Greetings, this was a difficult podcast for me to produce
As I was finalizing my Journey to Healing program, once again, for six week I dealt with this nagging sense that my mother, the woman who gave birth to me, was dying. She died last week and I don’t know how to grieve.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since 2007. I spent two long hurtful weeks in 2007 with her. She was in early stages of Alzheimer’s yet she was still controlling, lethal, and master of manipulation.
I hadn’t seen in at least 10 years prior to the painful 2007 debacle
I’m 73 years old and the most intimate one on one time I spent with her was the 10-11 hours she was in labor with me. If I combine all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of my 73 years together, the most we spent 3 years of pure hell, of constantly being reminded she abandoned, rejected, and bragging that she never changed my diapers or feed me.
How do I grieve for a woman who the one and only time time she had to sign a permission slip for me to go on a filed trip, ask me how did I spell Theresa with a H or E
How do I grieve for a woman who as a small child I craved for her to look at me, to comb my hair, to touch me, to kiss me to do the things I saw my friend’s mothers do. I wanted her to know my favorite cookies were oatmeal raisin, my favorite color was blue, and praise me for being in a gifted program at small.
For the first 14 years of my life we lived with 3 blocks of each other and we ignored each other. I stop calling her Mama by the age of 9, she was just Jeri, a woman I refused to speak to.
How do I grieve for a woman who had no problem rejecting me, who would when speaking of her daughters she would tell me, not you, she only considered two younger sisters as her daughters.
As I child I longed for her, to see, her, to have her touch, hold, kiss or even acknowledge me in some form of kindness. At best she grunted at me
There is no pain greater than living your entire life as a Motherless Child.
It makes you doubt everything about yourself. What was so wrong with me that own mother didn’t want me.
This is a woman who handed me over to my father, a pedophile. This man screwed or attempted to screw four Willard girls and women. He married the eldest, attempted to rape the middle sister, had transactional sex with my 14 year old mother for a coat, and at 14 he began raping me.
She willingly handed me over to him to do with me as he pleased.
The results, he raped me for 3.5 years and impregnated me with my eldest son.
How am I grieving, I’m not, all I feel is numbness