First off, I just want to mention this site. We played around with it on Friday and I laughed and laughed and laughed at some of the submissions. What’s that? I’m easily amused and need to leave the house more? Yes Internet, you’re probably right about both of those points.
Last week was just busy. I had things going for school, work and design stuff too. That and the end of February is when my mother’s birthday occurs, which is usually a hard week for me as well. That almost sounds like my mother is dead, right? She isn’t, but sometimes I often wonder if it wouldn’t be easier overall if she were. Which is probably really really terrible and awful to say (or in this case to write), but it’s the truth.
Let me give you the short version of the story so that maybe you’ll understand a little bit better. I am my mother’s only child. My parents divorced when I was very very young. I’ve never asked either of them when exactly they got divorced because it was always an extremely touchy subject, but from what I can piece together actually happened when I was around 2-ish. I lived with my mother most of the time and there were times when it was really really rough. Other than the fact that we were often extremely poor, my mother suffers from depression and anxiety and made things…complicated. I finally made a conscious decision at 14 to move to Idaho and live with my father’s family because quite simply I had had enough.
Fast forward to the present. For one reason or another (and I’m still not really sure of the exact reason or reasons) my mother has not spoken to me in almost 14 years. I couldn’t even pick up the phone to call her if I wanted to because I have no idea where she is. The last address and phone number that I had for her aren’t hers anymore. She has no idea that I’ve graduated from college, that I’m married and that she has a grandson.
Understandably this is an area of my life that I don’t talk about very much, even with my husband. Some of it is because, yes, it is a very sensitive area and the hurt is pretty much always raw right below the surface. Some of my reluctance to want to talk about my mother is because I don’t even know the words to describe how I feel about it all. For a time in my mid 20’s, I really thought that I had come to terms with it all, but it took having Owen and becoming a mother myself to understand that no, what I had really done was just to push all the feelings down so that I didn’t have to deal with them anymore.
The really crappy thing about repressing things? No matter how hard you think you’ve pushed something down and away (it’s gone! never to come back and bother you again!) is that until you finally realize that you have to deal with it, those repressed things keep coming back again and again. I have tried therapy a few times to see if that would help but it doesn’t seem to work for me. I just have to pull things out, examine them and come to conclusions on my own and on my own time.
Wow, what a Debbie Downer of a post this has turned into, right? I didn’t mean to be so dark and gloomy for the start of the week. Last week, I was fumbling through, sad, tired and tearful. This week is looking up. February, my least favorite month of the year is over and we have moved on to March. There are buds on the trees and Spring is coming quickly.