I feel like this month has been a roller coaster. Lots of adapting, lots of patience wrecking procedures to facilitate selling my mother's apartment and a lot of letting go expectations and just going with the flow - it's like the universe wants me to be better connected within myself and with my strengths' which are not dependent on anyone's approval and participate in a world with my mother rather than being away from her and yet staying in hurt for all the things that could have gone well had she been emotionally better aware of my feelings rather than being terrified of her traumas and possible pains. She got used to her brothers apathy and huge egos, control and so on from her childhood until she got married to my father that she assumed that after my father's sudden passing and being placed in a job on compassionate grounds in the government organization that he used to work for would help her feel secure in some way. She just grew up insecure and neglected and intimidated as that was the best way for a family dominated by an angry father and bullying brothers and with hardly any female support as her mother had passed away when my mother was quite young was just her history repeated after coming back home after losing my father but with me born just then and with a job that could give her possibly a lifetime of support and sustenance but not just enough stability personally as she had hoped she had wanted from me and that was a lot to ask for from a kid back then who was in fact dependent on her mother's calm and stable emotional nurturing.
Try as I might but I could never have been the stable ground even if I had better health and just optimum sensitivity and not high sensitivity because it's not my responsibility to make her feel stable but her wanting to grow up that would have helped her accept me for who I am and the condition that she has always put herself through in as a survivor of an emotionally abusive family and having to live in constant fear and people pleasing - this truth could have set her free rather than wanting to stay with her brothers in a toxic relationship and trying hard to make her life work alongside me which used to be highly stressful on me. And so her complaining that she has to all of her life without her husband and again getting reactive at me at how my health is so much like my dad's was both confusing and disorienting. My migraines, cardiac issues, and so on were just premises that exacerbated her already existing emotional/mental stability issues. She used to make it all about me but in truth it was she who had unresolved trauma, a lot of grief work that she had to do and not just for who she could have been but not when living with her brothers but also the tragedy of losing her husband quite young and just when they were about to welcome their baby to life.
She is a survivor and like her I too learnt to be one. That was the best way and no other choice if we were to live in this family along with my mother's brothers and their families. And I grieved this choice by my mother, hated her almost for it, if not then but decades later because the amount of mental health damage that it had done on me was something that only I could fully understand. To enable her to carry on with her life normally was supposed to be my only goal but not living with joy and gratitude for just simply having a life and enjoying my space and time in it and discovering my personality, likes, dislikes, and growing which became just tweaked to being good enough for her expectations as if by doing that that would help me move towards participating in my life to the fullest.
I became a victim for my mother in order to enable her to stay as one and had no clue that my life was at stake and any semblance of owning my life and living it well was out the window. I had locked myself up from inside and kept looking out at others for help, including my mom. Nothing feels more tragic than having a life and not having the power, the will, the awareness of choice and exercising it to build my life muscle so that I cherish and feel happy for my life and walk the miles to make my journey happen no matter how long, how far that could be, but taking the steps, baby steps is what I am doing now. I trust myself but it comes after giving in to lot of doubts, anxiety, and a trauma bonded sense of self.
I guess trusting myself has been the most vulnerable and yet the most powerful step that I have been taking consistently. Although soaking in my mother's trauma, her emotional instability has been my conditioning and whatever I do feels like I am placating this need of hers to stabilize her, but there's only so much that I can do other than living my life - this is not my entirety no matter how much trauma baggage and unresolved grief she may be carrying, it's on her finally. I cannot stay off centered from my life at the cost of making her feel stabilized. She needs to help herself no matter how old she thinks she has gotten, it's an opportunity to truly grow that she has missed on and compensating that with money is selling herself short.
My duty is towards my life and live grounded, calm, and at peace with myself more than anything else in the world. That seems doable but would require daily practice and I am trying to keep at it being true to it one day at a time.
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