I hate to be a dark cloud on everyone’s wonderful mother love today, but man my nerves are shot after talking to her.
I called earlier and got her voice mail, but having made the attempt I had discharged my duty and could rest easy about it, though of course all that did was put off until later the inevitable.
We just talked for an hour, or rather she talked; the death of my cat got two sentences from her (after she asked how he was doing and I said he had died) and then she was onto a new subject. We don’t converse, because she’s not particularly interested in anything I have to say - I simply numbly mouth ‘that’s great’ or ‘that’s too bad’ at appropriate moments, and as often as not she interupts even those small attempts to participate in the dialog. Full sentences are pointless, but I try anyway at first, until the futility beats me down, and then I am dutiful if distant until I take my leave, after which there is another 5 minutes of mutual “I love you”s which make me feel queasy and hypocritical.
All the good I might do in the world is negated, I feel, by the fact that I do not have deep loving feelings for my mother, whose love for me seems more symbolic than practical; that is, she is much for exclamations and little for action, and it has always been that way. On those grounds, and due to the fact I was left to raise myself emotionally, I have never been able to escape the feeling that on some level I have no mother.
I of course feel guilty about the way I feel every single day.
(via melanyouth)
You aren’t alone. I have often felt guilty for not really loving my mother, beyond the obligatory, she’s my mother sort of thing. Nor do I much like her. She was never shy when I was growing up about telling me all the ways I was not the daughter she had wanted, all the ways I disappointed her. Only much later, and not to her, did I manage to speak of all the ways she had failed me and disappointed me. Now, she’s old and widowed and needs me, but she still finds it difficult to credit me with anything positive. Only lately, as she must acknowledge she is nearing the end of her life (she is 90) has she started to occasionally, and always as an afterthought, say thank you, or that was nice of you. It doesn’t matter much anymore, and I long ago got over wanting her approval. Now, I am mostly irritated at myself when I feel any guilt over my lack of warm feelings for her. It’s the bed she made, for both of us. She can lie in it, metaphorically speaking, alone. Because I promised my father before he died that I’d look out for her, I’ve done the best I can to do so. But it always feels like nothing more than a duty. My daughter and I have had our differences, but we have always worked them out. Now, she has a daughter of her own, and we are both happy that I can be part of this new little one’s life. I am concentrating on this positive and happy part of my family, not on the sterile relationship with my own mother (who though she was glad about a great grandchild, was also at first jealous and petty about none of us having as much time or interest as she wanted us to have for her rather than for the baby).
