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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 659406" data-attributes="member: 18958">I love my Mother. I am not sure I love my sister. If I do love her it is the memory of her little and when she was still so vulnerable. I do not love either one of them for their qualities. I love my mother in spite of them. There were many years when I could not tell her I loved her. I did not feel it. I did not believe she deserved my love.  And I couldn't lie. She was mean and hurtful and I thought she had hurt me. I was vengeful.I will try to describe what changed.You know how some psychologists say that behavior precedes attitudes? It is like walking the walk before you can ever really get the meaning of something. And when you first do it, it feels foreign and not you. But if you do it enough you begin to change and become that person?Like running, let's say. You hobble and hate it and can't breathe for days and weeks. And then one day, you feel like, hey, I'm a runner. Something has changed in you. The activity has become you.For me, no way was loving my Mother a habit. Actually, nobody could have been more surprised than I was when I began to love her. I took care of her because of duty, and the fact that I cared very much if she was vulnerable and I did not want her to be alone. But it was hard at first because I did not love her as I came to. I grew into that love.Should I love my mother?  I defied loving her for years and years.There was a staff member at the hospital that I remember who questioned my taking my Mom home. He said, "you don't have to do this, you know."  But I did. I think it was guilt, not love. But there was no way I could have done otherwise, and I am glad I took care of her.  I said in another post, that we were the closest my Mother and I that we had ever been in the time she was dying. I gave myself that, SWOT.  To me that was a great gift that I gave myself, the memory of being with my mother, and loving her (Now I just have to figure out how to get over it.)But I think you are right in so many ways. I think that I needed to love my mother. To love a mother.There is no way that loving my mother would have made her into anything other than what she was. But I came to see that loving her was not about what she deserved or what she was. And everything about what I am, what I deserve and want to be. The two are not in any way connected. And that is what I came to see and feel.If I hate my mother and blame her, it changes nothing about who she is or was or will be. It just changes me. It makes me live as a person who blames and hates. A resentful, bitter woman.And I am not those things. And neither are you at your heart.  I am strong enough to love her...and you are strong enough to love your mother...never forgetting what she did to you. It is not a question of crime and punishment or tit for tat.We are talking here about our infinite souls. Not theirs. Theirs are their business.Do I love my Mother for what I wanted her to be?  No.  I love her for what I want to be and who I am. I so get this, SWOT. The love is in you SWOT. Each of us has these hurts that we trace back to the cruelty of our mothers. I could never forgive my Mother. I have not, still. I can still love her.  Just as you do not forgive your mother but have love in your heart for her.SWOT, how can you or anybody else love horror?  If we were to love abuse, what would that make us?To love my mother does not mean I accept all of the hurt she caused me and my sister and others?  I love her in spite of it.I do not feel I should love my FOO. I am certain I do not love my dead Father. I do not love my dead half-brother. And I do not at present love very much about my sister.  The little bit I might love her, is tied to the baby she once was, and the vulnerable person I still think she is.  But she decided long ago to build a false life, a pretend life, leaving behind this vulnerability that could have been the kernel around to build a true self. I cannot love a false thing. Because that is dangerous.I do not have to validate my love for my mother. It just is. My Mother and I had a sort of friendship for more than 20 years before she died. We both wanted that relationship. It was punctuated by long periods of not seeing each other. Neither she nor I could sustain the connection. Out of this came the love I felt for her as I cared for her as she died.I think what came forth in me at the very end, when I knew she was about to die, was that it was too late...to ever get more, to have more....There was a tremendous loss of what could have been and now could never be. But ten thousand times at least I had made the call that a relationship like I wanted with a mother could never be with my mother. But at the point she was dying, I got confused. Because my mother is the only mother I will ever have. With her gone, the loss can never be remedied.I came to feel at that point that I had made a great mistake. That it would have been worth anything at all, destroying myself, obliterating myself, to have loved my mother while she had been alive, when I could have.Where all that came from I am not sure at this moment but I will get back to you on it.SWOT, that is definitely not true that our hearts supersede your own. I believe your heart is huge and open and sweet. Nor do I believe the other things are true.First, I think it is harder because your Mom is dead. And she was so cruel as to not permit you to love her as she died. Because I believe you would have. And had less pain, because of it.Second, you think as I did that you have to forget all the bad, shaming things your Mom did in order to feel love for her. And that is not so.  You also feel, I think, that to feel love for her, you have to forgive her. I have never forgiven my Mother and do not intend to. Love is not conditional on forgiveness, in my view.On this, I have to deviate from Cedar, at least partially. My Mother only seemed sweet and funny and brilliant outside the house or sometimes, I will admit when she was "on" at home.My Mother could be absolutely hilarious. Hilariously funny. She did not care how much of a fool she made of herself. I am the same. But nobody in my life appreciates my humor one bit.  Without my Mother I am humorless, it seems.My sister became so artificial that I cannot point to one endearing or amusing or attractive thing about her, except the vulnerability that she has tried mightily to  erase which to me was her best self.I have realized just now that my sister has something of the women, Rachel Dalezal about her, who has invented an identity as black, coming to head the Spokane NAACP based upon her false self-representation. The entitlement to be how and who you describe yourself and based upon this self-initiated representation, to be so, without negotiation, protected from any dispute of it, just because. I wish I had that about my sister, Cedar.  And my Mother. The reality is there were no joyful movements. I do not think I can remember a time except for when my mother was shopping or "out"a memory of my mother where she acted in a loving way towards me.This was not my fault. I was a lovely, sweet, adorable, loving, smart, creative child. I deserved her love. As much, I deserved her protection. I got neither.She could not give me what she did not have.I will not let my mother define who I am. I can love. And I chose to love her. So there. Despite everything. Not habit. Not should. Not forgive.Just because I can. My choice. Nothing to do with her.OMG, I just saw the goblins. Are those the goblins that have swooped down to consume my flesh here in bed?  I will get back to you after I consider this.</blockquote>

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