Mother’s Day : a dream ‘visit’ from my Mum.

Mother’s Day came and went without mention, at least in my world yesterday. I never heard from my sister even though I tried to call her on Saturday and no one else was in touch. I accept it now. It was the second mother’s day without my Mum and I received a gift last night. She visited me in a dream. The dream was clear as day and in it my Mum was sitting in a room dressed in one of her favourite jumpers and I told her how I miss her and hugged her, she told me these words “I am working with you every day.”

I don’t know if this was as visitation from the spirit of my mother or an inner psychic representation of my own changing relationship to my inner mother, despite not hearing for my sister I did not feel disappointed or upset yesterday (at least not consciously), I just enjoyed a cosy day with Jasper taking it easy, writing and reading and cuddling up on the couch. later we went for a walk at the oval while I throwed frisbee around. I was able to talk to myself in a loving way when the inner critic stared beating me up at one point yesterday.

I got another really helpful book by David Richo out of the library yesterday afternoon and it is really helping me to work with that loving self containment process. He gives a gentle practice in the book about holding your fear and working with and despite it to make forward movement. He makes the valid point that fear projects past difficult outcomes onto present events. He speaks of how the twin fears of abandonment and engulfment and or control can dog us but how as adults we can actually develop resources to deal with these fears instead of allowing them to overpower us. These resources are boundaries and the ability to lovingly self assert while accepting gracefully that things in life and love will not always go the way our hearts desire.

Just possibly my own capacity to self nurture and be a good mother to myself is growing. I have compassion for my Mum but I also realise the very real defects too that made our relationship difficult. I see how hard I found it growing up to recognise boundaries and trust and know that I could ask for help and be vulnerable. The book I am reading from David Richo is about negative ego and where it can get in the way by making us hide our vulnerabilities, often if we were not accepted fully nor loved or helped to mature in childhood. He speaks in it of the two difficult approaches that can result, either we become overly passive and accept mistreatment thinking we do not deserve better, we can then become victims and blame the world for not getting what we want or need. Alternatively we become too aggressive in pursuing our own agenda while running roughshod over the sensitivities and boundaries of others. Having things forced onto and into us in childhood by parents who do not respect our boundaries or differentiate our true feelings and needs can lead lasting damages and psychic wounds we need to address and work to take care of in positive ways in later life.

It was helpful today to discuss all this with Kat in therapy. I cried a lot for my Mum and I shared the posts I wrote on the weekend about by difficult Saturday morning symptoms turning into fears and feelings I was finally able to vocalise and work with. I went out to the shopping centre after therapy and got myself a pair of warm thermal leggings and a vest. I had some lunch.. oh and I bought a pair of red socks with hearts on the because I wanted a red pair to go with a new jumper. I came home and have been pottering in the garden, tidying my house and doing laundry all the while thinking how Monday is ruled by the Moon. The past two Mondays my thoughts have been turning to my brother. I think I will give him a call soon. It was good to cry over Mum this morning in therapy and to acknowledge further the pain over past wounds surrounding the two terminations I had in the period before my father died. I was saying to Kat I wish I had reached out to my parents instead of keeping the secret my father became very ill over that period and must have been so worried that my then boyfriend abandoned me on the side of the road with no bag when we were on a trip up north one thousand miles from home. I had to contact my parents and get the to wire me the money to catch the train home. I did not know at that stage I was actually pregnant and I had a termination a few months later which I hid from almost everyone.

I realised today how much pain I have carried in silence. I sometimes worry about sharing all of this in my blog but in his book David Richo talks all about the power of vulnerability. Sure if I unmask these secrets and shames someone may judge me, but then again my willing ness to share about it may encourage others to be real. To me being real is the best way I can mother myself, god knows so much happened to me in m life I really wish was so different but today I realised it was not my fault, there were a line of influences on my young behaviour then of which I was yet to become fully conscious. I am working the best way forward that I can to make peace with my traumatic and tumultuous past.