Despite all that I endured with my mother under her care, or lack of it, I was never ambivalent about my ability to love.
Even in the worst of times during my childhood, and while undergoing the nightmare of relationship with my mother, it has always seemed the easiest thing to love, the hardest to mistreat and push away, speak harshly to.
I cannot imagine being to my children as my mother was to me, and never saying, “I am sorry, so sorry. Please forgive me.”
And that is what she did. She left this earth while in my care, and never apologized.
And so now I wonder as I did when she was alive.
Did she really love me, the person?
Or did she, like people who are in love with the idea of being in love, or the imaginings of marriage, was my mother enamored with the idea of having children, and in actuality repulsed by all that is required of one to nurture and bring children forth to adulthood.
To be sure, raising children is not for the faint of heart. While delivering us to the momentous of highs and dispensing the most passionate of epiphanies, children also tug at our hearts and souls in ways that undress our fears and expose us with our foibles and vulnerabilities.
They make us proud. And they embarrass us. They leave us ashamed and they enlarge our hearts to points of near bursting.
For they are us. And we are them. Some would have us believe that we are separate from our children, distinct humans with lives and freedom of a set of choices that distinguishes our actions from those of our daughters and sons.
And yet life and the emotions any parent feels concerning her or his daughter, or son tell another story.
Perhaps this was too much for my mother. Perhaps while in the middle of the ocean of child rearing she realized, “This is not for me, more than I asked for. Too much with which to bargain.”
I do not and will never know the answer to this question or if this is the question that actually demands an answer.
This memoir, if that is what I am writing, comprises my testament of forgiveness, my sonnet of compassion to that of which I am not quite certain.
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Nobody wants to be thought of as a project or fulfillment of duty. Then again we wonder how much our parents specifically our Mothers live or lived vicariously through us. Perhaps they love the show or the way they reveal there love does not satisfy us as children or daughters but then again maybe they did not know or perceive another way. Many questions. Few answers. Then again sometimes the answers come with time, distance and perspective.
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