Yesterday, I talked about the fact that I am struggling right now with my feelings toward my mother. She went into the hospital right before Mother’s Day, so I got a double-whammy of emotion that I don’t know what to do with.
I don’t want to love her. Loving her brought me an enormous amount of pain. She betrayed me in a way that cut so much deeper than any of my other abusers. She was my mother, and she was the one person in the world who was supposed to be there for me – to nurture me and protect me. She was the one who was supposed to make me feel precious and set the tone for all future relationships. She failed me so miserably that I cannot/do not even want to go there right now.
I don’t want to hate her. I spent so many years nursing my bitterness toward her, but it never hurt her – only me. I want to be free from the hatred, and I deserve to be freed from it.
I don’t want her to influence the direction of my life. I don’t want to make decisions to please her or to p@$$ her off. I just want to do what is right for me, regardless of how it affects her.
The only way that I have found to do this is to kill all of my feelings toward her – the love and the hate. I have worked so hard to remove any feeling about her whatsoever – to become numb to her. I don’t want to care about her at all – no love, no hate, no nothing.
I thought I had done this, so why I am sitting on the floor bawling my eyes out over her? I have no answer for this? Does this mean that I have been deluding myself about my nonchalance toward her? Do I still love her? Do I still hate her? Do I still feel both?
I wish I had a way to take a hatchet to that part of myself and completely sever it off. I feel like the dog caught in a bear trap that tries to chew its own paw off to find freedom from the trap. How do I do that?
There is no point in loving her. There is no point in hating her. Apparently, my efforts to numb myself to her have not worked, and now I am so confused about what I feel toward her. All I know is that it hurts, and I wish I had a way to make that stop. How do I find a way to end the lifelong legacy of pain that she has left me?
Related Topic:
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
Blooming Lotus 