What is the single most intense, fraught, infuriating and rewarding relationship in your life? For many women, the answer is a no-brainer: the one we have with our mothers. Mother-daughter bonds are a notoriously complex soup of emotion, and no wonder. All that love, pressure and desire to please, mixed up with the need to find and define who we are, often in opposition to the women who gave us life. And that's the simplest, most ordinary scenario.
Jackie Kennedy once said if a woman failed her children, she failed, period. My mother failed in spectacular fashion. I was three when she packed up my brother and me and signed on as organist for a traveling tent preacher. When we reached school age, she shuffled us off to live with a series of (mostly) well-meaning religious nuts. We reunited with her only to find the preacher had become our part-time step dad. The other part of the time he lived with his wife and five kids. Our lives were the stuff of country songs, not the newer, happier pop style tunes, but the twangy, broke-down country blues they no longer play on the radio.
I've spent years trying to come to terms with my mother, working my way through stages of desperation, denial, anger, indifference and grief. Accompanied by therapy, lots of therapy.
Years of argument ensued as I tried to get her leave the preacher and establish a normal life. The frustration of that time led organically into the relief of denial. During this stage, I pretended we were normal. My mother and I engaged in intensive retail therapy. She felt less guilty, and I felt like the best-dressed girl in school. Sometime in my twenties, the shopping high wore off, and anger moved in. I threw my mother out of my house for volunteering to wash the dishes that spilled from the sink. The therapy sessions she paid for enabled me to spot a passive aggressive power play dressed up as helpful housekeeping. Yeah, right. Exhausted by the emotional roller coaster of anger, I rolled quietly through a long era of indifference. I was able to spend days with my mother while barely registering her existence. We coasted here for years. Until my mother was diagnosed first with Alzheimer's and then with terminal lymphoma. The lack of a future with my mother enabled me to set down the giant luggage of the past.
Suddenly all I wanted to do was brush her hair.
I could not bear to define my mother solely by her failure. It made me too sad. Motivated wholly by selfishness, I began to reconsider the legacy this passionate, highly narcissistic woman might leave behind. As it turns out, there are things I admire in my mother, and they are the same things I admire in other strong, willful women. She chose a highly unconventional life when everything in society conspired to keep her from it. She could have lived a classic 1950s existence with a "Leave it to Beaver" house, two kids and a husband who came home at the end of the day, but instead she chose to follow her passion for God, love and music. It was a choice similar to the one made by men of that era all the time (see any episode of "Mad Men"). Gender aside, with a different upbringing, my mother might have become an accomplished pianist, an artist or a writer. I know from experience they way in which creative professions whittle away family time. In many ways my mother's choices were my own writ large.
I, too, chose a life that was and is outside of convention. As a young single mom, I didn't attend college until my early twenties. I became a writer instead of a nurse or teacher or any of the other careers well-meaning mentors tried to push me towards. How many times did I choose school, work or even the love of a man over my daughter's immediate need for attention? I'm not excusing my mom. A woman who leaves her children for a few hours a day does not equal a woman who abandons her children for months at time.
My mother's attempt to realize her dreams and the weird life that resulted from them became literally the raw material from which I forged my life as a writer. With that realization comes gratitude and the willingness to acknowledge what has always been present in our relationship and what will ultimately, I hope, be our final stage: love.
Having no parents is a huge rite of passage; I sat dumbfounded as a friend complained and whined first about her father then about her mother.It was the usual "being taken for granted" "where were they" blah blah blah...I just cur her off and bluntly told her to make it right now when they were alive and to enjoy what they do offer and leave the rest.She hasn't brought it up since.
So tell us how good life is for you?
The Bible says that we can choose to accept or reject Jesus, and that choice is ours alone. Satan, the enemy of your soul, does not want you to accept Christ and will try to keep you from doing so, perhaps by reminding you about what happened with your mother and this preacher. Jesus paid the ultimate price so that you and everyone who has ever lived could have a choice in the matter. He wants you to choose Him, but He will not force you to do so. I cannot make that decision for you either, although I would urge you to choose Jesus.
This will be continued in my next post.
It just comes natural?
Even if you have forgiven your mom, I discern that by your calling the "Christians" that your mom left you with "religious nuts" that you may have some issues with Christians and maybe with God, since it was presumably in His name that your mom did this in the first place.
This will be continued in the next post.
For those who don't know what a false prophet is, the Bible defines it as anyone who leads one away from the heart of God. I have seen and dealt with several in my time, and they cause a lot of damage to people who would otherwise follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
In cases such as this, forgiveness is mandated by the Bible, but I know from experience that it can be very challenging, as even within the church, there are differences of opinion as to what constitutes forgiveness. I believe that forgiveness as defined in the Bible is the act of releasing the person from one's revenge list. It does not mean that one likes or agrees with what the person did, but it means that you are no longer going to try to collect the debt that the person owes you.
This will be continued in my next post.