I’ve been thinking about my relationship with my mother, and more specifically her relationship with me. I’d like to review the issue in an unemotional way so that I can better understand how to go forward with my life. I believe my relationship with her has been an element holding me back from success.
When I was a young child under her care, my feelings toward her ranged from anger, confusion, idealization, and fear. I couldn’t understand what it was that made her so disconnected and annoyed with me. I desperately wanted my mother to pay attention to me and treat me as an equal, even at the most tender age.
Physical abuse was ever present throughout my childhood, and sometimes daily, but the bruises from beatings (etc.) disappeared and they were just as heartily dealt out to my brother. It was the constant rejection and absolute affection for my brother that resonates in my adult mind more than anything.
It was once revealed to me that when I was a fetus, I kicked my mother to the point of her near insanity.
I envision her in the gentle naivety of a twenty year old girl. Janet’s expectations of a warm baby to love her and to be loved have been washed away. She is alone with a man seventeen years her senior; he’s desperately fallen for her and completely inept. She thinks she’s going to marry him, not because she loves him, but because she believes he could love her enough for the both of them.
She is alone in the world and she’s ill with pregnancy; in utter discomfort and her dreams of what pregnancy should be have been crushed. She hates that baby before it has ever entered the world, and this hatred turns to disgust when the little girl is colicky and reliant on her. She finally feels the wholeness of her mistake, that marriage and pregnancy is not the ultimate answer for a sense of well-being, even if the man she chose was a soft father figure. The little girl, that messy, tireless, screeching little girl is the physical reality of her mistakes.
She becomes pregnant with another child, and alas her second chance begins. None of the horrors of the previous pregnancy occur, the birth is quiet and the child looks up at her with glee. He does not cry or kick as much and there is an ease to him, there is a warmth that she had looked for in the first child. At that moment she feels that maybe she can love, maybe she has the ability to love.
This is my interpretation of the dynamic that spun my childhood. As I grew older and began to look more like a reflection of my mother, I believe her disgust with me also grew. She was a child having a child, and she’s yet to have completed her adolescence at the old age of 43. How does an immature person differentiate between what she feels and what truly exists? She can’t. There is no difference to her.
I don’t pretend to relate with her, but I think I can understand her actions and how they’ve affected me. Maybe if I can see her as someone blindly reacting to the world that was invading her, as someone mentally ill, then I can feel less like the reject.
I may continue with this entry as it isn’t completely finished…
When I was a young child under her care, my feelings toward her ranged from anger, confusion, idealization, and fear. I couldn’t understand what it was that made her so disconnected and annoyed with me. I desperately wanted my mother to pay attention to me and treat me as an equal, even at the most tender age.
Physical abuse was ever present throughout my childhood, and sometimes daily, but the bruises from beatings (etc.) disappeared and they were just as heartily dealt out to my brother. It was the constant rejection and absolute affection for my brother that resonates in my adult mind more than anything.
It was once revealed to me that when I was a fetus, I kicked my mother to the point of her near insanity.
I envision her in the gentle naivety of a twenty year old girl. Janet’s expectations of a warm baby to love her and to be loved have been washed away. She is alone with a man seventeen years her senior; he’s desperately fallen for her and completely inept. She thinks she’s going to marry him, not because she loves him, but because she believes he could love her enough for the both of them.
She is alone in the world and she’s ill with pregnancy; in utter discomfort and her dreams of what pregnancy should be have been crushed. She hates that baby before it has ever entered the world, and this hatred turns to disgust when the little girl is colicky and reliant on her. She finally feels the wholeness of her mistake, that marriage and pregnancy is not the ultimate answer for a sense of well-being, even if the man she chose was a soft father figure. The little girl, that messy, tireless, screeching little girl is the physical reality of her mistakes.
She becomes pregnant with another child, and alas her second chance begins. None of the horrors of the previous pregnancy occur, the birth is quiet and the child looks up at her with glee. He does not cry or kick as much and there is an ease to him, there is a warmth that she had looked for in the first child. At that moment she feels that maybe she can love, maybe she has the ability to love.
This is my interpretation of the dynamic that spun my childhood. As I grew older and began to look more like a reflection of my mother, I believe her disgust with me also grew. She was a child having a child, and she’s yet to have completed her adolescence at the old age of 43. How does an immature person differentiate between what she feels and what truly exists? She can’t. There is no difference to her.
I don’t pretend to relate with her, but I think I can understand her actions and how they’ve affected me. Maybe if I can see her as someone blindly reacting to the world that was invading her, as someone mentally ill, then I can feel less like the reject.
I may continue with this entry as it isn’t completely finished…
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