The haunting past
Apr 17th, 2008 by spaceagesage
My mom is two people. One is the young, wounded child yearning to be free of her strict upbringing, and one is the 79 year old woman who refuses to remember her parents and upbringing as anything but “wonderful, fabulous, and perfect.”
Most people who see my mom, see a sweet, older lady who is gracious, giving, and always willing to give a smile. She is patient with all the doctors she sees, treats store clerks as real people, and always tips generously at restaurants. I see her as all that, as well as feisty and funny.
I also see her as the nine year old girl who was locked up in a small out building on her parent’s farm for playing a little too long in town with the other kids instead of doing her chores. Who knows what happened as she sat alone inside that little house, but I believe the girl who stepped out of there was forever scarred and scared into “being good” the rest of her life to never be so abandoned again.
Watching my mother, who lives with my husband and I and who suffers memory losses from stroke and aging, I can see her nine year old self wanting to be free of that need to “be good.” I know this because when I have to remind her of things, like, “Please wash your hands after putting those egg shells in the garbage,” she becomes either like a defiant teenager or she feels like “I just can’t do anything right.” In the latter case, her shoulders slump like a person being told they have done something wrong, and I can almost hear her saying to herself, “I have been bad again.”
I see my mother as an woman whose body has tried to tell her with first with a stroke, then a TIA, and now with Alzheimer’s that the buried memories need to be released. I tell her she is retired and to enjoy life, but she will still scrub a bathroom on her knees if she feels it needs it. I see her living daily in denial because her subconscious mind wants to hold onto the idea that her childhood was so perfect.
The lessons for my husband and me are 1) to learn to love her more deeply for who and what she is without making her feel guilt over it all, and 2) to face any issues within ourselves so we don’t follow any kind of a similar patterns of denial and have our bodies throw it up at us in old age.
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You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
~Douglas MacArthur~
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