Witnessing our eldest graduate college in May 2009 and then graduate school eighteen months later in December 2010 delivered me to a new level of confidence and belief in myself.
I realized that something of all I had done as a mother had worked in nurturing our eldest daughter into not only a good citizen, but one who had goals and plans for achieving those goals.
When after earning her graduate degree in International Studies our eldest daughter asked to return home and live with us while attending law school, I was thrilled. I was also humbled.
Her actions, so different from mine in my early twenties, said that not only did she feel safe and felt comfortable living at home, felt that her father and I would respect her privacy, but that she counted me as a friend, that in respecting her privacy, I could view her eye-to-eye and allow her to do the same to me, her mother.
This is something I never experienced with my mother, despite the fact that I married my husband and the father of my three daughters at 21 years of age.
I might have been a wife and mother, but my mother and I never became friends.
Perhaps this occurred, or did not take place because of the abuse she perpetrated on me.
And yet another part of me said that even absent her actions, my mother lacked the ability to open up and shared her fears. Instead they overtook and ruled her.
Two women separated by decades in age, but having undergone similar experiences found common ground in being women and connected by blood, we, my mother and I, would very much unlike me and our eldest daughter, never share thoughts and feelings of insecurities that women of our day and of time immemorial have faced.
We would never speak of and attempt to articulate the vicissitudes of emotions that come with being a woman in her striving to find meaning in our lives and imbue our living with purpose–make our presence in this life worthwhile.
This is sad.
When I consider all that I have experienced in the last four years with our eldest daughter, watching her matriculate through law school, which is no cake walk, accomplish what I could never imagine doing, becoming her own woman and individual, I stand in awe and with immense gratitude.
The day I witnessed, with my husband and two younger children, our eldest daughter graduate college, began my journey of healing, the bounty of which she delivered when returning home to live for professional school.
I will never know the full extent of the person my mother was. This too is sad, because I am certain a great person lived inside her. I met aspects of that person. I am who I am, have experienced failures followed by successes because of the enigmatic person.
I also feel extremely sorrowful for her in that she never came to know me in a way that I can never imagine my life without having become acquainted with out eldest.
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