Lori Bryant Woolridge shares in her recent article, Dear Santa, All I Want for Christmas, at the Huffington Post, “...the holiday season…with its emphasis on family traditions, gift exchanges, and togetherness can be tough for single ladies because it’s one of those times of the year (like New Year’s and Valentines) that when being alone can feel pretty lonely.”
No more than with single parents is this need to connect and interact with a level of profound togetherness than with the single mother or single father.
In her blog post, Sad Mommy vs. Daughter Wars, Zondra Hughes asks, asks, “…How can we end these wars…mommy vs. daughter wars…a sad reality that continue to plague our families…”
Where does a woman, or man’s, need for companionship and intimacy slide into abandonment of responsibility as a parent when she or he, the mother, or father, enters into relationship with a person who poses threats of physical and emotional harm to the woman or man’s child?
North Carolina courts, sentenced 43 year-old Elisa Baker, in September of this year, to 18 years in prison for the murder of her step-daughter, 10-year-old Zahra Baker who had in her short life, survived bone cancer. As a result Zahra used a hearing aid and a prosthetic leg.
Born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Zahra had traveled with her father, Adam, to America in 2008, and settled in Hickory, North Carolina with Elisa whom Adam married. As Zahra’s stepmother, Elisa would proceed to abuse Zahra.
Elisa and Zahra’s father, Adam, met on the Internet.
Step Mom Gets Pp to 18 years in Disabled Girl’s Murder
Zahra Baker’s Stepmother Strikes Drug Case Plea Deal
The Nativity Story that centers on an infant, father and mother, stirs our most primal and basic needs to be loved and held, respected and valued.
Present day American culture perpetually hurls slurs and slights that cut and maim the best of us. Family offers a refuge wherein we can drag ourselves at the close of each day and receiving balm and mending.
All too often too many of us have no one waiting at home or as Margaret Mead stated of humans and desire to matter and to know that we matter, we lack anyone at home and in our lives to experience concern should we not return at the close of the day.
For those of us lucky enough to have someone in our lives, it is our daughters and sons awaiting who await our arrival at the end of the day.
Inviting a person into your home that disrupts relations between you, and your daughter or son requires careful examination of how much we as parents are attending to our needs during the 364 days that follow Christmas. Relations with our children oftentimes challenge us beyond the reaches of interactions with other family member, those with our own parents, spouses and significant others.
While the marriage relationship focuses on the evolution of the soul and fidelity, first to one’s self and then to others whom we love, the bond with children asks for honesty with first ourselves and then our children. Success at marriage demands respect and commitment to a person with whom we are to draw close and intertwine like a vine that sits closer to us than with any other human.
The best of parents who grow old the comfort of loving interactions with their children nurture the nest of these relationships from a place of truth and integrity that supports and guides them in remaining careful to not abandon the needs of their children as they simultaneously seeking to fill the requests and needs of the parent’s own inner child.
Awareness and understanding of what we failed to receive in childhood offers the first step in knowing what we must give ourselves in adulthood.
On a higher level, befriending and caring for the wounded child who lives within us, the parent, also provides a compass guiding us as parents in the decisions we make, choices that effect not only us, but also our children.
We must always choose with care those people with whom we interact, those we invite or allow into our home, those we allow to enter close vicinity to our children.
When our children hold concerns and fears about anyone who enters or is in our life, worries that this person holds negative intentions, does not feel safe when in their presence, we must immediately re-examine this person, review their desires to draw near us, and most importantly, we must revisit our attraction towards them along with our desire to have them in our lives.
What vulnerability, unanswered need, emotional wound, most times stemming from our childhood is this person poised to exploit, thereby re-injuring us, and threatening to hurt our children?
The anxiety or cries of a child concerning our acquaintances and intimates speaks most profoundly to that which was silenced in us and that we have continued during adulthood to ignore.
On a most practical level, the warnings uttered by our children give voice to the needs of our own inner child, words that should we heed them, lead us to the path of not only protecting our children and ourselves, but healing the wounds of our child spirit that struggles to survive within our hearts and our soul.
Forgiveness is the key in preparing any mother/daughter relationship. My mother was abusive to me and my brother while I was growing up but as my Dad used to tell me, DeBorah your mother is sick. My mother was a functioning schizophrenic who self medicated herself with alcohol. She was also trying to deal with an autistic son back in the 1960s when no one knew what autism was much less how to deal with it. There were no therapies or medications for autistic children in those days.
When I was around 8 or 9 I saw my mother try to commit suicide but at the time I was so young I had no idea what she was doing until she sent me to get my father for help. She drank Drano. I saw my Mom do a lot of crazy things when I was a kid but kids did not get therapy back then. Family closed ranks, kept mental illness a secret and kept things moving. My Dad really stood in the gap for all of us. He could have chosen to leave his sick wife, disabled son and troubled daughter but he stayed. My parents stuck together for 40 years, literally until death separated them. On his death bed my Dad expressed the love he had for his wife, my Mom despite illness. Likewise three years later for my mother when she passed.
I was blessed to make amends and asked my mother why she treated me so badly when I was young. She said, “I was overwhelmed.” And with those words I understood because by then I was 36 and battling depression myself. For the last three years of her life my Mom and I became very close. Hang out buddies. True partners thanks to the development of anti-psychotic medicines. But in order for this healing to take place we both had to sit down and talk. Mothers and daughters have to get things out in the open because once that person dies it’s too late. Have than conversation now while still living.
DeBorah Ann Palmer´s last blog post ..My Maternal Ancestry Tree: The bond and bridge that enable me to crossover from America to Africa
How beautiful that your mother found her words of truth and shared them with you.
If only we all could experience the gift she provided you.
Thanks again for such thoughtful sharing that touches the heart.
Peace and blessings…forever…and to all whom you encounter.
I’m currently writing a memoir about my mother Mable Elizabeth Palmer. A lot of what she did to my brother and I as children was the result of the schizophrenia and her attempts to quell the demons and silence the voices in her head using alcohol.
However I will say this much, despite some of the trauma I went through as a child over all I had a good childhood. Funny how when you get older you put things in perspective plus some of the illnesses your parents had visit your doorstep.
After I graduated from college at age 43, actually even before that I battled depression. I’ve been hooked on all types of anti-depressants, pain killers and have an off and on dalliance with drink. By the way doctors and therapists knowingly make drug addicts out of their patients. I stopped taking all my anti-depressant medicines in 2007. As you know medical science has since proved those medications turn you into a zombie and cause depression/suicidal thoughts. I’d rather be depressed and a functioning human being than a suicidal zombie.
Now I not only understand but know what my mother felt. Even though my Mom had been gone for years I’m closer to her than ever before, because I’m more like her. In a way I am her and me at the same time.