My Mothers Daughter

When I got pregnant with my son at 23, I was living in my own apartment, and my off/on boyfriend of 7 years had his own place, too; we had been out on our own for almost 4 years. I had a steady job; I was just a server, but at the busiest restaurant in town, working full time hours, so the money was great; he had a stable job; we had two cats and a dog already and although I was surprised, I was excited when I got my positive pregnancy test... i loved kids and had never knew much about what I wanted to be in life, the only thing I had always been sure of was that I had always known I wanted to be a mom.

I wasn’t really worried about telling my own mom the news, at first. We told my now-husbands mother first. My mother in law was ecstatic, over the moon, beside herself with joy. She couldn’t wait for her first grand baby. I wasn’t sure how my mom would react, really, if she’d be super excited or not, I just know I didn’t expect what I got...if anything I expected her to be at least a little happy, at least somewhat excited.

She was pissed. And I couldn’t understand. I didn’t get a smile, not one even fleeting moment of happiness, for me or for herself, about to have her first grand baby. Instead, the first thing she told me was that I wasn’t ready for this, that she was scared for me and this baby. I wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a kid. Before I could process that, suddenly I was being asked about what I would do for childcare? Who would be the pediatrician? How was I going to get insurance? What about doctor appointments? Had I even considered how much money babies costed? Or how much diapers were? That they cry soooo much? Did I think because i had a job i could pay bills and buy diapers? Whose going to watch my kid when im at work, I might not be able to have a job? Because they were telling me right now they were not going to be my babysitters. And they were not going to be raising my child for me, if that’s what I thought. God I’m so not ready for this.

I was so crushed...I had no answers to any of their questions yet, I was 8 weeks pregnant. I told them if they couldn’t be happy or positive or at least semi supportive then they wouldn’t be around me anymore, while I was pregnant, and they wouldn’t be around my kid either, and I left their house sobbing and shaking...Which was not an unusual state to be in when leaving my mothers house but that time was a lot different.

I was a little scared, long before I walked in their door, of course I was, what woman isn’t scared when she sees that little pink plus sign the first time? Walking out of their house, though, I was absolutely terrified at that point...I’m ashamed to say, that I convinced myself for a few days that they were absolutely right and I could NOT do it. Alone, with my child’s father, with anyone else’s support or not...i seriously considered terminating my pregnancy, over the next few days.

I came to my senses, of course, and I Bossed up. I could do it, I could do this, I decided, simply because that’s what the hell I was going to do. Come hell or high water, i had decided that it was me and my little embryo against the world. And I would make it okay, always, I would make a way. I’d figure it out. Things would work out.

After about two weeks, my mom called, she apologized, and she admitted to me that her reaction to the news actually, really, had a lot to do with the fact that she didn’t think she was old enough to be a grandmother yet. She didn’t want to admit she was in that part of her life, yet, she didn’t wanna feel old...and having grand babies makes you old. At the time I tried to laugh with her about it, and I tried to make her feel better, but it bugged me for days after and still bothers me today. Thats around the time I started to notice the truth about the kind of mother that my mother is.

She isn’t like the other moms being described in the submissions and entries that this Challenge is going to inspire. She’s not my rock, I don’t look to her for guidance, or strength, she’s never made me feel like I’m capable of doing things I dreamed of doing, she’s not my friend. We don’t laugh, we don’t bond, we don’t talk really. There are no moments from my childhood or from my teenage years that we’ve ever shared where I felt close to her...I know very little about my mom, her experiences as a kid and as a teenager. I have no idea what it was like for her growing up. There are random facts, of course, small tidbits, but I have no idea who she is, who she’s been, or who she wished she was. She has shared nothing with me, nothing personal, I have no idea about any fights she may have had with her sisters or what it was like even having sisters. I have no idea what she got in trouble for as a kid, if she ever made any mistakes or has any regrets or resentments...she’s never told me about her first boyfriend, her first love, her first heartbreak. If I ever asked anything like that, her answers were vague and dismissive, and they really weren’t answers at all. I remember when I told her that I had lost my virginity, she was upset with me...and I asked her how she lost hers, and with who, and her response to me was that she didn’t do what I did...that’s all I got.

