My mother, the monster

Maybe I'm sharing too much with this post. But it hasn't been anything that I haven't divulged already to some, if only to "get it out of my head" or else lose my mind.

Only in the past few years have I come to realize how much my own mother was a monster. There were moments when she could be sweet and loving, but now I wonder if that was just a show. That was the side she showed most people. But a few of us saw her for what she really was: Bitter. Hateful. She had, as one close friend told me, "a kernel of cruelty". She seemed to enjoy humiliating me in front of others, especially friends and sometimes co-workers. She did a lot behind my back to sabotage my chances for happiness... up to and including things she was saying to my former in-laws before my ex-wife and I were married.  God only knows what that would have been without her interference.  I certainly would have been a better person with life in general if He had given me a better woman as a mother.

It is the memories of my mother that are most at the heart meat of the therapy that I have been undergoing. Thankfully, those have been working and working terrifically. They take the sting out of the memories. They are making me assured that it was never "me" that was bad. It was that woman, who called me "retarded" and would blow cigarette smoke into my face and who blamed me for her own lack of relationship with God. It was that woman who would slap me in public, who threatened to smear human feces in my face, who never gave more than hugs bereft of any empathy. Mom was, I see now, a highly functioning psychopath and someone who was NOT a Christian at all. And that is what hurts more than most: how she turned God into a weapon to beat me over the head with, not a God who is loving and merciful and looks past our faults and frailties. Mom never forgot my fault and frailties. I don't think she forgot them with anyone.

My mother was the kind of woman who ruined the funeral of an uncle I was close to. No, really. She literally ruined a funeral. All for her own selfish sake.

But I was expected to love her, because "she's your mother". Now I understand that love can never be demanded. It must be EARNED. Including for one's own parents.

My life would not be so screwed up all along, had there been a TRULY loving and caring mother in my life. One who was sincerely beautiful in spirit. But as it is, she was not that and she poisoned that house and everyone within it. And I'm thankful that I got to see Dad happier than he had ever been before, in those final years before his own passing.

Why am I sharing this?

If you have a true and sincerely loving mother, or you did have one, be thankful. NEVER stop being thankful for that. Thank God every day that He blessed you with her. There are some of us who never got to have that, and it seems we will never stop asking Him why did He trap us with someone like that. Many are the days when I wish that I had just died in the delivery room, as I almost did. Instead He gave me to a woman who should never have been a mother in the first place.

If you are not like me, then you should consider yourself very, VERY blessed indeed. Because, like I said, some of us didn't get to have that. And I for one am as envious as can be that other people got to have that loving mother.

That's all that I'm going to say today. On this Mother's Day, if she is the kind of mother that God intended for them to be, let her know how much you appreciate and love her for that. If she is no longer here, thank God that He let you have that. And maybe you never had that kind of mother. Perhaps there are other women who have become like true mother figures in your life. In that regard, I have been immensely blessed. THEY are the ones I prefer to think about on this Mother's Day. They are the ones who stepped up to bat and showed me what real motherhood is all about.

I know of what I speak. I know what was missing from my life. I pray that no one else has to know that kind of vacuum.

Thank God for your mother, if she is or was the kind of mother that a woman in that place is meant to be.

That's all I know to say about the subject.  Don't expect me to write about it again.  I've said what God was leading me to say.  And that is enough.