Lantern Project

[JulieW]

Today is Mothers Day. This is the time of year when I watch customers in stores browsing through the cards on the shelves. Flower shops double their prices as people rush to buy huge bouquets (sp?) for their mothers and pubs and resturants heave with diners treating mum to dinner. The cemetary car park is always full at this time too, those who have lost their mothers seem to get some satisfatcion from visiting their graves at this time, fair play to them if it makes them feel good. I envy them.

All this has never made much sense to me, I only wish it did. I would love to feel happy at this time or even to feel grief for a loved mother who has now passed on. I would dearly love to have known a mother who meant enough to me so that I could celebrate my feelings for her on this day. Sadly, I never had a mother, at least, never had one who cared for me. My mother was a serial bully, a psychopath, an abuser in many ways who never loved anone, let alone me. She was not my biological mother, she adopted me so that she could have something to control. She spent most of her life trying to hurt me and usually succeeded, even after her death she still hurt me, by leaving me £13,000 of debts no one knew about and nothing to pay them with. Still, although that caused a lot of hassle at least they didn't have to be paid out of my own money.

I have often wondered why this woman never loved me, but she was not capable of love, at least, not the emotion most of us know as love. To her, love was control, she only loved those who she could use for her own gain in some way. She loved me when I was getting her the attention she craved, when she was making me ill, when she was telling others how bad my behaviour was, when she was punishing me for lying after I tried to tell her my grandfather was sexually abusing me and when she was setting me up for something so that my father would be angry with me. This woman did not think the way most of us do, that's why she couldn't love me.

Still, after all these years, I still feel the loss of never having known a mother. My biological mother didn't want me, not her fault but when we met, it just didn't work out. So, on Mothers Day each year, I always feel alone and different. I so wish that I had a good memory of my mother, it wouldn't even have to be a biological mother, just a woman who was kind and loving when she brought me up, someone who didn't isolate me from others and who taught me the usual social skills children learn. That was not to be.

So Mothers Day is always sad for me, for many reasons. It's a day I just find it so hard to relate to. But, with the passage of time, I learned those skills of life that never came to me as I was growing up. I had to do my maturing and growing much later than most, but I got there. I must have done because the front door knocked this morning and there was a huge delivery of flowers from my son, who lives and works away. There was a phone all from my daughter too, just saying 'Happy Mothers Day'. So at least the day means something to them, to my children, even if it can never mean much to me.

Sorry about that. Just needed a rant

love
Julie