Her family lives 6-7 states away, in the same town she grew up in, the same town her and my dad left when he joined the army once they married after high school. I was three and my brother was 1 when he left us. Mom moved back “home” for a few months with us but came back to where she had been when she was married, even though there was nothing here for her. And this is where I grew up. And how; Seeing my grandparents, two aunts, and I don’t even remember any other family we saw or visited, just once a year. When I turned 12 we started seeing them every few years instead of every year...my dad was gone and his side of the family was cut off from us when I was 7. My grandparents call on Christmas and birthdays and we talk for about ten minutes but it’s awkward. We don’t know each other. They’re strangers.

It was like my mother made it her personal business to make sure nobody had access to us. Or that we didn’t have access to anyone. Sometimes I feel like she didn’t want us to have anyone but her. It’s hard to believe it was intentional...imagine the nerve to do all that and then go and be so emotionally unavailable to your kid...But maybe neither were conscious decisions or actions. Maybe she wasn’t aware.

She’d met and moved in with my step dad when i was 4. And he’s been an ass as long as I’ve known him, he’s always been a bully. He bullied my brother and me, but because my brother tried to earn my parents approval with everything he said and did, he lost the target on his back pretty quick...he felt my step dads wrath occasionally but I was his daily punching bag...I used to think my mom was weak, for never standing up for me when he was harassing me, which happened a lot, I been called fat, ugly, I been screamed at two inches from my face, threatened, everything; any woman who let her kid or kids be treated that way and watched without trying to stop it, stand up for their child, attempt to mediate AT LEAST, is weak as hell and the opposite of what she is supposed to be. Thinking about it now? I think she allowed it because she enjoyed it. If I stood up for myself I was being disrespectful, and she could punish me. If I took it then I was getting bullied, without her even having to lift a finger. Win win for mom. I’ve only realized as an adult she was a bigger bully than him. But much worse. At least I recognized it for what it was, because he did it openly. What she did was sneaky, passive aggressive, manipulative; emotionally and psychologically abusive on a much deeper level than anything he ever did...

I spent most of my life thinking it was my step dad who came up with some of the weird and absurd rules That I had to follow in my house. But I’ve realized that it wasn’t actually him. It was my mother. Isn’t it strange to be 13 years old and not be allowed to walk two steps from the bathroom, to your bedroom, in a towel after you shower in your own home? A proper towel. A towel that covers you. Just two steps. Literally. But there’s a rule in your house that you have to be fully dressed when you leave the bathroom after a shower. At thirteen. Because there’s “boys” in the house....your step dad. And your brother. Not being allowed to wear camis or spaghetti strap tank tops in the house...she was thinking that her man would look at me, which is wrong on multiple levels. Maybe it was in an attempt to protect me somehow, but it implied that she thought I would be looked at by her man, starting at the age of 13, and the way she told me to cover up myself all the time even when I was alone in my room, or it was just us in the house, it was like she was disgusted with me. Or like she was judging me, for growing into a woman. For having a body. For being a female. When I was in trouble for getting bad grades on my report card she punished me by taking my hair products and makeup. She actually took many opportunities to do that as a punishment...I was always grounded so I guess she wanted to get creative. Talk back? No makeup for a month. No hair products or straightener for a month. Now I see that I made her feel jealous. Me becoming a woman made her feel threatened for whatever reason. I spent my whole life believing her when she tried to convince me that our awful relationship was my fault.

The black sheep of the family, I just want to be difficult all the time and I always have. I go out of my way to disagree with her or be different than her or do the opposite of what she wants or what she’s asked me to do. I purposely defy her and she doesn’t know why...all my life I’ve heard that. And it wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I realized that she shouldn’t see me being who I am as going out of my way to piss her off all the time. Just because Im an individual person and not an extension of her, just because I exist, just because I represent to her everything that she dislikes within herself, that’s still no reason for me to have ever felt like I wasn’t good enough, not just for her but for anything or anyone. And that’s the one thing I can say for sure my mom tried to drill into my brain. That I wasn’t easily loved, because I was flawed, and that because of this her love was conditional. She was all I had. All I know about love I learned from her.

