Yesterday I was taken to hospital in an ambulance with the 2 girls. I was suffering chest pains and difficulty breathing. After many hours the Doctor was talking to me about how stress was causing my chest pains and other physical symptoms...So then I was asked all the lifestyle questions:
Do I smoke: no
Do I drink: no
Do I exercise: occasionally
Do you have anxiety: yes
Do you have stress: YES!!
So now we come to the crux of the matter: the stresses in my life. Some things we can control and others are out of our hands. While lying in that hospital bed feeling like shit I started really thinking about my life. Last year while in therapy I came to a life changing realisation. I had to talk about my childhood and what had happened. I had come to the realisation, with my therapists help that my childhood had affected me so strongly and was still influencing me, to this day. I made the decision to be an adult and face up to what had happened and sort out some damaged relationships.
I hadn't spoken to my Mum in a personal way ever. She is not a maternal person, she shows no sympathy or emotion. She has never said "I love you" or made me feel taken care off or protected, so it was a big decision to face her. I spoke to my therapist about this decision as by this stage she had a pretty good understanding of what type of person my Mum was. She prepared me for every eventuality. She walked me through what I wanted to say and made clear the consequences of my actions.
When I spoke to my Mum we discussed what had happened to me as a child and what damage it had done. Needless to say she didn't cope well with it. She kept saying "I find it hard to believe" We gave her time to let it sink in while also discussing our relationship now. I was asking for us to have an adult relationship where we can talk to each other and see each other. At the moment she was Grandma or the baby sitter. We never had lunch together, she didn't ring me to see how I was, we never spent time together unless we visited with the kids. That discussion didn't go down well either. She didn't like the idea that I wasn't happy with who she was. She didn't understand that it was about improving on what we had. The line she kept repeating was if you're not happy then you know what to do and this is who I am take it or leave it.
For several months we had a weird stalemate. She was supposed to be taking it all in but in the meantime no one was comfortable and no one was talking. After the months had gone by she called me and confronted me in person about what we had talked about. Then the bad news started. She had spoken to other family members behind my back telling them what I had told her. Telling them what had taken me 20 years to tell her. What no one else in the world knew except my husband. Then the next shock after talking to them she didn't believe me. She couldn't understand it and she couldn't accept it so it was easier to say it didn't happen. I tried to talk my way around it, to explain it to ask her why she couldn't believe me but it just got into a bigger and bigger argument. In the end she told me she didn't know why I had to tell her in the first place. She didn't want to know and I shouldn't have said it. I had to take it back or we couldn't go on....
It was at that point with my heart broken into a million peices that I realised the decision had been made for me. I was being told to go. So I stood up and said that this was it then, she had no relationship with me, my husband or my kids. The last thing I said was I still want to see my brother (age 12) and we would sort iout how to do that.
I went home to my husband and he was in shock. He didn't ever think a Mother would walk away like that. Andrew had a pretty good relationship with his own Mum and he got along well with mine, probably better than she got along with me. He didn't know what to do from there...
It was only a few weeks later this Miss L was in hospital and we were missing having any family support around us. At her first birthday party not one family member from my side showed, which made me very sad. I later learned that my Mum had been speaking to them about what she saw as our argument and what "I had done".
To this day I have not told anyone what our discussion was about. What news I had to tell her. I have held my head high and kept on walking. If family members only wanted to hear her side and make their decision I wasn't going to argue over it. The only thing I was pushing for was to see my brother.
Well today after seeing my GP and talking about the stress I was under and how to reduce it I made the decision to see Mum in person to sort it out.....
No comments:
Post a Comment