I Think I Might Have Been a Bad Mom

Like a ton of bricks, covered in honey and set on fire

When it happened, it felt like the agony that overwhelms you when you learn that someone you love has died. I couldn’t say anything, I started to hyperventilate, and sat in a long pause while my body caught up with my mind. My thoughts were trying madly to translate what I heard. English words that sounded foreign to me. And then, from the depth of my soul I cried out. Thankfully, I was alone because I’m sure the outburst was itself, gut-wrenching and concerning. I felt like I was being crushed.

That was 3 years ago, I think. It’s hard to hold on to anniversaries draped in pain.

I still feel it, now and again. The feeling isn’t centralized in one part of me, though. It takes over my whole being. My heart pounds as anxiety engulfs my senses. I find it hard to breathe around the stone in my throat. Tears stream from my eyes as I desperately try to calm myself using the techniques and tools of my therapist: Deep breaths and tapping that will bruise my arms, my collar bone. She lied, though, my therapist. She talked about the Locust of Control like I have the ability to control something when in reality, I can’t control anything. Not the heaving and tears when I’m alone or the quiet weepiness that I try to hide in public. I can’t control the way looking at curly hair on a toddler reminds me of my grandson or knowing that he’s not a toddler anymore. I wonder, sometimes, if he’ll remember me.

He doesn’t get it.

My husband doesn’t get it. He doesn’t suffer like I do, at least not such that I am aware. He thinks this is something I can just get over. How do you get over heartbreak? How do you get over the loss, even though she’s only gone to me? He’s separated himself from the pain she’s caused me. He tries to reason with me. I can’t be reasoned with. Nothing about being estranged from my daughter will ever be reasonable. Her biological father is a bit more understanding, but not much. She fell silent with him for a few years and even got married without him there to witness. Since she talks to him now, I understand.

How did this phenomena become my reality?

I started joining a few support groups online and found a therapist when the weepiness of it all wouldn’t let me go. Support groups are at best a sounding board for like-suffering mothers and fathers. A few who have reclaimed their relationships give useless and painful advice. Others have studied this and rattle off numbers and stats, like that might be helpful. It’s not. Knowing that I’m just one of a growing number of adults whose adult children have become the litmus for what good parenting is and stating clearly that we are not, is neither helpful nor supportive. The mother’s who proclaim that we know what we did and we owe our children apologies and space, I realize now, have evolved into a complacency that this is their lot. I don’t accept that. I just had to stop beating myself up about what I don’t know and what I’ll probably never get the opportunity to fix. I imagine myself, like the hundreds of thousands of sad mothers and fathers and grandparents in those threads, living the rest of my days on pins and needles because if they come back to us, when will they push away again?

And so the others suffer.

The last four children at home. They lose the part of mothering that raised three strong adults. They lose the part of me that told them the truth, even when they didn’t want to hear it. They lose the parent who taught hard lessons and social skills, the mother who didn’t let them slack on their chores and held her pocketbook closed for frivolities because, what is the thing that I will do, or not do that will pull them out of my life? They don’t get the best of me is cliché but it is what it is, and what is left is weak and very much like the gentle parenting that this generation thinks is how we raise children without trauma. No one tells them though that living is trauma and tumultuous. Life isn’t gentle. The world isn’t gentle.

It’s me whose being punished.

In my own head, I am finding it nearly impossible to move past this singular event as if my world began and ended with one sentence, “You are bad for my mental health.” I run scenarios through my mind, I think about the times before, what I could have done, the days that I was too tired and how I should have pushed through, the days I didn’t have enough money, and I should have worked longer, the times that I said no, I second-guess. I ruminate on the silence and chew slowly the words: my - mental - health. Who would do that to their child? Who would dare to be a person flawed and faltered and allow their flaws to be the undoing of bonds. How dare I?

Now what?

I stopped seeing my therapist. I stopped sending gifts through the mail (I think she moved anyway), I stopped expecting a call on mother’s day, a card for my birthday. I stopped hoping. I try not to fixate on when the next child might push me away and I bought an eight-pack of pocket tissues.