The most important lesson I learned from her is one she never even realized she taught me, that i bet she learned from her own parents, who learned it from theirs. Love is full of conditions, and if you’re asking or needing more you’re asking or needing too much. There are others, but that’s the biggest one. The relationship my mom has with herself is just like the relationship her mother had with her. And the the relationship her mom had with herself is just like the one her mom had with her...from one generation to the next, mother to daughter, father to son, we pass along the curses of our grandparents and parents and we let the pain travel through families and trickle down, trauma we inherit without ever even realizing it...All I know about love I was taught from the way my mom loved me. I’ve spent my life bleeding toxicity into everything and everyone I touched, because my relationship with myself was just like the one my mother had with me.

I’m trying to heal, and overcome the pain and fix up the wounds I have; the ones that are mine, the ones that belong to the generations before me...I’ve struggled with so many different forms of self sabotaging and I’ve hated myself on so many levels through out my life, it’s a strange feeling to suddenly change direction, but I did, the day my son was born. Back tracked several times but it doesnt matter, because I don’t give up. I know it’s us against the world and it’s up to ME to be the Boss Mom in my life. I can only do that by healing, breaking the chain, ending the cycle. He deserves a much different life than I had: he deserves a happy, a whole, a healthy and fully conscious mama...even though It hurts to look back at all the things I’m having to come to terms with about mine and my mothers relationship, about my own childhood, I’m still thankful. I’m grateful.

I’m glad it stops with me. I’m glad I’ve went through everything I did. I’ve sat down with my demons, learned their names. Come to find out IF you listen to what those demons have to say everytime they try to speak to you, you don’t have to fight them. I went stumbling around in my darkness trying to find the point in it and as soon as I had given up, I accepted that was just me. The dark was me. That’s just how it turned out for me, maybe. Maybe there was no reason. Either way it is what it is. And I accepted it...the next thing I knew i found myself embracing it, embracing me and all my shadows, all my demons, all my pain and hurt I’d been handed all my regret all the shit I didn’t like about myself all the things I hated all the things I wished I hadn’t done, or done different, everything, everything ugly, rotten, everything about me that made me unloveable, I embraced it all. I remember the moment. I was on my porch, it was the middle of the night and my porch light wasn’t working, and I was smoking a cigarette, it was summer time, I had just checked on the baby and tears were pouring down my face as I silently realized in my little meditation, how much beauty there was in the darkness, with the sky full of stars...how human I was, how all that darkness I was embracing is what made me human...it didn’t make me unworthy. And then my heart cracked open and suddenly all the light came pouring out from the place it had been, without filling the dark up. They just seemed to balance out, I had never in my life felt anything like it before. I loved myself for who I was, what I was, in and out, up and down, and I understood that I deserved anything and everything good in the world, anything I wanted I should have, that I shouldn’t ever settle for less than what I know I deserve again, from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Unconditional self love. A sudden wave of it. I had had an awakening. Had I not been on the journey, going to therapy, journaling, spending hours a day deep in thought, trying to heal everything that was broken by my mom, and her parents and her parents parents, I wouldn’t ever have had those precious ten minutes. I wish I could have put them in a jar, and feel that over again. It’s been about two years. I could use a refresher... But those few minutes will always make this journey worth it to me. I could use a refresher but my life was changed forever. I’m not sure if anyone who’s been loved right by their mom could have had experienced that. They wouldn’t have needed too, of course, but wow. I’m thankful. For that, and for learning what to not be like, from her.

My son and I are close, and I can’t wait to have a different relationship with him than I had with my mom. I can’t wait to give him more, and see where he can go with the emotional intelligence and the love and support and compassion I’m going to give him. He turns four this year. Four years of learning a lot from him, he teaches me more than I could ever have learned from my own mother about how to be a real Boss ass Mommy. Then I turn around and Boss Mom my own inner child in the places and spaces and in the moments I remember I needed it the most, as the memories come...wherever I could have used a Boss Mom like me, I go inwards and I become it for the little girl inside. Its intense, sometimes, but it works. And if that’s not turning your pain into power I’m not really sure what is. That’s pretty...Boss.