Nothing Was Right

Raising children in a world that I had been thrown into and never mastered just survived was a journey that few can comprehend. I didn’t have the regular Leave It To Beaver Family but more like the dysfunctional family of the year. So when I was young I just wanted to create my own dream family and my life would be perfect – healing all the pain, loss and suffering that I had endured during blip called childhood; That was a farce. No matter what I did nothing was right. I felt like a complete failure and believe me when you feel like that people just love to jump on top of you and add to your burdens confirming how lousy a mom, wife, daughter-in-law, sister you really were. But I digress.

Looking back today, I know without doubt that for me the most important thing that I needed to do was learn to love myself. Loathe was a better word for how I felt. I seemed to have passed that on to my youngest daughter. Or maybe it was interacting with life itself that took both of us there. Tonight I heard she had had a struggle for a bit since her vaccine. She was feeling down, struggling to feel good inside. I realized with great clarity that I never had had an example myself of how to help someone that I was close to through struggles. My degree allowed me to be intellectual, but not motherly, tentatively a good listener. Was anyone really good at this skill set anymore? I have met few. So I failed my kid many times and she felt empty and hollow. Why? Because I lacked the necessary skills that every mom should have, yet I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, when I was supposed to pick up those skills through my life there were none. I had no examples from my memory bank to draw upon. It was a connection moment. A realization that I had lacked good parenting myself, and there was a huge void in my cognition of how to help my child. I had lacked it since I could remember and my youngest was now 29 years of age. So now she was struggling from a childhood without that special motherly love skillset. I sure had zero in the tank when it came to understanding without interjecting my own experiences to demonstrate I understood (why? because that’s how I was raised!) and compassion. Empathy bankrupt in so many ways. I struggled to help without hurting her further.

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