Loving my Mum

I feel such love for my Mum lately as my heart aches with sorrow for the sadnesses of her life.  I see how she struggled growing up with so little affection.  I am aware now how she tries never to ask too much of my sister and I.  I know growing up my Mum was not an easy presence.  She was carrying alot of things I could never fully understand without going on my own healing journey.  I know she has her defences and resistances but I am glad as she nears the time of passing on that I have, in W H Auden’s words “learned to love my own crooked neighbour with my own crooked heart.”

I was in tears after talking to my Mum during my morning with with my dog, Jasper.  She spent most of yesterday in bed with a sore shoulder.  Her poor body carries so much grief and in later years after my father died and she had the responsiblity of my disabled sister while trying her best to be there for my sister and I after our marriages broke down she bore a lot.   I know the mistakes she made.  I see a lot of them, but I also see how much she tried to give and with a childhood like hers that was not easy.  She didnt give us the affection we needed us much growing up but in later years she has tried to compensate.  And after I have conversations with her like the one this morning I am aware of how alone she must feel towards the end of her life at times having lost so many of the people she loved including her mother, husband and my sister, as well as her best friend this year.  Its a lot to carry.

I am more aware these days I cannot take my Mum’s pain away.  I too have known a lot of loss but at 54 I do have the opportunity to make a new life that isn’t as isolated due to my unhealed attachment wounds I am working hard to over come.  I spend a lot of my life connected in my deep inner world for sure, but I am also grateful to find those who I can reach out to these days from a genuine place.  I have no doubt though, that it is a hard world other there in many ways were we are encouraged by so many influenes to harden and numb or move away from genuine feeling.   Technology dominates in a way at times that can lead us away from feeling.  The other day I experienced this as I underwent my follow up mammogram, my breast was sandwiched in and clamped hard in place by two glass sheets while I was told to contort my body in impossible ways.   I swore in a gentle way when the radiographer asked me how I was doing.  I think she understood.  I had my gripe about it and then a glass of water. I expressed myself in a way that wasn’t violent.

Today during the chat with my Mum we were speaking about the change in seasons.  She was saying how she feels the building up of our home town with more and more people using electricty and artifical heating is making a change and I couldn’t help but agree.  We have our labour saving devices and some of those are good but when life gets too mechanical at times we forget our human souls are not machines and not in tune with this kind of full on technological world.  If we can use it without being hurt by it, that is fine.  For myself I was glad I could feel my soft heart around my Mother today.  So much of my anger has passed and I see deeper than I did before.  I think about how our hurt over what we didnt get can sometimes poisons us.  And I am glad that I dont feel that poison these days.  I must be healing.