Scent of Cedar *
Well-Known Member
"If I was worried that is on me."
The core hurt is that, somehow, we are supposed to confront and acknowledge and feel punished by our rotten, non-loving motherhood at every bend in the road. Our difficult child kids are forever the victims of their uncaring parents to everyone else and we get that ~ but to understand they have told the story so often they have come to believe it themselves and that they expect us to believe it of ourselves too...ouch.
That's the stinking unfairness, here.
pasa, you are a wonderful mother. We know what all this cost you because we have been there ourselves ~ we know the taste of fear and regret and curdled hope and determination, too. There are times when we all need right witness. For you, this is one of those times.
It's a very lonely place to be, this place where you are now. Recently traumatized and told you deserve it.
How crummy is that.
And told you deserve nothing better.
A bitter, lonely, hopeless place.
You know what? This is just how they think. It's that kind of thinking that allows them to justify the way they behaved when they did live at home. As though there are no rules of behavior and they've never been taught manners or consideration for others. He has to have known a sudden disappearance would devastate you.
He has to have known.
But in his mind, he has all the loose ends tucked neatly in. In his thinking, he comes out smelling like a rose, and we are the villains. It's like they cannot see how painful the actions we've taken to motivate them were for us to take.
They do not see our bravery or our pain or how hard any of this has been for us. They do not see how lonely we are for them. They cannot understand the sense of loss when we reach for them or think about them, and our hands come up empty.
And that layer is a whole other kind of hurt other moms know nothing about.
Without words to express what we feel, we suffer the hurt and the shame and the endless, middle of the night questioning of motive and outcome alone.
My son calls us by our first names. He has, for years. Because, so he says, (right to our faces at the same time he was also expecting money), if we are not friends who call one another by their first names we are nothing, because we were such bad parents.
And I am used to it, but it still hurts me.
That is what I meant about our hands coming up empty.
It's like we have no right to mother-love. They do not get to define that for us, pasa.
They do not get to touch that.
If they did not know how much we do love them, they would not be using it to turn us against ourselves. That is what they are doing, when they treat us without cherishing ~ calling everything we've done into question, and leaving us wondering, in the dark of the night, how this could have been the outcome of those days when we were moms of such strong, beautiful little sons who loved us so much.
We are doing the best we know for them, pasa.
For them.
The other ways have not worked.
You are strong enough, and so am I.
Cedar
