Touching on motherhood

Who would have thought it?  Certainly not me.  Me, Karen Pronk, blogging?? 
But there it is. I have a strong suspicion that I've stolen one of my son's titles  - where I'm going, where I've been - but I don't yet know how to change it, and can't just now think of anything better. So, sorry Nick.

I woke today thinking about Mary's blog (http://magdalena-mary.blogspot.com/) which has inspired me so much in recent weeks, and it occurred to me that I could do the same!  I can see the process of writing about what is happening in my life (and what I want to happen that doesn't) as being pretty challenging, but also less demanding that others listen to me in person.

And immediately after that thought was the feeling that I could start talking about this whole 'demanding' thing.  Specifically, what I am finding out about myself as a needy and demanding person, something I would never have believed once.

It started around the middle of last year when I wrote to my daughter suggesting that she told me how she really felt about me.  She replied with very strong statements about how she felt manipulated by my sadness and the feeling that it was her responsibility to make me happy and she needed to mother her own mother, to mention a few things. 

When I received this reply I actually laughed out loud!  I  thought it was quite funny because she expressed so exactly how I felt about my own mother and of course I just knew I wasn't like that at all.  I, who have always been strong and competent and independent, or so I had been told and was happy to believe.  I, who never allowed my emotions to show, happy or sad, or so I thought.

But over the following weeks and months I continued to try on this idea of myself as needing constant reassurance, as actually being angry at the world without even being aware of it, so long had I been in the habit of withdrawing into myself at any sign that things weren't going my way.  And I found, to my discomfort, that my daughter's words fitted surprisingly well.  I am so much more like my mother than I ever wanted to be.  I manipulate others with my moods, all the while telling myself that all I am doing is going away to be by myself.  How many times when my children were young did they cry out to me in frustration to adjudicate over their arguments, to listen to them?  And I well know my response - to try as hard as I could to insulate myself, to tell myself that this childhood fighting was a natural part of growing and to let it run its course, though all the while feeling it was up to me to find a solution and that I felt completely inadequate to do so.

There's another thing: I have felt, since at least my teens, that my mother was incompetent.  I remember as a child often weighing up all the advantages I saw of being a male but deciding I was better off as a female for the sole reason that I could have children.  I wanted to be a mother.

But lately I've been asking myself, how much of this desire was based on the need to prove that I could be a better mother than my own? 

I spent much of my childhood isolating myself and as I mentioned, I now look at that, at least in part, as an expression of anger at the world.  My daughter when little was an angry child, but as I reflect on it now, in her teens she became, as she herself described, a person who felt she needed to make me happy.  I didn't recognise it for what it was at the time.  If asked, I would have said, 'oh yes, she was a difficult child but now she's a really nice person, so caring and attentive, and we get on so well'.  Read between the lines 'and I am such a good mother'.

But I am so very lucky to have a daughter who has chosen to follow a path of being truthful no matter what the cost.  Though often, to be honest, I don't feel very lucky. I have to say that I would love to revisit the days when we spent time together and talked and felt good - at least I felt good.  But I hold on to the firm hope that, especially as I experience and release my own childhood feelings of anger at my mother, and my own belief that I am not a good mother, she and I will have a deeper and more real interaction, one not based on her reassuring me and watching for any sign I might withdraw with a view to not upsetting me.

And perhaps we will find common interests and joys and have fun together, or perhaps we won't.  But I know one day I will feel that that doesn't matter.  I can love her without needing to be a part of her life.  I can look forward to every future interaction being fully truthful and real - and I have a feeling that that will be wonderful.