Tough one, but I’ll say it anyway.
I don’t mean to be purposefully controversial or upsetting to anyone, but I have to state I am glad (not quite the word I wanted) that mum’s demise appears to be through some (still yet to be diagnosed) dementia illness.
Glad – not because I have seen too many family members ripped away by heart disease, by cancers – diagnosed too late for any treatment, by genetic defects which cut short lives even in infancy, let alone young adulthood. I’m sure many here, as me, will have their own tales of tragic family legacies.
For some months since realisation dawned that mum’s own battles with cancers and arthritis and sundry other more minor but cumulative ailments (general ‘wear and tear’ one doctor dared suggest) were being radically overtaken by this new ‘monster’ I have felt so angry, so cross, so despairing….. how could we surmount all these other hurdles to be presented with THIS?
Maybe it’s my slide into ‘acceptance mode’ that after her once weighty body had taken the battering from years of treatment for cancer, I had begun to think she was invincible.
This mother. This imperfect mother, and me such imperfect daughter.
I think for many years I expected us each to slide into some imperfect oblivion in which our differences would not matter, our ‘past imperfects’ be erased.
Today, I look back on what mum did for me, and what I did for her – very little mutually, it would appear. I was ‘daddy’s girl’. Didn’t give two hoots if mum wanted me to go round town with her or try cross-stitch… just wasn’t girlie…didn’t live up to her expectations of a daughter…. and then there were times I didn’t rate her so highly as a mum……
But today, right now, for all she is driving me ‘spare’ – I love her. The hurts of the past matter not. It’s the here and now and being able to hug each other like we have hardly done in the last 30 years … and strangely, at last, to be able to say to each other that we love each other and to mean it…..
It’s hard to express how grateful I am to be given a chance to care for my mother in a way I would obviously never have wished for either her or myself – and yet to be given a chance to assuage the guilts of the past – on both our parts - and suffer less from the guilt of the present offers more comfort than having had her ‘taken from me’ without the chance for a reconciliatory and loving ‘good-bye’.
Some may understand……
Love, TF, x
I don’t mean to be purposefully controversial or upsetting to anyone, but I have to state I am glad (not quite the word I wanted) that mum’s demise appears to be through some (still yet to be diagnosed) dementia illness.
Glad – not because I have seen too many family members ripped away by heart disease, by cancers – diagnosed too late for any treatment, by genetic defects which cut short lives even in infancy, let alone young adulthood. I’m sure many here, as me, will have their own tales of tragic family legacies.
For some months since realisation dawned that mum’s own battles with cancers and arthritis and sundry other more minor but cumulative ailments (general ‘wear and tear’ one doctor dared suggest) were being radically overtaken by this new ‘monster’ I have felt so angry, so cross, so despairing….. how could we surmount all these other hurdles to be presented with THIS?
Maybe it’s my slide into ‘acceptance mode’ that after her once weighty body had taken the battering from years of treatment for cancer, I had begun to think she was invincible.
This mother. This imperfect mother, and me such imperfect daughter.
I think for many years I expected us each to slide into some imperfect oblivion in which our differences would not matter, our ‘past imperfects’ be erased.
Today, I look back on what mum did for me, and what I did for her – very little mutually, it would appear. I was ‘daddy’s girl’. Didn’t give two hoots if mum wanted me to go round town with her or try cross-stitch… just wasn’t girlie…didn’t live up to her expectations of a daughter…. and then there were times I didn’t rate her so highly as a mum……
But today, right now, for all she is driving me ‘spare’ – I love her. The hurts of the past matter not. It’s the here and now and being able to hug each other like we have hardly done in the last 30 years … and strangely, at last, to be able to say to each other that we love each other and to mean it…..
It’s hard to express how grateful I am to be given a chance to care for my mother in a way I would obviously never have wished for either her or myself – and yet to be given a chance to assuage the guilts of the past – on both our parts - and suffer less from the guilt of the present offers more comfort than having had her ‘taken from me’ without the chance for a reconciliatory and loving ‘good-bye’.
Some may understand……
Love, TF, x