Life is complicated. Beautiful and hard and complicated.
I somehow naively thought I would escape the pain of grieving my BPD (Borderline Personality Disordered) mom. I feel really silly saying that, but it's true. I thought after all I had been through with her, there was NO way I would feel sad that she was gone. This is what makes grieving the death of an abusive parent so difficult. On the one hand, there is tremendous relief knowing they can no longer harass you, talk badly about you behind your back, turn others against you or make you pay for refusing to enable them. That is the sad reality. I am not losing something good or healthy.
What does grief look like? Well, I think for starters, grief is different for everyone and its important to keep that in mind. What it looks like for one may not be the same for another. I think that is something that our culture really lacks. We lack knowing how to grieve and knowing how to be there for others in a time of loss. There is no real ceremony, aside from a funeral/wake, no change of dress to demonstrate where you are in your grief process, and often times the one grieving is told to hurry up and get on with their process. It can be terribly invalidating and damaging to say that to someone. We need to honor both the individuals style of grief as well as the person they have lost.
I hit a rough grief patch a few months ago. I was really reeling from it. I was SO TIRED of losing things and grieving things that I found myself resisting the process. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was facing some self judgement about what i should and should not feel. On top of that, I had just had a very close friend tell me that I should be over it. That I shouldn't reach out for comfort for friends because that's not what friends are for. A big old pile of poo if you ask me, but nonetheless, it left me confused and hurt.
God is so unbelievably kind and faithful. He never fails me. My husband and I were at a Habitat for Humanity resale store and a bookshelf caught my eye. I thought there would be some home owners books or project books but one book in particular stood out. It was called "Motherless Daughters." I couldn't believe my eyes. How did this end up here, of all places? Needless to say- even though I had been terribly invalidated by a friend, I had NOT been invalidated by God. He knew exactly what I needed.
I wept through the entire first chapter. The woman who wrote the book lost her mother when she was 17, and subsequently went on in her adult years to study how the loss of a mother affects daughters in particular. She was THOROUGH. She studied what affects happened at what age, and how to progress through developmental challenges that inevitably come up when there is no mother to guide that development. She talked about how having a mentally ill parent means that we often grieve them at every stage where they were not emotionally available to meet our needs, from the past all the way into the future. Wow. That answered so many questions I didn't even know I had. All of this uncertainty about being a mother to a second child without a mother of my own started to make complete sense.
Developmentally speaking, children grow and learn to differentiate and individuate by having a caregiver to look back to on a regular basis AS they take steps in development. For example, a toddler learning to walk wants to go explore, but is anxious about the task and needs a caregiver to look back to for reassurance and comfort as they go forth. The same is true but in different ways at every developmental milestone all the way into adulthood- the looking back for a caregiver for reassurance and comfort. It's how we as humans learn to attach, detach and become confident in our own abilities.
So much of my past has been grieved and healed. But there are times where it hits me like a wave as I'm parenting my own daughter. I recognize that for so much of my childhood, my mother was not emotionally present. There are so many things I get to do with my daughter that I have no recollection of doing with my mom. I have almost no memories of closeness or comfort. Hearing her laugh was so infrequent that it would often catch me off guard as a child and cause me to cry. That was the mom I wanted around but so rarely got to see and experience.
What I grieve now is not the mother that I had, because she was buried under the rubble of her own life's mess and mental illness. What I grieve is the mother I always wanted. Not having a mother at all to celebrate birthdays and babies and life changes with. I grieve that the relationship never got better because she never got better.
So, for anyone grieving ANYTHING, know that it's entirely appropriate and acceptable to reach out and talk about your process. Or just ask someone to sit with you while you cry. I have found that few people are really capable of that, and if you have no close friends or family to do that with, find a good counselor who will just be present with you while you process. I PROMISE...you will be so much the better for it.
2 Corinthians 1:3-5 "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ."
