Every experience of us as children is different, our relationship with the mother changes in different homes and families, in this second part of our look at the Mother´s Voices we share with you another type of expression related to this commemoration in the month of mothers.
My first mother’s day without my mother in 2017, 7 years ago, caught me quite by surprise. I did not know what to expect or if to expect anything, but it caught me by surprise nonetheless.
I had done my reading, At the time I was reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Previously, I had been reading about grief, and the Five Stages, as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. I was seeing a therapist since her passing in September, I thought I was ‘doing the work.’ And then I open my eyes and it is Mother’s Day. And there is No -Where -To- Go. No where to go, nothing to do, no one to see. I was very disoriented. I knew it would be hard; It was brutal.
I wanted to call my sisters. But both have children, both are mothers themselves. They may be mourning but they get to celebrate mother. I suppose I was going through an identity crisis. I was not a mother, but I was a co-parent with my mother and I had never realized that before.
I was quasi Mother, Co Mother, Co Parent, along with my mother. I helped raise my two sisters with my mother, since at least the age of ten, when the youngest was born. And then, that day, there was no mother, and I had no center. On this day, I really did not know what was happening. I would later find out that this was the unraveling of a co-dependent relationship.
Do you know what a co-dependent relationship is? So many of us have them and we don’t have a clue. So many of us were raised with strong mothers, absent fathers, or vice versa grew up faster than we needed to or should have, have the role of peacemaker, of rule keeper, of the Role Model for the youngers. We understand responsibility, we come with answers, we over function, we are not resting if we are not saving, not doing. And now there was.. a void.
According to Melody Beatty, who wrote Codependence No More (1987) and more recently, The New Codependency (2010), codependence is kind of what happens when you lose yourself in another and don’t know who you are. You are merged. I was merged with my mother, and now, without her, I was left behind trying to figure out where she ended, and I started. That is what I saw, that first Mother’s Day. I did not know where she ended, and I started. I was lost.
I had gone through all the stages of grief and had been dealing with them in therapy or at least a few of them. Denial and anger were already processed when we heard her diagnosis of Parkinson’s some ten years previous. We bargained, as we managed her life, her diet and maybe extended her comfort for a few more years. Now, after her passing, I was moving into a depression that would stay with me for year, and gradually, come into acceptance.
It would be a few more years, in 2020, when I found David Kessler’s Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief (2019) that I realized I was working my way on to the sixth stage,. I was now exploring and learning the meaning of my mother’s life, the meaning of my life, relative to my mother, relative to my own life, relative to all of Life.
I have learned, and am still learning, to define who I am, like a baby, learning to walk, learning to speak my mind, develop my boundaries, learning to express my feelings and desires in a way to engenders connection rather than separation. I was and am learning how to maintain connection without losing myself. These skills are very new, very fresh. I have so much more to go.
So, I end with this, on that Mother’s Day, in 2017, I was emerging from that sacred void and was born, anew.
And On this Mother’s Day, I say, Thank you, mom, Antonia Guzman, for my life, for yours, and for all the love you left me with, and left in me.
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