if our relationship and my yearning for one was not ongoing.

At the same time I also have first-hand experience at living with the uncertainty of a mother who can walk away, or who is unable to love her child in the way the child needs. Perhaps that will be one of the greatest gifts she has given me…an empathetic understanding of loss and yearning for the love of a mother that I will carry with me as I become a mom to my future children.

Sometimes I wonder, would it have been different if I’d had another mother, or mother-figure, growing up who stayed with me into adulthood, who showed me what a mother could be? Would it be easier to let go? Would it be easier to forgive?

I feel it would, but I can only speculate as it has not been my experience.

Before the “India Fiasco” I’d seen her in person only a few months earlier after 11 years of sparse emails and an occasional phone call, and I felt it was a positive “goodbye” for us both. It was pleasant, though unusual, like visiting an older relative I used to know but now had no real knowledge of… the passage of time I suppose.

She looked old to me, really old, like my grandmother might have, and there was a disconnect too as though she was someone else’s family I was taking to lunch. We didn’t talk about who we were, or who we had been, or even our travels (she’d been living in India for 11 years, I’d been living in Canada), or anything about our yesterdays, just chit-chat about the weather and the food and her upcoming plans for travel to India. Still, it was something, contact, face-time, and I felt it would soothe or smooth our relationship somehow.

I had mistakenly believed that I could walk away from our last in-person encounter with a little closure and only light, easy contact from that day forward.

But then the call from her well-meaning family that she was “missing” in India and I found myself once again in the eye of the tornado that ended in heated angry words and a disconnected phone call a few years ago, followed by unanswered cards.

The ongoing silence from her is both a sanctuary and a gaping open wound.

The knowledge that she doesn’t have the desire to love me in the way that I long for a parent to love me, both soothes and destroys me.

Time has passed, and the pain of being sucked back into the ‘world of crazy’ is a distant memory… all that remains is the desire for a real mom. Someone who is always there for me (by blood or by love, or both), who will take me into her arms and tell me that I was no mistake, that I am important, that I matter, that my life and my ideas are special to her, that she is proud of me.

Intellectually, I know that she will never be that for me, even if we lived in the same town and saw each other every day, that is not the person she is – no blame, just two different people with their own way of living.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There have been some good memories, some times where she was there for me in a crisis. In fact, a crisis is where she stepped up to the plate. I was not much of a “crisis” child though, I was more of the Pollyanna, happy-go-lucky 99% of the time type of child, so those crisis moments for me were very, very scarce. And perhaps she is equally disappointed that her child didn’t “need” her in the way she wanted a child to need her, perhaps that’s the kind of child she wanted – not the introverted, independent, happy-go-lucky child that I was.

Good things have still come from our relationship and from all of the relationships of my three parents (none of whom are in my life), such as my independence, my imagination, my ability to love even when the going gets tough, my ability to see the best in people and ignore the worst of them, my ability to self-soothe (mostly!), and for those and many more positive qualities I’ve developed over the years I am deeply grateful.

The desire to adopt – in part – has also come from the family in which I was raised. The desire to love a child, or children, who may also have felt a desire to be loved by a parent unconditionally, and to give my children (and myself) a family that will last our lifetime, is one strong reason that adoption calls to me.

My step-family was another strong reason. That was the most “normal” family I had growing up and my happiest memories of my childhood. I loved my step-dad and step-siblings so much. It was an awesome family while it lasted. We were made up of four kids who each had different biological parents. We loved that we were different, that we all had different parents, and that it didn’t matter to any of us. We loved each other and supported each other through everything. Until the end of course.

So, why is my mother on my mind at this time?

Perhaps the matching event last week and the renewed hope of a match have made me feel that compassion and love for all – to make me want to connect with my past, to reach out and say “I’m doing OK, I hope you are too.”

Perhaps I still require that approval from her, to hear the words “I’m proud of you.”

Perhaps it is the guilt that I haven’t really thought about her or her wellbeing for a long time, and that my cards were ‘occasional’ rather than heart-felt connections.

Perhaps it is the feeling that I should be the one person in her life not to abandon her completely.

Perhaps it is the desire for a response, to absolve myself of that guilt for our last conversation, as infuriating and hurtful as it was…I hung up, I ended it. I am responsible.

I do not even know what to say in a letter. Surprising I know.

