The wounded inner child

of my mother

Among the stuff that my best friend Holly brought to me a week ago were two pictures of my mother as a girl. I noted how much my brother resembles her as a child, whereas I favor my father.

But I find myself staring at the adorable little face that was my mother. Long before her mother abandoned her, before she was beaten by her alcoholic step-father, before she tossed around from foster family to other relatives, because no one wanted to claim her, to care for her.

And she looks happy and so innocent.

And my heart breaks for that previous little girl in the picture, knowing what her life will be.

As I am doing work to tend to my own inner child, and the wounds she has, taking care to be especially gentle and loving to her, I also wish that I could hop back into time and be the adult, the parent, that my mother so desperately needed and deserved.

Because people like my mother astound me:

As hard as things have been for me at points, I still always had her. A force, as my mentor called her, when she passed. Even now, when she’s gone, all that she imparted within me remains and sustains me.

But—Someone capable of such depths of love and generosity and warmth, amazing to behold and feel, but all the more striking considering she was displayed such a lack of it, in her foundational years.

I looked over a book, Pearls of Wisdom from a Mother to a Daughter, that she gave me when I graduated high school and found little notes that she had made in the margins. Pouring out wisdom or life’s lessons that she wanted me to have.

I smiled as I read through them, feeling the bittersweet memories, my aching heart, but the small smile coming to my lips, reading over the little jokes we had and the ways that she knew me so well.

At the end, in her note, she told me that I had made life worth living for her so many times.

What I don’t think she realized is this—

She has made my life worth living and so enjoyable for all the sacrifices that she made and all that she did to ensure a better life for me than she had.

She always made me me feel so amazingly loved.

This couldn’t have been easy. She had no reliable partner for emotional support. Financial security was always precarious. She had her own major trauma and severe depression, constantly battling her own mental health issues. Then her own heart attack and physical health scares.

She only knew from my Grandma Elaine, her foster mother, how to love. And even that was just a few years in high school.

It’s amazing to me then, her capacity for love given that she had such a limited example.

Yet, as I ponder this, I sit back and marvel, amazed at how much we are formed by our experiences, both terrible and good.

When I mentored graduate teaching assistants in the teaching of writing/Rhetoric and Composition pedagogy, we couldn’t possibly cover it all in pedagogical lessons before we threw them into the deep pool to teach Composition courses on their own. Many of them with no education degree or ever having taught themselves.

So, instead, I asked them to draw from their own influential and impactful experiences as a student—both the good ones that they wanted to emulate and the nightmarish hellish ones that they wanted to avoid at all costs.

Ie—Who were your best and worst teachers?

This informed their teaching approaches and philosophies, more than anything else could have in that limited time frame—their first-hand experiences.

As it was with my mother; she took all the bucketfulls of shit that life handed her, dumped on her, threw on her, and she still gave back love.

She is my hero.

She was a fucking warrior.

A former partner of mine once told me that he thinks that from the beyond we choose the parents we want to be born to.

Of course, when I told my mother that, she snorted, snickering and asked then why she wonders she would have chosen her mother, my Grandma Bishop—

I don’t have an answer to that.

But I do have an answer to why I would have chosen my mother. Because despite the working poor background, and a volatile and verbally abuse alcoholic father, I still would sign up for it again—

As long as it meant that I could be her daughter.

I think about a dear friend of mine, a penpal, who is watching her mother transition from this world. And I hold for her a special type of solidarity, the true— berduka cita—I follow in your pain and suffering, my dear friend.

Joining the dead mothers club sucks. But, it’s a rite of passage for many of us adult women. It signals a new path of life.

Some of us have to join it sooner than others.

Sometimes it does not seem fair. It is not. There is never enough time with those we love, that we don’t want to lose.

I have felt my mother’s presence though. I know she still exists. I have felt her aura, her energy, her peace. And that warms my heart and puts my own soul at ease, especially for the remaining years of her life when she became someone I didn’t recognize, a shell of the person I had once knew her to be.

She is whole now. Complete. No longer trapped in a broken body and spirit and energy field. She is restored.

I carry her with me and miss her sometimes so much, I physically ache for her.

Other times, she feels so close. I can hear her voice in my thoughts and internal monologue, even the tone, and I smile, knowing the sardonic wit she had and what she would say to certain events.

I knew her so well.

And yet, once she was once this tender-hearted, hurt, scared child.

I can’t restore that in her, but I take solace in knowing that God can. And that He has.

Amen.