Mom

After I had been seeing Drew for about 5 months, my mom came to visit for 2 weeks.  My mom and I have never been especially close and we are very different in many ways.  But, we have both made a commitment to develop a closer relationship and this visit was a step in that direction.  To that end, I invited her to attend a therapy session with Drew and me and without hesitation she accepted. 

I was as nervous as a bride on her wedding day (almost as nervous as my first visit to that office), but my mom maintained her stoic front.  She wasn’t nervous because he is a doctor and….well, I still don’t know why she wasn’t nervous. 

Anyway, we went and we talked.  I can’t even remember everything that we talked about that first time.  My mom talked about how things were for her growing up and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between her childhood and mine.  I spent time living alternately with both my mother and my grandparents, so I definitely could relate to her experiences with her parents.  She was raised partially by older members of our family that I don’t know well, but I still believe our experiences were similar.  In our family, praise and signs of affection were not handed out often.  As my mother put it, “if you weren’t being yelled at, you were to assume you were in good graces.”  That was true of my upbringing as well.  You knew you family loved you, so they didn’t need to tell you.  I don’t know how many times I have convinced myself of this fact when the question would come up in my mind. 

This session with Drew and my mom went better than I expected.  My mom absolutely loved Drew and actually heard whatever it was that I said and she wasn’t defensive or offensive.  I was relieved.  My family has a history of fighting and not speaking for long periods of time, so I was worried that this might be the end of my relationship with my mother.  But, I had to try.  Therapy and learning about my emotions and figuring out how to deal with them has become such a huge part of my life – there’s no way I could have an honest relationship with my mom that didn’t include those things.

After the first session, my mom still had a second week with us in CA, so I invited her to come to a second therapy session.  This time I planned ahead and knew what I wanted to talk about and how I wanted to talk about it.  I learned from the first session that flying by the seat of my pants wasn’t a great plan!

The second session was incredible.  I want to detail every bit of that session for you, but I feel like I would be breaking her trust by doing so.  What I do want to share from that session is how open and willing my mother was to hear how I felt about our relationship.  It must have been incredibly hard to hear her daughter say those things, but she did more than simply accept them.  She went home to Pennsylvania and really thought about what I said and has actually made an effort to change things in her life to improve those things.  It’s actually pretty incredible.

Since then, we have had a few pretty intense conversations in which I’ve actually told her that growing up, I didn’t feel like she loved me.  This was huge for me.  It took me a week to decide to actually tell her this and how to tell her this.  In response, she sent me a beautiful letter where she detailed how much she loves (and loved) me, how proud she is of me, and how sorry she is that I ever felt that way.  She even wrote about how she could understand why I felt that way and it was exactly right – she really understood my point of view. 

I’ve always cringed at the idea of being anything like my mom, but if at the age of 60 she’s willing and able to see her own flaws and learn and grow then maybe it’s ok if there’s a little mom in me after all?