A mother’s love

***Trigger warning!!! This post may pose a challenging read for anyone who has experienced abuse, emotional neglect, or more generally experienced a negative relationship with a parent (particularly a mother).

I’m not going to beat about the bush here…

I’m just going to get it out here right away…

This may sound nuts, but these are the words that set me free:

“I don’t really know my daughter! I never really wanted to! I had wished she’d be stillborn!”

I say set me free, that’s not entirely true, they at least made me realise I was in prison.  It took me a few years longer to realise that my cell was no longer locked, and that these words had been the key to opening the door.  What interested me most at the time was my reaction to them.

Let me fill you in on the missing details about how I came to be hearing these words…

I was knackered!  It had been a very long weekend.  We had done a crazy road trip which included a visit to the East Yorkshire coast to collect my parents, back to Leeds to grab the kids, and then on to Berkshire for a family wedding.

On the return leg of the journey, my husband (now my ex-husband) and I agreed we’d split the travel differently.  I was to head straight home to Leeds with the kids, who by this stage in time were feeling a ‘little’ cantankerous because of all the excitement over the weekend and being away from home (the joys of having overstimulated, neuro-divergent children), and he would deliver my parents safely to their home before joining us back in Leeds.  Although his journey would be at least a couple of hours longer than mine, I think he believed he had gotten the better end of the bargain because he wouldn’t have two squabbling kids sat in the back seat. How naïve was he.

By the time we were getting ready to leave my niece and her new husband, I had just about had enough of babysitting my mother, who was behaving very much like she should be starring in an episode of OAP’s Behaving Badly.

To my knowledge there is no such TV programme, but there should be.  Believe me, it could prove to be very entertaining, in that morbid fascination kind of way (your welcome, anyone who picks this up and decides to run with it).

In her infinite wisdom, and despite her advancing years (she was about to turn eighty-one) and severely restricted mobility, my mum had decided that the best course of action on this sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-September, would be to drink a skinful of wine on an empty stomach, and start making thoroughly inappropriate conversation with anyone who was willing to listen, and getting louder, more insistent and slightly more obnoxious for anyone who wasn’t.

As soon as an opportunity arose, I took my Mum to the loo (by this time she was incapable of managing this by herself) and swept my parents into my husband’s car, packing them off on their long journey back to the Yorkshire coast.  I also managed to trap my Dad’s fingers in the door in the process, but don’t worry, he was alright, just bruised.

After waving them off, I set about gathering my kids up and saying my goodbyes to the other people in attendance, whilst at the same time offering up apologies for my mother’s behaviour.

I was mortified, my shame was bubbling away at the surface and I could not wait to get out of there.

It was only when I finally got on the road back up North myself, that I realised a slight flaw in our travel plans…

I had just packed my pissed, bladder incontinent, immobile mother off on a nearly five hour long road trip with two blokes (my husband and my eighty-six year old Dad) who were about as awkward as it comes when it came to handling matters of a delicate nature, i.e. working out how the f**k they were going to manage getting her to the loo.

Cue more shame.  Not only was I some sort of thoroughly inept custodian of the elderly and infirm, as I personally had overseen and was therefore responsible for my mother drinking herself witless and causing several people offence, I was also a terrible daughter and wife that hadn’t had the foresight to see this major flaw in the plan and had caused injury to my father by selfishly trying to ease my discomfort and ditching them as soon as I could.

I pulled over at the nearest service station and set about sending my husband an extensive message of apology for having put him in this situation, I could only hope he would forgive me and we could make repair when he arrived home later that evening.

It was a hellish journey home, not because of any vehicular holdup, but because I was so entrenched in a shame fueled rumination spiral.  I clearly could not get anything right, including being able to navigate my way towards my home destination. Anyone who knows me will know I am a little directionally challenged, so I had tried unsuccessfully to navigate the same ginormous roundabout on no less than five occasions and only ended up realising I was going the wrong way when I noticed I was passing one of the London airports.  I was just longing for the kids to stop their bickering and heckling me about my lack of ability to navigate and to nod off (something that always happened in the car), so I could get at least a little respite from this overwhelming bombardment.

Eventually, thanks to the satnav finally recognising some of the roads I was driving on, we made it home and I poured myself a stiff gin while making some tea for everyone.

This loosened things up a little, as the fragrant, botanical infused liquor started to flow through my veins, I felt a slight anaesthetisation come over me, which allowed a little let-up in the relentless critical voiceover that had been accompanying me for hours now.

Ahh, that was better.

My annihilatory internal voice, that was so quick to shame me for everything, was no stranger to me.  They had been an ever-present travel companion, as I navigated my way through the thirty-five years of life that I had spent on the planet so far.  The only thing I had found that might quieten it temporarily was to medicate myself with booze (I had been faithfully sticking to this strategy since I was about thirteen).  But even this only gave me short-lived respite, as when the impact of the drink turned from numbing to depression, the voice would inevitably unleash another round of character decimation about how weak I was to be unable to do life without a level of self-medication, on top of all the other character flaws it was currently focusing on.

I heard nothing from my husband from the moment I sent the message from the motorway service station, to the moment he walked back through our front door in the evening.  To say this did not help my state of tension is a gross understatement.  This was in the days before WhatsApp, so I had no sense of whether or not he had received the message.  However, I did not need those ticks to turn blue and get no answering message, in order to start jumping to the conclusion that his lack of response obviously meant he was fuming with me.

