Letter to my mother

Dear Mum,

It's time we had a talk. I know you are not going to listen now but I'm saying it anyway. I'm writing it down for you so that if you decide at some time in the future to hear what I'm saying all you have to do is go back and read this.

In many ways that you and others in your family don't want to remember, you had a very bad time of it when you were very young. I understand this and I really feel for you but I won't talk much about it just yet. What I do want to talk about is me, how you affected me when I was very young.

To start with, before I was conceived you were already feeling overburdened with two little children who were not at all easy to care for in a strange place where you had no family of your own to support you (apart from dad), where you had to learn to speak the language and make do with what little you had, and where you felt very much under pressure to have your children look good, to avoid feeling judged by your own family and to help you feel better about yourself as a mother. And perhaps Marjorie was a handful, and Stephen was covered in eczema so that he was miserable and cried much of the time, and this was very very hard for you.

So that when you became pregnant with me you may have felt some love towards me but you certainly felt even more overburdened and afraid of how you would cope. And after I was born, you had John, who was too thin, which, you will not want to accept this but it is true, was because you were too overwhelmed with everything else to love him enough, and then Anne Mary where again, you know yourself you were so miserable and overburdened you prayed for God to take her.

And much of what I felt from you from the moment I was conceived was that I was a burden. I felt your unhappiness and your fear that you were being judged by your own mother and yours and dad's family in Holland for not being a good enough mother, that is, for your children reflecting that you weren't a very good mother, and not knowing any better I felt it was all because I was not good enough. You even used to say to us that all you wanted was for us to be good.

And I tried every moment to live up to your impossible standards of what a good child should be. I tried to write poetry, I tried to play the piano, I tried to be clever like your family, I said my prayers all the time just like you did, I tried to help you with the younger children and remember being called a Little Mother (and much of this was to please you), I went to drama and Girl Guides which I hated, but I never felt like I was good enough.

I hated being with other children (except my brothers and sisters) because I felt so unwanted and so unsure of myself, carrying this same feeling that I had from when I was first conceived right through my life. Any time I have ever been in a new situation with other people I have felt afraid and out-of-place and very unsure of my acceptance, just as I was when I was born. And I have tried very hard to be good and do what I felt was expected of me so that I might get some approval.

Because what I felt coming from you was your anger and disapproval. You will deny this but every time you withdrew into your own world with your sadness or your feelings of inadequacy, it felt to me that you were pulling away from me, that you didn't like the person I was; every time you were hard on yourself for not doing a good enough job, it felt to me that no matter how hard I helped you I was never good enough. I tried so hard for your approval because that was the nearest I could get to what I really wanted, your love.

I have spent my life being afraid of your anger and disapproval; this is why I so desperately wanted to leave home as soon as I could. You may find it hard to believe but even after I grew up, I was afraid of how you would feel about me, and kept trying to live my life so that you wouldn't judge me badly. I had an abortion and never told you, in large part because I was so afraid of how you would judge me as sinful and I would never be able to hold my head up again.

And somehow along the way, I became just like you and many others in your family. I protected myself from my own feelings of constant fear by becoming very judgemental of others, especially women, especially people who I think are less intelligent than I am. Because judging others doesn't feel as bad as being afraid all the time. But doing that is really just a form of being angry at others. So I am angry at all women and all men who don't make me feel good about myself.

This is not a good way to be; this badly gets in the way of my being close to God, no matter how much I pray. God is waiting for me to learn to love all her children, not be angry with them, and until I let go of the stubborn feelings in me that I know better than others, that I don't want to be told what to do, I'm pushing against a brick wall that I have created between me and God. You have that brick wall too mum, and so do many in your family. We don't want to be shown the truth of how we are inside, we prefer to tell ourselves that we are strong and intelligent and loving and kind – and be angry at anyone who suggests we might be anything else.

You might say that you have never thought of yourself as intelligent and it is true that you have always told the world that you are stupid and useless and 'no good'. But this is only what you have learned to believe of yourself, a mask you learned to put on in the hope that others would be kind and sympathetic towards you, in your own sad search for the feeling of being loved. You well know that underneath that you are very intelligent and strong – and angry. And it is your anger and your strength that I feared as a child who needed your protection, and what I still fear as if I were that small child.

I didn't understand all this when I had my own children and without realising it, ended up doing to them, the girls especially, exactly what was done to me. And I deserve the anger they feel towards me for making them feel not good enough and unloved for who they were. And I suspect that that is what happened to you too.

But it won't change anything to just say it was not my fault. Even though it wasn't my fault, I'm no longer a child and I can undo what harm is in me. I know how to do this; it isn't easy because it involves feeling all of the pain and shame and grief I avoided feeling in my childhood by withdrawing (just as you did mum) and feeling angry and judgemental.

And it will happen in layers. First I will pray for help to go back and feel all the fear in me when I was very little and you were angry or not available to me emotionally. And when all that fear of your anger is gone from me, when I'm no longer afraid to express my own anger, I will pray for help to do that, somewhere safe so it no longer hurts anyone else. Because what I now see I've been doing all my life is being angry at anyone who opposes me, especially if they are a female, even though I didn't recognise that that was what I was doing.

And when all the anger leaves me I expect I will cry and cry in the way I feel I never allowed myself to cry when I was younger because I was so busy being a good little girl. And when all that sadness has left me then I will be a good little girl without even trying, and I so look forward to that.

Love

Karen