I’ve lived my life this way for so long, it begs the question: why bother to fight my way out? Why go through the messy ugly painful confusing process of trying to understand why I am the way I am and figuring out how to be different. Both the process and the possible end results could have major repercussions throughout my life. This is the person my friends and colleagues expect, this is who my family knows me as, this is how my stepchildren have learned me, and this is who my husband married. Will my relationships change? Implode? Explode? Safer to stay the same, stay locked down, stay the calm, passive person I’m known to be. Why try to change.
Simple.
I want my daughter to have a different mother. My own mother was an incredible woman, and my love and respect for her are beyond words, and her loss, though 17 years old, is something that still brings me daily pain. But there is no way around the truth: she had her own demons, and they negatively impacted our relationship and my development. For many reasons I know, and I am sure many more I don’t, she couldn’t seem to handle physical or emotional closeness. To be very, very clear, my mother was never abusive or neglecting, but there was always an emotional and physical distance in our relationship. I don’t want my daughter to grow up that way. I don’t want her to develop the deeply-held belief that something is so fundamentally wrong with her that it makes her true self unlovable and her body untouchable; I don’t want her to believe that her emotions are too big and therefore wrong; I don’t want her to crush her incredible soul to make life easier for other people, to make herself smaller to fit other people’s expectations, desires, or needs.
It sounds cliché, but I want her to live a big life, even if it’s really a small life. What I mean is, she doesn’t have to be famous or make a global impact; she doesn’t need to be rich or remembered for all time. I want her to live a big life in that she has beautiful experiences and truly feels them, all the big, complicated feelings that rise in her throat and prickle her eyes, the seismic anger when someone wrongs her, the aching sadness that is both a roaring emptiness and a choking fullness of pain. I want her to feel them all in the moment, live in them, acknowledge them, and let them go, ready for the next experience. No one should live the way I do, numb, yet full of pain, full of this acidic burning of thousands of moments, of emotions trapped, unable to get out.
So I want out. Even if not for my own benefit in the end, though seeing her happy and free would certainly be a benefit for me, but so that she has a different mother. She deserves that. It will give her a better chance to have a better life. Isn’t that what we all want for our children? All the sane, rational people, that is.
I want my daughter to have a different mother; that is an incredibly painful thing to acknowledge, by the way. I feel like I’m saying that I’m not good enough for her, and then by extension saying that my mother wasn’t good enough for me. And that both is and is not the truth. My mother did so many things right, and I like to think I am at least a decent mother, but the truth is that we are/were dysfunctional, and I want my daughter to know a different way of being. I don’t want her to be like me, and I fear that telling her not to be like me will not be enough; she will learn what she sees. So for her sake, I have to try to find my way out of my lockdown. I have to try.