My mother died in July this year (2025, for future readers).
I know I don't have many followers here despite writing this blog for more than
20 years, but if you search the posts, you'll find a lot of background. Some of
it is repeated here.
She was ill and declining for six or so months. We never reconnected.
Before:
I’m sorry you’re unwell and in hospital, but I am so much sorrier for you,
for the life you’ve squandered. I’m so sorry for you, that you know nothing
about me, nothing of my partner, and nothing about my amazing, successful,
wonderful, compassionate, loving daughters, or your incredible niece.
I’m sorry – and this is the hardest part – that in 12 years,
you never reached out beyond notes talking about yourself, or asking for things
you wanted; never, “I would like to reconcile; can we talk?” I’m sorry your
refrain was always “I don’t know what I’ve done.” I’m sorry you never saw your
eldest child was desperate for a real, kind, compassionate relationship with
you, and I’m sorry every time there was the possibility of having a
relationship, you found some way to kill it.
I’m sorry that, because you have never shown much interest
in them, your grandchildren wanted little to do with you; anything you might
ask them about was only a springboard for you to talk about yourself. You made
no effort to know them or be interested in them, their schooling, their
friends, their partners, their work. They are my greatest joy. I’m sorry
for you that your self-obsession prevented you from being interested in and
engaged with these brilliant women.
After
I’m so sorry you never understood the immense love you could have enjoyed –
from your children, your grandchildren, and your husbands – George
particularly. I’m sorry that my children could never know you, know about your
life, your family, your experiences – the true story of what it was like to
grow up when and where you did, the true story of who your mother was, who your
father was – good or bad. I’m sorry my children knew how bright you were, but
that what could have been a bright beacon for them was only an enticement into
your self-obsession, and your constant belittling of other people, your
anxiety, depression, your closed world.
I’m sorry that your anger and your lies caused a permanent
rupture between you and your Nova Scotia family. I’m sorry for you that the
damage you did to your relationships there mean you will be buried far away
from your parents, your brother, and your family members.
I know you spoke against me to your brother and
sister-in-law intending they hate me too. I believe you poisoned my
grandfather’s understanding of me. You didn’t succeed. The last words out
of Bill’s mouth to me before he died were “I love you.” The last words Alice
spoke to me before she died were “I love you.” Jeanette and her girls and
I are very close. As weird as he is, even Brad and I can get on the phone and
talk for ages.
I’m sorry that you don’t understand how criminal it is
you caused such deep divisions between your own children and I’m sorry for you
that you spent your life abusing, maligning your firstborn. I’m sorry that you
seem never understood what all of this cost you and that you never understood
the life you could have enjoyed and the love you could have surrounded yourself
with. I see all those condolences people have posted, and those make me sad and
frustrated, frankly, because most of these people never knew you beyond a few
hours at church or at some event. They never knew the you behind the door. They
never saw or knew the chaos and they never understood how deeply wounded you
were. Hundreds of people in your life would have corralled around you, supported
and championed you – the real, damaged, human you. But your narcissism was
profound and so stifling.
I was saddened and frustrated to receive your note in
May via G. I am without words to understand why, after nearly 12 years, your
request was that you were probably dying and that I should come make you happy.
I have never been successful making you happy at any point in my life. I don’t
believe it was ever possible. Nothing I did every caused you to feel pride,
interest, curiosity. You responded to me as a nuisance, an invasion, as someone
who, as you said so often, was trying to ruin your life and doing a good job of
it. How could I have ever made you happy when I was a liability you seemed to
have to deal with? How would my presence have suddenly made you happy when it
hasn’t in my entire life? It felt more like you wanted a win. It did not read
that you wanted a reconciliation.
I think you have been anxious, and depressed most of your
life, and that your coping mechanism was anger, blame and chaos. That too makes
me so deeply sad for you. You had an amazing second husband. Amazing. You had
three great daughters -different yes, but all bright, compassionate, funny. You
were surrounded by so much potential for love, support, understanding, help,
but you let your anger colour everything. The cost is immense – for all of us.
I have had the experience of anxiety and chaos ruining my
life and relationships several times myself; I have had several periods of
debilitating depression. I was very, very ill between 2020 and 2022. I was
critically depressed and anxious, leading me to seeking out crisis care when I
became obsessively suicidal. During this time, I was prone to hours-long rants,
and to feeling persecuted and marginalised. I was sure my children and spouse
were conspiring against me and positive I was universally hated and hence
should not exist. As I look back over my life and the hundreds of times you
engaged in similar rants, anger, inconsolability, I recognize these
similarities – depression, anxiety, insecurity. I will always, always regret
the distress I caused in my family and to Jason, when I was so ill. I don’t
believe you ever considered the damage you have caused, and certainly not that
you ever had a moment’s regret.