It is my personal belief that this nifty little feature that WhatsApp has included in the app, is their attempt to give an extra nudge to those people who might have been able to convince themselves that no response doesn’t actually mean anything at all, nobody likes a doubter after all.

I began to plan my repair attempts in my mind, tossing the imagined conversations over and over, imagining all sorts of potential negative narratives which might unfold. My imagination was entirely consumed with the task of working out what the problems would be, and ways in which to make things good.  It never once occurred to me that he might be having an entirely different response to the events that had unfolded whilst we were together, that he might have had a different experience of the journey home to the catastrophic events that I had created in my mind, and that he might just be looking forward to reconnecting and planning his own way to tackle a really challenging conversation that was unrelated to my neglectfulness.

This, in this circumstance, very unhelpful use of my creative imagination is what psychotherapists call projection.   This is not the only way that projection plays out, but rather the manifestation that I was experiencing at the time.  I only had a vague understanding of the phenomenon at the time, and most certainly wasn’t aware that is what I was doing, I was far too swept up in the turmoil to work that out.

Projection is what happens when a gap in the smooth back and forth reciprocation of connection opens up between us and someone else.  Sometimes this can be because of a literal lack of response where you might be expecting one (as in my situation here), because of crossed wires in communication, or sometimes because of a dissonance between what we are feeling and what is being said/happening (this is not an exhaustive list, more a brief guide to give you a general picture).

When an unexpected gap in connection opens up in front of us, we can start (often unconsciously) to feel a little uncertain and, as a result, unsafe.  Our minds really don’t like this and start to frantically look for a best fit explanation for what is happening, so that we can come back into the certainty zone.  To do this, they fly back in time to our histories and go in search of experiences which feel similar.  They pick an experience which feels like the best fit, and communicate to us that this must be what is happening right here, right now.  Our minds are amazing pieces of processing equipment, so all of this often happens out of our awareness, and in less time than it can take for us to blink.

Does this sound like a familiar experience for you?  If so, trust me, you are not alone.  All humans project, it actually is just one feature of our inherent survival strategies and can sometimes be really useful, even if the projections are infrequently accurate.  The problem is, that we convince ourselves that they are objectively the truth of what is happening in the moment, and when we are incorrect about what is actually going down, this causes dissonance (and sometimes conflict) in our relationships.

In this particular situation, my mind had gone in search of some information to fill the gap, but at this stage, I actually had no idea whether or not the data it had turned up (I am fundamentally a failure and a terrible person, and everyone hates me) fitted well with the situation I found myself in, or not.  That didn’t matter though, I still set about behaving in a way that would suggest I believed it to be true, i.e. planning how to repair the rupture in my relationship.

It felt to me like I was engaged in this business for an absolute age before I heard the familiar sound of the front door opening.

I felt some relief that the youngest one was in bed, and the oldest one had drifted off in the direction of their room too.  I didn’t need them bearing witness to this most uncomfortable of conversations.

I had decided, that making an immediate apology whilst offering up an olive branch of some home cooked food might be my best chance of achieving a repair to the relationship that I was currently utterly convinced was broken.

So, as he walked through the door I set about putting the plan into action.

“I’m so sorry,” I said “I should never have put you through that”

I sneaked a little glance at his silent response.  He looked a little confused, as he was watching me devoted to the task of ladling out the remaining contents of a large pan into a bowl.

“What do you mean?” he responded.

Confused myself by his response and deciding that he clearly wanted me to spell my apology out loud and clear, I continue “Did you get my message?  I am so sorry for rushing you off like that and not thinking about all the logistics that you would be facing, never mind leaving you with my mum in that state.  You must be really cross with me!”

“What message?” he said.

“Oh, you didn’t get it?  Oh well, never mind that, I’m just really, really sorry and wanted to make sure you got my apology as soon as possible.  Here, your journey must have been hellish.  I’ve made food.  Tell me all about it.”

“Well…” he said.  I braced myself to be hit with a barrage of all the things that had happened and to be faced with his disappointment of just how thoughtless I had been.  This was a well worn pattern in my history, to be faced with shame for not having got my crystal ball out to predict all the things that the other person might have been about to potentially experience and taken steps to ensure they did not.

…“I was wondering what that rush was all about, and the thought did occur to me as I got on the motorway that I wasn’t sure how we were going to manage loo stops, but we worked it out.  We just used the disabled loo, and your dad helped your mum.”

This all felt far too reasonable, so as he took another breath, as if he was about to say some more, I prepared for impact.

“There is something that did happen that I’d like to talk to you about though.”

My heart sunk, my shame flared, I couldn’t look at him.  This was going to be bad!..

If you are wondering where this might be going, and how I’m going to tie this story up before the end of this post, I want to let you know now, that I’m not intending to do so, this is where I shall end this particular instalment of my story.

You see, this entry on my blog is the start of a journey for me, I’m hoping you might want to come along with me.

Here is my invitation to you…

I have felt so much shame in my lifetime, needlessly so, and there was a time that I wouldn’t have dreamed of sharing this stuff in the public domain.  But, I have been working hard for a long time towards healing from the experiences which led to me being a thirty-five year old woman that was so tied up in knots and convinced that the world hated her, and I have learned so much vital stuff about healing along the way.  I don’t want to keep that stuff to myself, I want to share it so it can help other people too.

So, this blog thread is, in part, an experience that I hope will further my healing, but also the manifestation of my desire to share freely with those who might benefit, the things I have learned as I have traversed this path.

Will you come along for the journey?

I’ll tell you all about those fateful words that I mentioned in the beginning in the next instalment…