“Stay at the center of your own soul
There is nothing else you can do.”
William Martin, Parents’ Tao Te Ching*

In the process of accepting G’s increased need for autonomy, I have noticed my thoughts circling back to my mother. Re-runs of my childhood often are playing on a background screen in my mind.

My mother used to say “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” and it really, really bugged me. The non-verbal preamble was, “I may annoy you now, but…”

The reality is my relationship with my mother was an imperfect one. My first manuscript, The Sleeping Curse: One Girl’s Mystery, makes an attempt to explain. It sits on my bookshelf in draft form; I’m not sure I will ever let it out into the world. Not only does it totally violate Mother’s core tenets—honor your mother and father, never write anything critical—the material makes me want to crawl under a rock and stay there forever.

I think for a moment of my baby boy’s binder—how I looked inside it recently and subsequently my re-grieving for him tapered off. Silently I dare myself and then reach for the Staples-bound manuscript of 138 pages. As I begin to read I search for the shame I normally feel. I surprise myself: it’s okay. The story is bizarre and naked, but I am an adult. I can handle it. Even if all of it is true, it doesn’t make me a bad person. It doesn’t make my mom a bad person. It just makes us human in our own unique ways.

I stop everything and read more, making a few edits as I go. This document represents years of therapy, introspection, and some help from an outside editor. It is the story of me facing my shadow self and unearthing the shadow illness of my mother. It is all about darkness. I prefer to live in the light.

Re-reading The Sleeping Curse I am reminded how hard I tried to be the best daughter I could be, how I suppressed my struggles with my mother and never processed anything successfully with her. I released my anger in bubbles only to retract them, submitted apologies only to have them rebuffed. I tap-danced for her positive regard, always seeking something more than she could give. I wanted depth and intimacy; she could only go out to tea. I did not know what to do with her sudden rages, black depression, and withering judgment. Her self-loathing and threats of suicide. To the outside world she was the loveliest lady; she was to me, too. She was kind, fun, and encouraging. Except when she wasn’t.

As a teenager I began to sense something was wrong, but I could not put my finger on it. I talked with dad, family, a few friends. I can see now that no one had the courage or the vocabulary (or both) to help me understand. To agree that something was wrong meant rolling back the rug and examining everything we swept under it. It meant revealing something we spent our lives hiding: that we were not perfect.

My biggest mistake was that I attributed intent to my mother’s behavior. In my thirties I began to unpack a lifetime of confusion. I apologized to my mother for hurting her. I did my best to lay down my sword when I discovered her battle cries were unconscious.

Without realizing the timing, I chose to revisit this manuscript two weeks before her birthday. She has been gone over two and a half years, and I have been trying to focus on the good memories, letting the others go. I have discovered this to be a tender exercise.

If I only hold onto the positive memories, I feel a profound sense of guilt that I hurt my mother, a fragile woman who did everything in her power to survive a life littered with pain and abandonment.

If I hold the line that took so much work to capture—that she was all of that, but also ill—I explain the inexplicable: why we all got hurt, why the inadvertent casualties, why I was provoked to be so unkind to her. But the problem is: this does not restore her to my magical mommy. The one I knew first; the one I adored. I want access back to those memories. This is a nut I am struggling to crack. How do I accept both of us as flawed, forgive both of us, and yield to the light?

As I work to let G go, I’m trying to free myself of the past, to let myself go. With each layer I uncover physical pain, emotional pain, imaginary pain.

Raising a little girl, the child in me was invited to play. I got a chance to relive a childhood, an opportunity to channel through me all of the magical-mommy-ness that my mother gave me, absent the fear and instability.

These days I am discovering that having a teen is a process of returning myself to me. While I am an adult in mind and body, I am discovering that in my heart is a child. A child who has not fully resolved her past, who is afraid of getting hurt even more, who isn’t finished playing. My heart is having the hardest time.

My heart is seeking a way to greater peace so that I can love again, fearlessly.

* Highly recommend this book: Parents’ Tao Te Ching by William Martin