For most of my life, I wanted a relationship with you. How
many times did I try, did I hope “maybe this time,” dare to believe you would
somehow have some clarity about how you’ve lived and behaved, and that maybe
you would engage with those realities and finally be honest and humble, and
willing to accept your failings and deal with whatever mental health issues you
surely had.
But the mother I wanted a relationship with didn’t
exist. The mother you were was brutal, false, violent, untrustworthy. It took
two years for me to mourn the end of our relationship and nearly 10 years more
for me to finally accept you were not that mother and were incapable of being
that mother. I had to abandon hope you would ever have any clarity, honesty, or
humbleness, and that your inability to do so prevented you from having close,
loving, respectful relationships with me, RA and G.
Your relationships with us have been unpredictable,
anger-based, and incendiary, predatory where it concerns RA, controlling with
G. I do not have any impression or memory of you being genuinely proud of us.
My feeling is we were accoutrements to your life. You said so often I was
selfish and that any time we did or said anything you didn’t like or agree
with, or if/when we were just being kids of whatever ages, we were out to make
you look bad. You said so very often we couldn’t wait until you were dead. I
remember you saying such things from when I was very young. You never
understood, or never cared to know, how utterly destabilising it is for
children to know themselves as liabilities to their parent. It has taken me
most of my adult life to finally put the responsibility for your behaviour
where it belongs; with you.
If I were to lose contact with any of my daughters, it would
be my sole pursuit to know why and put it to rights. You made absolutely no
effort at all. Not once did you ever indicate you were aware your actions and
your abuse at were, at very least, what caused me to sever contact.
I have no means of understanding why a mother would
not make it her obsession to rectify such a catastrophic event. I don’t know if
you were unwilling to acknowledge your part in it or are utterly unaware, or if
doing so would have wrenched open the portal to something impossible for you to
take on. I deeply resent it when people say “she’s your mother,” but
never stop for a second to contemplate what might make a person sever their
relationship with their mother. I am not infallible, and knowing that helps me
be a better, more honest person. You always believed, or at least presented to
anyone who passed through your life, that you were infallible, and that
somehow, I was just an unkind, punishing person. “I don’t know why she won’t
come see me,” puts the blame outside yourself. For people who don’t know you
(very few people knew you well), and who don’t know me, or who never met me,
you managed to place all the blame on me with that one deeply dishonest
statement.
From my earliest memories, I have known it was impossible to
make you happy. I have always known it was impossible to trust you. I have
always known that I have been your scapegoat.
The week G was here in 2013, when A was a newborn was the
terminus. It was the last weight I could bear. To watch you be so unkind and
abusive to a near stranger you had invited to stay was bizarre. To watch you
sulk, be petulant, to lock yourself in your room for two days, and be so
abusive to G, who was a new mother trying to get her bearings, and who had
brought you youngest, newest grandchild to meet you, was intolerable. Then,
after you had spent that week being vicious and intractable, the morning they
were to return home, you suddenly refused to drive them to the airport, leaving
G in a panic. You were petty, angry, and narcissistic. That October, I finally
accepted a relationship with you was not only impossible, but to continue to
try would be dangerous - potentially lethal - for my mental health. The cycle
of abuse was present then, and looking back, I could see it having repeated
over and over, hundreds of times.
After 53 years of your abuse, I knew in my bones you could
not be any different, and that a relationship with you was impossible. I tried
so many times to establish a workable relationship, or re-establish after a
period of no contact, but you never seemed to understand you had a significant
part in that loss of contact, that you had to participate honestly, and that
you were culpable. You were impervious to the swaths of damage you caused me,
and to Ra and G, and to so many people around you. Nothing ever penetrated to
cause you to acknowledge this reality, not even losing one of your children.
That is astounding. In twelve years, not once did you reach out with anything
approaching “what happened?” or “I want to reconcile.” I know, second hand
only, you consistently stated “I don’t know what I did.” I believe you did know
but I think acknowledging any of it was impossible for you. This is the core of
narcissism; it’s always everyone else’s fault. Whatever goes wrong, when you
felt bad, or angry, it wasn’t ever due to anything you did or said; it was
always other people treating you badly, being mean to you.
The things you have said and done to me, your dishonesty,
your anger, your propensity to belittle, insult, rage against, terrify, has
left me with permanent scars. Until I chose to end contact with you, I was
unable to know myself. I still struggle every single day with deep self-doubt.
Every. Single. Day.
I have lifelong depression and have struggled my entire life
to trust people because you, my mother, were immensely untrustworthy and
consciously vicious towards me at every possible moment. There was never a time
between you and I when things stabilised for more than a month or two, and I
could trust you; there was only holding my breath waiting for the next
explosion. From my earliest memories, it was always when, not if it would
all burst into unquenchable flames.
