my mom sucks
I find myself bringing up my negative experiences growing up and my negative experiences with my mother a lot laitly. I can't tell if it is because I am just now feeling the effects or if it is because I am just now beginning to mature and get past what happened. I read a really great quote somewhere, it said: To stop thinking your childhood coud have been better is to accept what happened and to move forward.
What maybe has brought my deep dark boogie man feelings to the surface?
I am taking a Representations of Motherhood class which highlights the rough relationship my sister and I had with our mom and points out ways in which I didn't even realize it was so bad. I didn't know how unmotherly my mother really was until I started reading books and articles and passages and plays and quotes and listening to stories in class about motherhood and out of all the representations of motherhood never once have I found anything like my own mother.
It doesn't matter I always tell people because my dad recieves the best father in the universe award hands down every year. Don't feel sorry for me, the missing motherly love was overcompensated for by overly fatherly love and sisterly love. A lot of the representations of motherhood I have learned about in class good and bad have actually sounded more similar to my sister. So then I tell people (and why am I talking out loud about this anyway?) that they especially shouldn't feel bad for me because I even had a sister who stepped up and took the mother's badge of honor and fulfilled the role in my life completey. So why am I still grapeling with this? I heard a conversation once that went something like this....
"My family isn't normal, I mean it's okay, its not like I have a broken family or anything but my mom sort of hates my dad and I don't know I guess they might get a divorce and then I can really say my family isn't normal...."
"Hey kim...it's America, your family is normal only if they do get a divorce"
So between the quote and the ease droping I should and most of the time do feel comfortable with the fact that I grew up with a mom who was selfish, unloving, unnuturing, brash, and crude because who didn't grow up with something terribly crooked going on in their family?
A few weeks ago I also helped out at this program for the Women's Center (where I work at SCSU) called "Take Back The Night" a speakout event for victims of sexual assault. The speak out was moving. More people than you would never hope for stood up at that poteum and told the most gruesome, horrid, and disturbing stories of family rape and assault. I waltzed into that night hardly thinking twice and walked out a broken young woman. My heart grew heavier with each story with the burning memory of the sexual offender and drug dealer my mother had live in our house when I was 10 years old. Just so you don't go feeling all sorry for me please don't because under some blessing I was exempt from his physical wrath. It was horrifying but he only used words on me and I am much luckier than the people I heard speak that night.
So I am starting to work out why all of this is coming to the surface
The final reason may be my boss at the women's center. She is a wonderful woman who is my mentor. She is the mother of all mothers. Kind, spiritual, nuturing, perceptive, caring, and all of those other fluffy warm kinds of things mothers should be. She reminds me a LOT of Mattys mom. This is a problem for me because I had just about made it up in my mind that mattys mom was some kind of a fluke of a mother, that no one can be that wonderful and caring and then BAM I meet Cathy. Her sons are incredibly blessed, I hope they realize it. I hope they spoil her on Mother's day. SO now it seems like I was a lottery ticket pulled out of millions to have a mother who is much less. Why didn't my mother have boys?
It may also have something to do with my biological clock. I am 21 years old, all of the girls in my life cuz fuz included think about being pregnant and having children. They are salivating over it and I am scared shitless. I don't know how to love a baby. I just got a puppy and I already catch myself irritated, exhausted, impatient, and unuturing ...what is going to be different when I have a baby? I didn't want kids at all until I met matty, I think i tried to tell myself I did for his sake. I don't, I can't do what my mother did to me.
Ya know what also? My mother as an individual isn't so bad. And I can relate to that because as an individual I think I might even be pretty great. So this scares me. If she never had kids I think she would have been a better person. Now that I am 21 we sit at the kitchen table, we drink, we chat and laugh and bullshit, we can do it for hours. Most of the time I am humoring her ignorance but still we get along great. As a child I feared her like a new standard car avoids hills. Everytime I almost got close to her I would do something horrible and fuck up like spill the milk and she would just knock me back down. She would scowl at me for weeks because I left a cup in the sink one night while she was at work.
I am just going to keep going if thats ok with you.
Ya know what bothers me the most? When I am alone for multiple hours and I always am. The only time in my life where I was hardly ever by myself was when I dated a former Matt. All my free time was spent with someone who loved me very much and it was one of the happiest periods of time in my life.