Parenting is hard. Motherhood is extraordinarily hard when a whole culture is contorting itself to prove over and over and over again how little it cares about birthing people, will not fight for them and allows our basic rights to evaporate.
The things we see on social media are more often than not; partial displays of lives we see on social media.
This is an absolute favorite photo of my children and myself moments after giving birth to my third child in 1992.
Next to my right shoulder is a dear friend, 42 years on, a friend I cherish so much, Julie. To her right is my midwife, Pat Jones. Across from Pat is Nancy, I don’t think Pat called her a doula but that’s the role she had in the birth of my beautiful son. At the end of the bed are my now 41 year old son and 36 year old daughter.
What you don’t see:
The photographer. A violent domestic abuser.
My daughter, whom I love beyond imagination, has estranged herself from me.
My oldest son is on the verge of doing so.
My youngest son is angry with me.
If you were privileged to know my relationship with my children over time you’d find out:
They are three of the most generous souls you will ever meet.
My oldest son and I have wildly different value systems at opposite ends of the cultural and political spectrums. We love one another. We struggle to see one another’s perspective of the world. He has yet to work through the trauma he experienced at the hands of his father and due to my failure to protect him.
My daughter is living through some of the most difficult milestones of her life as she navigates the influence of religion and her father’s dominating personality (probably what we call narcissism now) while being a truly strong woman who doesn’t know yet her anger will serve her well. I love her. I struggle with the level of rage she has toward me.
My youngest son has been extraordinarily open with his compassion toward me over my dark decade where his sister and brother have tired of my slow healing process. He is tiring too. We love one another. We’re struggling with separating what he sees as his expertise to help me and my understanding he does not need to have that role.
You’d also find out:
They have supported me financially since 2014 when I lost a lucrative job, dove deep into depression, health issues I ignored could no longer be ignored and I had no resources to fix my health issues. I moved from houston to my parents’ home in illinois for five years with zero health or personal progress, then after that moved to alabama and lived with my oldest son for the next four and now rent to live in my daughter in law’s old house.
You’d also learn:
My daughter felt it would be effective to start family meetings around the time I moved into my son’s home. In these meetings I would report to them my progress on finding work and pursuing mental health care and figuring my way through finding federal assistance for support financially and for healthcare. These meetings had been ongoing until I stopped the reporting aspect of them this month, May of 2024, so around a ten year range. Thus the immense anger on their parts.
These meetings were almost always confrontational on my part. There was part of me that understood the approach was well meaning. The part of me that did not have capacity at the time was the part that screamed inside of me I needed support differently than they were laying out.
There is also the realization that I had a hand in teaching them this approach as a solution to a problem.
Daughter and soon after, Oldest Son, became convinced I had to take mental health drugs as part of what turned into a to do list of mandates from my children.
From their perspective most if not all of my problems came from mental health problems. They couldn’t understand that the severity of my physical health issues caused my waning interest in life overall, which turned into depression and their assumption that mental health was my main issue.
If you’re reading this, you probably understand even in our deepest states of darkness, we have an inkling of what we need for ourselves and recognize when something feels wrong. Yes, we don’t see things clearly in those times, but our instincts can still help us know when wrong is wrong.
I applied for and got disability and got medicaid insurance, it took a year and a half, which is fast for that whole process. Yes, part of the pressure my kids put on me moved that forward.
Medicaid is it’s own interesting world and in my opinion could be an amazing model for universal healthcare, but nope, instead we will always mark people using this service as less than worthy and make it painfully hard to find physicians and healthcare providers who will take it. Don’t get me started on alabama’s extraordinarily poorly run and staffed carastar. A quick search will confirm for you what that’s about and how little alabama cares about the health and education of its citizens.
In December of 2022 I had one surgery and April of 2023 a second that solved about 90% of my health issues. Since those surgeries I have gotten a low paying, low demand, but exhausting part time job. I am not on disability any longer. I still have medicaid.
Back to the medicaid convo. I found an absolutely amazing surgeon and orthopedic practice to do my surgeries. It was a slog to find them but I will never write about this without acknowledging how important his skill was for my surgeries. And. I traveled two and a half hours from where I live at the moment to have the surgeries. If you know about orthopedic surgeries, hip and knee, you know they get you out of the hospital as soon as possible, the same day if possible. It’s wild to me. Cut or shave whole bone from a person and glue in new parts - then less than eight hours later send them home. The fact that this surgeon took my insurance was wonderful. The fact that this level of care in any part of the healthcare system in alabama for the underinsured is rare, is egregious.
Throughout the years of mandates from my children while attempting to survive the depression, pain, isolation, and lostness of my life there were so (so) many times I agreed to do things I knew I would not do. My flawed thinking was to appease in the moment. In my life I have mostly been a person who could not deal with confrontation of any productive kind. There’s an unresolved thing in thinking that about myself because in the violent marriage I was in for almost 18 years, I was the most confrontational I have ever been in my life. It was in defense of my kids though. Rarely in defense of myself. Never in defense of building a relationship. That situation was never a partnership of any kind.
Motherhood. Social media. What you don’t see. My family and I are in a crisis at this time in our lives together. I stopped agreeing to the reporting part of the meetings with my children. From my perspective it turned into a situation where they could not hear a single thing I tried to convey to them about how I felt about things needing to change. In fact Oldest Son said many times “I don’t care what you said. What I hear is…” and Daughter has repeatedly said “I’m not here for you, I’m here for brother and brother”. She has called me lazy. She’s called me stupid. She’s called me a fucking idiot. She categorizes me as entirely a liar. She is so angry. And I know her anger reveals what she needs but did not get in a violent childhood home. Protection. Undivided attention. The chance to learn how to live well outside of that chaos. And I have to reconcile that I was and may still be, her model for so many things she’s dealing with now in her life.
What none of them know is that I had so much anger toward my parents in different ways but as strong an anger as they have toward me now. It’s wild to me to see generational poison show itself in real time.
It’s pretty messed up right now. I have to repair it.
In my last conversation with them I told them we are at the point we need outside help to work through the things between us. Not one of them acknowledged I said it. There is so much more between us than my work or health. None of us have chosen to face our collective trauma from their childhood home. It doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon. I know that will only happen at their own pace.
I write this post today to do the following things. To document my progress and honor that. To honor being a mother who is deeply flawed. To honor being a mother who has made it through domestic violence. To share the pain of being a mother who is flawed. A mother who loves her children infinitely. A mother who understands a lot of their anger. A mother who is learning how to say the damned things in an honest way that hopefully will be heard some day.
And that’s what’s behind the scenes of the post you may have clicked on to get here.
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