Is it true, that I never loved my mother? What did I really feel for and about her? When and why did it change? The relation between her and me has to do with who I became.
It is not for blaming anybody. I learned repression for a reason. The time has come to look at the dynamic between her and me to finally close this chapter. To deny that I once loved her, might be the conflict I tried to suppress. It is perhaps the origin.
A few weeks in August I felt relief by the thought “I need to let go mother, father, everything”. I imagined them both sliding down my shoulders.
Her history is hearsay, what she and her brother told me.
Her Background
Asthma accompanied her childhood. In this family of four (parents, son and daughter) my grandmother’s focus was my mother. It might have been because she was ill but I can’t get rid of the feeling that this little family was dysfunctional in way. Her brother up to his forties was an attention seeker. He wasn’t ill. Furthermore, there was this strong bond between mother and daughter. I remember a sentence my mother repeatedly quoted from my grandmother “Men? They don’t need much care, they can care about themselves!”
The bond was so deep that my mother was afraid to participate in a school trip, to be separated from her mother for a whole day. She made herself fall into a puddle to be sent back home, they could not let her be wet the whole day.
I almost see three parties in this family: the union of mother and daughter, father on his own, brother on his own. My grandmother was the dominant figure, she owned their house and the shop. Grandfather was employed as a worker in one of the industries nearby.
Her brother told me, that the focus in the education of his sister was to find her a rich man to marry. How to dress, how to be attractive, the rules of behaviour in high society (for example table manners).
My mother wanted to create the same bond or union with me. Instead, we were like fire and water, too different to even understand each other. When I disappointed her she preferably said “You are like your father”, the man she disgusted.
Tomorrow I will describe my father.
The Wonder Called Me 