Healing by the best of intentions: don't let me become my mother

So, every once in a while you run across someone who reminds you of someone else--someone who does nothing but leave a bitter taste in your mouth. It happened to me recently, and it had an unexpected effect on me. I found myself feeling anxious. I found myself feeling angry that this person could potentially hurt someone I dearly love. I also found myself thinking I would do just about anything not to become like that person.

It's important, but sometimes difficult not to dwell on people and things that have negatively impacted you in the past. Thinking about those people and things can become a sort of reminder to arm yourself, become defensive, and to even go on the offensive--even against people and things that would never harm you. It isn't fair to the people you love, but sometimes you keep doing all of these things out of a fear that you don't even consciously know you are feeling. 

You can very easily find yourself becoming things you don't want to be. The people you care about may accept you, but they always wonder when or if you are ever going to be healed, and if you are ever going to stop going into battles your hidden fear and defensiveness create. 

I don't know the answer to that. A life of love, support, freedom and opportunity has healed a lot of wounds. Oddly enough, the darkest and most obvious wounds have been the easiest ones to heal. It's the passive, superficial ones that constantly reopen. Two years of therapy helped me recognize them, but like a "cutter," I seem unable to stop the often destructive habits that started out as defense mechanisms intended to help me run from my past and survive. 

The bitterness and judging behavior I saw in this person reminded me of my mom. 

My mom is a very unhappy person. She's led a difficult life, mostly because of bad decisions, and a failure to take personal responsibility for any of them. She is so dissatisfied with herself and her own life, that she frequently picks at, and tries to talk down other people--even people she claims to care about. She's quick to judge, and she is quick to assure you that whatever you are hoping for will never work out, and it's a complete joke. She's always waiting for an opportunity to say "I told you so." I think that deep down, she knows that her relationships are so poorly formed that she creates problems and delusions that allow her to pick fights and sabotage any hope of having something decent or real with anyone she cares about.

It's sad. Really. I didn't always see this side of her. When I was growing up, we were very close. Right or wrong, we were best friends. It wasn't until maturity and distance drew back the curtains that I could see things about her that made her very difficult to be around. Ultimately, she damaged our relationship beyond repair. 

I don't find myself able to give my mother much credit--and certainly not the credit she feels herself entitled to. But I will concede one thing. I'm sure that she never wanted things to end up the way they have. We haven't spoken in almost six years, and she has a beautiful granddaughter that she will never get to know. That's a harsh set of consequences.

Being a mother is really hard. Sometimes I feel like I am never going to be any good at it. The days when I can't get my daughter to eat a decent meal of any kind, and she is beyond exhausted but refuses to sleep, I find myself struggling and feeling overwhelmed. When I have struggled with other jobs, there has always been the option to give up and walk away. Motherhood isn't like that. A great deal of the time, you can't even take a break. Sometimes, the stress level is so high that I fail. I fail to be the mom, the wife and the person I want to be. I've failed before, but the stakes have never felt so high.

I know the value of everything in my life. I have the opportunity to build a home and life for my family that I never had. I have the chance to forgive myself for big mistakes, and to get over time that I wasted trying to be things I was never meant to be. 

People say it's normal to feel like you're doing a crappy job at parenting from time to time. It's normal to lose your shit and yell sometimes--even if that's the last thing you want to do. I know it's not my job for her to always like me. I know that it's bad for me to always let her have her way, and I try not to find myself on the path of least resistance all the time.

And I don't want to be that wife who let's her past define her successes and failures within her marriage. At a conscious level, I never have any reason to be the harpie that my own self-doubt and unrealistic expectations manifest. 

But every moment I feel myself failing, it is my mother's failures that whisper in the back of my mind and haunt me. I don't want to be that erratic, crazy person who drives my family away with poor coping skills and self-inflicted wounds. Every time I think it's safe to peel the "bandages" off, it seems like I find another layer of damage that stubbornly refuses to heal.

I suppose unexpectedly seeing someone else's "scars," and their potential to cause harm has "freshened the edges" of some of my own wounds, and made me wonder if some wounds ever truly heal. I don't know the answer. I want to believe. But sometimes, the hardest thing you can do is believe in yourself--and that disbelief doesn't harm you as much as it does everyone else. 

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