No one’s fault

Sometimes on Saturday afternoons I get hit with a wave of sadness for my Mum. Today I remembered how easily startled my Mum could be, if you walked up quietly and touched her she would almost jump several feet in the air. I thought of how much she had to carry after my father died and of how as a young child she was all alone with no father to support her either. I think of this absent father curse when the efforts Scott and I make to meet are thwarted by beuracratic powers that be, almost like an ancestral curse keeping us separate. (All of the female siblings in my family have been abandoned by their partners.)

And then I thought of the woman at the park yesterday who had no empathy for her Mum and I wondered if she had really lived her mother’s childhood if she would still be so defended and angry about it all?

Anyway I had a nice surprise a moment ago, my sister called me and we had a lovely chat. We were sharing about how well nurtured her son’s three children are and how we were often left so alone to fend for ourselves while Mum and Dad worked. I told her that I felt really sad the other day after running into her daughter in law at the park, it was great to hear of the way she is really there for the three kids but I must confess it sparked so much sadness in me for the loneliness and disconnection of my own childhood. I left the park crying after I saw her on Tuesday.

I struggle still between the hours of 4 and 7 every day which was the time I would so often be alone at home waiting for Dad and then Mum to come home. I think of all the times I took myself away when I really needed to be close. I think of how my own Mum was left alone then too as her single recently widowed mother had to work cleaning offices between 5 and 8 pm each day and then was absent between 6 and 9 am too. There was not one single relative close by.. they lived over 1,000 miles south.

This afternoon though when I went to my local coffee place at the shopping centre, a guy who works there and often had a brief chat to me smiled at me and said hello, “You always look so happy” I told him that it isn’t the whole of me. If he only know the tears I’ve cried but it occurs to me I was a happy child before being so left alone. I was full of life and vibrancy and energy, it was only in my early teens when I became gangly and awkward especially after being bullied mercilessly by the public school boys for being too skinny. I learned somewhere deep down inside me over those years of increasing isolation that I wasn’t okay and I came to believe I wasn’t beautiful.

But I also realise now that this isn’t the truth. There is the sad lonely side to me for sure. There are all the emotions that I struggle through and share in this blog but deep down inside me there is also another part of me. And sometimes lately I recognise my beautiful self and heart, I see how much I put myself down inside and it makes me really sad. But maybe in time I will come to terms with it all. Maybe in time I will finally accept what happened to me isn’t really anyone’s fault its just the way that things panned out due to the family and ancestral legacy I came out of. And maybe one day soon I will also stop being so hard on myself, and begin to cheer myself on for how far I have come!