I was thrilled, when two years ago, our eldest daughter asked to moved back home.
Having just earned a graduate degree and about to begin law school she expressed the desire to return to a more laid back lifestyle than she had experienced when a coed and then graduate student living in the city.
My excitement at having our first born home came not simply from 0ur enjoyment of having her around to share and do activities with, but with the additional idea that she truly liked being with her father and most specifically me, her mother.
The relationship I shared with my mother, now nearly 16 years deceased, bore little similarities to the one I share with any of our daughter, most or rather least particularly my interactions with our eldest.
Not that we have and do not have our disagreements, but the thought of living at home with my mother after graduating college, never mind graduate school, had I attended directly completing college, would have frightened me.
When I reached the age of our eldest I had been married three years.
I encourage our two eldest daughters to keep their eyes and heart peeled for that one right significant other to marry.
Both have expressed, as has our youngest, that they want to marry and have families.
I hope and pray they experience and share with their marriage partners as much and more than I have thoroughly enjoyed with their father.
And yet it is our eldest daughter, because she has been the first to leave home and return, who has brought me the greatest healing regarding the relationship or rather the wound of the relationship with my mother.
Though my mother was of a completely different generation from me–I a Baby Boomer of the early 1960’s and she a child born two years following The Great War, and who then lived through the Great Depression–our greatest differences came in the form of our personalities.
My mother, a teacher, was outgoing and incredibly driven, an extreme extrovert who like many Americans of my generation (I have come to see this in the last years) was not prone to self-reflection.
I, a psychotherapist, author and painter, spend much time in my head thinking and pondering. Private time to think and reflect provide me a stability that when missed or time does not allow I feel destabilized and disoriented.
My mother also had an incredible temper.
A good person who held good intentions, and always offered her personal best in each and every endeavor, she always sought perfection, from herself and others also.
Life, in its many imperfections, and I as her eldest child and only daughter, continually tried her nerves.
Her response was to lash out, in both words and through corporeal punishment.
This left me hurt and bruised, both physically and emotionally.
Two and half years after my mother’s death to cancer I gave birth to our youngest and last child.
In the twelve and half years that have passed our eldest and now our middle daughters have completed high school, college and graduate school, with our middle now a freshman coed who in choosing to study at a university close-by travels home each weekend. She also calls nearly three times each day.
Like our eldest, our middle has chosen to deepen her relationship with me even into her adulthood.
I cherish this as I do our eldest choosing to move home.
It is one thing for children to obey you when they are teenagers and living at home, quite another to have them return by choice and also by decision choose to involve you in their lives, introduce you to their friends, share with you their ups and downs on the road to full adulthood.
These latter actions of our eldest have said to me, “Not only do I love you, Mom. I also like you. Were you not my mother I would still want to include you in my set of close friends. In that you are my mother it makes our relationship even the sweeter.”
I could not say this regarding my mother or our relationship. I steer clear of people and peers that I know who display personalities. And for the ones that I choose with whom to interact and that remind me of her, I cannot say that I truly trust them. I often wonder why I spend time with the, keep them in my life.
I suppose I hold a fascination with them. I like to observe them, hoping, yearning to unearth some understanding of why my mother behaved the way she did, not simply in life with others, but most particularly with me.
While she expounded her beliefs on life and the viewpoints, often quite narrow and rigid, she never explained the roots from they sprang.
Nor did she share the life experiences that perhaps impressed upon her these inflexible beliefs and left her obviously hurt and sad, so much so, that she resorted to a shield of anger as a way of protecting herself from both the demons we all face in life and those which arise within us from emotional wounds left unattended.
My mother treated and behaved with me much the same way she treated and behaved with my father, her husband and my brother, as well as her siblings and the colleagues, friends and acquaintances of her life.
She held no personal vendetta against me, quite the opposite. I am most certain that I offered her a freedom no other person could or would.
In my living beyond her and achieving a life for which she, my mother could feel proud she found at least some purpose in her life’s work and living.
And yet everything that occurred between her and me held a most personal note and tenor.
I am who I am because of and in spite of the person she was and most probably wished herself to be.
Unfortunately I will never know that individual, nor did I encounter that aspect of her personality and recognize it for what and who it represented.
The passing of her life without having experienced this left a gaping hole in me and my living.
Though I am certain she felt heartily sorry for the many hurtful actions she took and accusing things she said to me she was never able to say, “I am sorry.”
Though she never asked for it, my goal has always been to move past the pain and hurt, to forgive her and ultimately hold her in compassion.
Achieving the latter has been terribly difficult.
We all find it difficult to experience compassion for someone for whom we cannot envision or realize the pain they are experiencing or have undergone.
We find it even harder to do this with a person who continually expresses anger even at the lowest degree.
And yet he arrival of our eldest in returning home propelled me to reflect.
These last two years of her living with us as an adult young woman finding her way in the world and including me and her father as an integral part of that process has presented the opportunity for me to assess the very nature of what exists between me and our daughter, the glue whose roots lay in the umbilical cord that was cut moments after I delivered her, and that now invisibly bind us, but also that respect we hold for each other as adult woman to adult woman.
I cannot imagine what it would be like with her as my daughter, but lacking this kind of interaction.
The hole rent by tense and opposing interactions with my mother would have grown larger and most likely devoured me, my heart and my soul.
Through years of prayer, spiritual direction, and psychotherapy, deep introspection delivered through my writing and creating my paintings alongside working with clients in my practice of psychotherapy, many of whom are daughters who experienced strained relationship with their own mothers, I kept the vow made to myself and our unborn children–to give them the unconditional love I did not receive from my mother.
I did this without abandon, and with no concern of what I would receive from them. My only concern was that I loved them with all my heart, remained ready and willing to apologize, offer, “I’m sorry,” when sensing my actions or words had caused them pained, and without relent told them everyday, through thought, word and deed, “I need and love you, today, tomorrow and forever.”
Little did I know they would return the favor so soon.
In this I have learned an incredible lesson.
We give, particularly that for which we lack and yearn, not so much to receive, but to experience and undergo healing.
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