Our relationship has never been one of deep heartfelt connections. And I have no news to share, “I’m living my life, working, writing, learning, meeting up with friends, and waiting for an adoption match.” My life in one sentence.

Perhaps it’s time to write the letter of thanks for the person she has been, and for who I have become because of our relationship. There are so many positives that I could focus on, there are so many strengths that I’ve gained through our relationship for which I am supremely grateful.

I wrote a letter like that to my stepdad many years ago. He was my the most amazing parent to me growing up, and was the one who made me feel most safe and like I had a real family with love and acceptance and hugs when I needed them, as well as freedom to make mistakes. He was one of the best dad’s I’ve ever been privileged to know and I am truly grateful he was a part of my life. Then he exited my life completely when my parents got divorced and I have not heard from him since. However, I wrote him a letter to say “Thank you for all that you have been and for your part in who I am today…” (it was a long letter, four or five pages) and it felt good to say all the things I wanted to say and to let go. I never got a reply, but writing the letter helped me so much, and I have nothing but love for him and fond memories of our time together.

Maybe I need to do this with my mother too. For me. To help me accept her as she is even if she was not the mother I needed, and to help me forgive myself for not being the daughter that she needed.

Perhaps it’s time for forgiveness, for my sake, and for the sake of my future children.

This is my opportunity, as I’m feeling called to write to her, to be an example to my children on how forgiveness can heal, on finding the positive qualities that we have developed from our past, on how to accept that sometimes the people we want to love us the most are incapable of giving the love we need, and that it is OK to feel hurt by it or to yearn for it, and that it is also OK to accept them where they are and let it go.

This is my opportunity to show them how we heal and grow and hurt and heal and grow many times over in our lifetime. And that sometimes, with some people, forgiveness is an ongoing practice – even when they have long since moved out of our immediate lives.

This is my opportunity to demonstrate how life is a treasure trove of everything we can imagine, and that the choice about which parts control our focus is always ours alone.

This is my opportunity to exhibit love, unconditional love, for myself and for others.

And one day I may help them write a similar letter to someone in their past, in order for them to find a sense of peace, forgiveness, and release.

Two years ago when I started writing the memoir Mother, My (which has stalled a little last year), I had hoped that my writing of those stories would help me “clean the slate” so that I was an open and ready parent for my future children, with no residual hang-up’s about the past.

Yes, yes, it was idealistic for sure. However, my desire to be as clean and as ready and open and loving as possible for my children is real.

I want my children to never question how I feel about them because of the way I interact with them. I want them to always feel and know that I love them. I want them to always feel that I will be there for them, that I am proud of them, that I admire who they are, that I appreciate them exactly where they are, and that I will always strive to see the best in them.

Those are the things I desired most from a parent and so are the qualities that I want to bring to the table as a parent.

Of course, I also want to be open to the desires of my children who may not need what I needed, and may need to be loved in another way altogether.

Whatever they need, or desire in a mom, I want to be sure to give them what it is that makes them feel all of the above – secure, loved, understood, safe, protected, buoyed, appreciated, admired, and accepted. I want them to know I believe in them, and support them in anything they want to be or do. I want them to feel certain that I will look for the best qualities within them and I will let them know that I see them.

Perhaps the desire to write to my own mother is because my children are close by now, maybe we are about to find each other and start our life as a family together very soon.

I hope so…! In seeking to find a renewed sense of peace with my mother, I’m feeling an increasing readiness to meet them!

As for my mother, I will likely start writing that letter. I will take my time so that I can find a way to say a truly grateful thank you, as though it were the last and only opportunity to say those things. I know that she gave me all that she could give, even if it wasn’t always what I needed or wanted, I can’t fault her for that – and so there are many ways to remember our time together, and many experiences for which to be grateful.

If you made it to the bottom of this very long post, I thank you so much for reading – for listening – and for being a part of my self-discovery. I am grateful.

If you have any thoughts you would like to share about this, please feel invited to leave me a comment. If you have a similar experience and would like to share it, please feel invited to share that with me too. If you would like to leave a comment that is private, please write private at the top of your message and I will not publish it below.

I would also love to hear from you if you had a dysfunctional relationship with your family, and whether you were able to turn it around as a parent yourself, or if you found it a struggle to break old patterns.

Warm smiles and Love,

Ali Jayne 🙂