I spent most of my childhood and adolescence wondering how life might have been different had I been raised by my mother. Watching the relationships the women around me shared with their mothers, I felt certain I was missing something—something I deeply desired at that time in my life. My faith as a Christian gave me an early sense of what family should feel like, but my experience didn’t match that ideal. Despite my father’s best efforts and the love I received from friends’ mothers, who welcomed me as their own, and from friends themselves, who still offer me love, nurture, and compassion, the truth is that I missed out on a lot. Life probably would have been different if my mother had been present.
Radical acceptance was one of the first techniques I learned in therapy: acknowledging a circumstance for what it is and how it makes you feel, no matter how raw, painful, or ugly. For me, it meant accepting that my mother was absent and that her absence led me to endure certain experiences alone; going through puberty and starting my period at fourteen, developing an attraction to the opposite sex without guidance, and facing milestones like having sex for the first time, then dealing with my first heartbreak without the comfort a mother might offer. I hadn’t realized until therapy that my younger self’s wonderings were filled with pent-up emotion and, as my therapist concluded, a destabilizing sense of abandonment.
When I was younger, I couldn’t quite understand my mother’s absence. It’s not as though she was dead; she just wasn’t there. This detail made her absence feel personal, almost like rejection. However, as I’ve matured, my receptiveness to the context has also grown. I wish I could say that learning the ins and outs of the matter took the sting out or undid years of belief, but it didn’t. When I was little, a relationship with my mother was something I desperately wanted and needed, but I never received it. As I transitioned from a girl into a woman, paid a therapist to listen to me cry once a week, and found love in places and people, the hope of ever having a relationship with my mother faded.
In life, there are certain things you simply grow out of. At 28, I’ve shed so many habits, interests, and versions of myself that I find it hard to connect who I am now with past iterations of myself. Yet I never truly grew out of the sense of abandonment my mother’s absence created. If anything, with every new friend I made or man I dated, the fear of abandonment seemed to cloud how I viewed those connections. The feeling is hard to describe, even for a skilled writer: that fear and constant uncertainty, regardless of reassurance about whether people want you around, and, shamefully, questioning your own lovability.
Abandoning the idea of a relationship felt simpler, especially since what we had was far from the mother-daughter …read more
Source:: Refinery29
