Mommy’s girl

51 years ago to this day my mom and dad got married. 9 years later I was born and barely 5 years after that, my dad died of lung cancer. For a few years my mom raised me on her own, but then my stepdad came into the picture.

It wasn’t easy on any of us.

All of a sudden I had to share my mom’s attention, there was this person in our house “trying to take my dad’s place” and I wasn’t having any of it. I had been spoiled for years and suddenly there was discipline and order. I’m sure I was a difficult teenager (weren’t we all?). I got everything I asked for but I always felt like something was missing.

Experiencing the chilhood trauma of losing my dad a such a young age and not understanding the why and how, was most likely part of the reason why I developed Borderline Personality Disorder. My mom had never experienced losing a partner so she also had no idea how to handle it, of course. She decided not to let me go to the funeral (I was 4 at the time). And she’s blamed herself for it ever since a doctor told her that was the cause of my BPD. I’m not convinced though.

I don’t think you can blame this “flaw” in my mental health on one single event in my childhood. I believe it’s a combination of factors and we’ll never truly know for sure.

The problem is that we are very different in how we deal with emotions. I have a strong need to talk about my feelings whereas she doesn’t talk about them at all and shuts down. Everyone deals with these things differently and it hasn’t always made it easy to communicate.

She tries, she really does. But I can’t always tell her how I feel, because it makes her sad. And I don’t wanna make her sad. I did enough of that as a teenager, I’m sure. We’ve never been the family that openly tells each other “I love you”. We’ve never been big huggers.

This post is about me trying to tell my mom (as well as myself and other moms) that I know she always tried to do what she thought was best for me. Parents are allowed to make mistakes and they shouldn’t have to carry around the guilt for all these years.

So, mama, thanks for everything you’ve done for me, it can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been. Happy Mother’s Day.

 

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