whole. I realize now that was impossible, but back then, when he did not live up to my impossible standard, I became angry and resentful of Bernie. Neither of us was ready for marriage, let alone the responsibility of children. I expected Bernie to be the kind of man I had read about in fairy tales. I fantasized he would ride in on a white horse and rescue me from this black void inside.
Unfortunately, while growing up I had no role models of healthy relationships between men and women. I only knew that Bernie was not the man in my childhood books, nor like the television husbands I watched that I longed for. Little did I know then, on some level he understood that I was projecting an impossible standard for him to live up to, so we pushed each other away for a few years. I got caught up in trying to be what I perceived as a good mother and did not focus much on Bernie at all.
Bernie drank quite a bit the first years of marriage for he, too, was dealing with pain from his youth. When we met, Bernie had lost his dad in a very tragic accident and the previous year he had witnessed a close friend being hit and killed by a car. He was dealing with his pain through drugs and alcohol. By the time we had been married a few years, I felt lost, alone, and wanted to hide away from the world.
I had little education, as I had quit school in grade eleven. When I was fourteen, Mom remarried and was trying to integrate a new husband and four stepchildren into our family. With all these other things on her plate, my dear mom became desperate at seeing how serious and attached to this boy I had become at seventeen. She gave me an ultimatum: to quit school and get a job, or stop seeing Bernie. Guess what I did? I married him a year later.
I felt I had no alternative but to be in this marriage. I did not want to be a single mom, for I had watched my mother throughout my childhood working ridiculous hours just to make ends meet. I remembered how lonely my childhood was and did not want this for my sons. So there I was in a marriage where I did not feel love, I was angry at the world and not knowing where to turn, I turned to food as my drug of choice. Food numbed that feeling of emptiness; it covered that ache in my gut that felt like a huge chasm. My insides felt lonely and full of dangerous pitfalls. I did not know how to articulate my pain; I just knew it felt endless and impossible to escape. After I ballooned up over three hundred and twenty pounds, food continued to numb this ache so that I was for the most part unaware of it. I hid it well from myself and (I thought) from the world.
When we are afraid of our emotions we stuff them away by turning to some kind of addiction or computation. Often more than one. What most people do not understand is there are as many ways of coping and dealing with our pain as there are human beings. There are the common chemical addictions such as drugs, alcohol, cigarettes. The lesser known ones can be overeating, gossiping, being angry and bitter all the time, being a perfectionist, being overly critical of others, the need to control everything and everyone or staying so busy you do not have to think, are but a few. Any compulsion that keeps us from feeling what is really going on inside ourselves will do.
We also often jump from one compulsion to another. In the book “The Gift of our Compulsions” by Mary O’Malley she says
“We have also forgotten how to trust ourselves, to trust our lives, and to live in joy. So we turn to our compulsions to numb ourselves out from all our struggles, only to find ourselves struggling with our compulsions. It is possible to move beyond struggle and instead reconnect with the joy, wonder, and vitality of being truly alive”.
During those early years of adulthood I was also angry with my mother. I felt abandoned and had never felt close to her. She was a person I knew loved me, yet I felt this longing for a loving connection that only a mom could give to her daughter. I did not know back then that it was impossible for her to give me what I needed because she was so disconnected herself. Mom’s life, in many ways, kept her from truly forming a mother-daughter bond because at that time for her existence was mainly survival. She got through each day by staying on the task in front of her. I remember when she remarried I was thrilled for her; somehow I had always felt a kind of guilt about how she’d had to live in order to take care of me. I can remember not allowing those feelings that I was experiencing to surface. Feeling of fear and confusion of this new family I had to live with,. I could only allow thinking of how this was Mom’s chance for happiness. I kept silent in my pain.
The strange thing about abuse, even if children are not physically abused but see their parent being beaten as I had with Dad, we still process it as somehow we are at fault. Most often we have long-buried this pain deep into our unconsciousness. This sets up a pattern of negative beliefs about ourselves that often gets acted out in many destructive ways. So in a distorted way, I felt I had no right to speak of the pain I was in. I remained silent, and because of that silence the pain eventually turned to anger towards myself and towards her. As those early years went on I felt farther and farther away from Mom emotionally.
Mom survived by doing what she was taught, “What you do not talk about does not exist” and in many ways I tried really hard to do the same. I turned this unresolved anger towards her and the world inward and began to eat away the temptation to lash out. At this point I was holding her hostage in my mind for something she had no control over. I was hurt she could not be the mother I needed yet I understand today she did not know how. This resulted in many years of distancing emotionally from her. Eventually, I unraveled this to see and accept Mom for who she is and value the lessons she was able to teach. I thank her deeply for the courage it took to leave when she did.
I have learned to mother and nourish myself from within, which I believe is important for all adults. I have learned to give myself what she could not. Because of that I no longer hold her hostage for something she was unable to give. I can finally have a relationship with her today and I no longer hold her responsible for my pain.
Many of us do not understand how old beliefs, both negative and positive, about ourselves and the world are mirrored to our children. How they can have a powerful effect on both their conscious and unconscious minds. Because of this, it is so important to find value in ourselves so that we can then pass this on to our children. The old saying “do as I say not as I do” gets it backwards. In reality, who we are and what we do to ourselves and others will speak louder to children than anything we say or preach. To show our children our own worth will teach them theirs. As the wonderful author and life coach Iyanla Vanzant says
“The most important relationship you will ever have is the relationship you have with yourself. Who you are is important in Life. Who you are is important to God, Who you are is so vitally important to life and to God that you owe it to yourself to take care of you. To give to yourself, to nurture, support and care for yourself before you attempt to nurture, support and care for others. All you desire to be ….to give….to do…to have, cannot and will not happen unless you take radically good care of yourself”.
My mother, like her mother before her and so many others did not know their own value and had no idea how to nourish themselves or to teach this to their children.
It is important to let go of blame or anger, for as parents we all do what we know and that sometimes is not enough. But because I believe I would not be the woman I am today if I had grown up in different circumstances, I would not change one moment of my life. My dear mother passed on valuable lessons of courage and survival as well as a moral code that saved me in more ways than I can ever thank her for enough!
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