My lifelong depression is grounded in that trauma. I am
deeply resentful of your abuse of me, and so much more so of RA and G. More
than that, I am so resentful of the deep ruptures between me and my sisters,
and particularly RA your abuse caused. You sewed the seeds of this rupture
years ago, when we were small, and you never stopped. The divisions between us
sisters, our inability to trust each other, or to lean on each other, and in my
opinion, RA’s propensity to do as you have done, and shift her anger, her
disappointments, her resentments onto me – to continue making me the scapegoat
for whatever is wrong in her life – this is the greatest wound and the deepest
cut.
It is an unforgiveable theft, and an unforgivable
shift in RA’s ability to recognize problems and deal with them, rather than
shifting blame onto me, or targeting me when she’s angry, frustrated or
disillusioned. You disabled her by instilling this process with her; you
predisposed her to engaging in bad, sometimes scary relationships, and when
those were going badly, to acting out and making me the scapegoat, or the
recipient of her anger or frustration. G too is so deeply affected by your
abuse. She is brilliant and talented but deeply insecure – so much so she seems
unable to make her immense abilities and her excellent mind the cornerstone.
She is angry to the point of scary unpredictability. She simmers only degrees
from catastrophic, angry, unpredictable explosions.
It is impossible to describe losing a sister, but much more so seeing that
sister fall into the same behaviours, suffer that same anxiety, anger,
depression. Of everything you took from us, our relationship and her
confidence, assurance, ability to trust – this is my deepest resentment. As for
G, I say the same; all the success she most surely would have had were stolen
from her along with her self-confidence by you, who never saw her as a person,
your child, but as a cog in your desperation to be someone, your desperation to
create some fantastical, important, wealthy maquette. I believe your inability
to accept and honour yourself also comes from substantial abuse in your
childhood. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have recognized the traumas of
your own past, and why you never rejected continuing that abuse and inflicting
it on your children. From the time my girls were tiny, I have encouraged them
to cherish and nurture their relationships with each other, to champion each
other, to love and understand each other, and to acknowledge they are
individuals with their own thoughts and perspectives, but to never let their
individuality stand in the way of their relationships with each other.
I hope we sisters can heal. I hope RA can begin to
understand how your abuse, particularly in these last 12 years, when she has
been your sole caregiver, your ride, your confidante, your coordinator, your
support, has impacted her. Regardless that she was with you, or helping you,
almost daily for the last 12 years, bought you a house when you were homeless,
found you safe care when you needed it, dealt with your possessions, liaised
with your friends, you continued to harass her, to diminish the immensity of
her contribution to your life and your day-to-day and accuse her of avoiding
you or “being too busy to help her old mother.”
I hope she will come to understand, and deal with how
it has affected her, how she lives her life, and to understand how damaging it
has been to us as sisters. She literally had neither of us, G being distant
physically and me being distant otherwise, and still, you never stopped. Those
“you don’t have time for me,” comments, when she gave you as much of her time –
more – as she had, were cutting and malicious. I know she slagged you off
behind your back all the time, because she was powerless to speak directly to
you – it would have done nothing beyond giving you more opportunity to
criticize her, be angry, be despicable to her. She was essentially enslaved by
you – an old woman who had made stupid choices, and who took and took and took
from her. She was powerless to change any of it and absolutely unwilling to do
what many would have done and leave you to deal with your situation
alone.
At least I was honest: I couldn’t be around you and I
couldn’t fake it; RA felt she had no choice, but she reviled you in private. I
know this, because there is video of your birthday one year, and I can hear her
being sarcastic and diminishing of you under her voice and off camera. You
forced her into dishonesty with herself and with you. I asked her once why she
didn’t speak back to you, and she said she didn’t want to make you cry. You,
however, never spent a second thinking about the years, and years and years you
caused such pain to your children, and how many oceans of tears we cried.
You treated me like an intruder, a problem, I think as soon
as RA was born. You used me, and you reminded my sisters from when they were
little until I left the province, that everything that was wrong, and anything
they did that displeased you was my fault. If they misbehaved, you told them –
and me - it was because I had taught them how as a means of getting back at
you. None of us trusts the other and neither of them is concerned about
wounding me. It’s normal. You taught them this. I’m the family garbage dump. I
am terrified we sisters and Ruth Ann and me will never have a good
relationship, or any relationship, as it is so critically damaged at present.
When I had escaped and was living in Montreal, you sent me letters and a
cookbook professing your love and saying you missed me, but when I did come
home for a week, within hours you were at my throat about my relationship. I
hadn’t been in the door three hours, and I was tired – because two hours time
change, but you were at me about living with someone – who was and still is an
exceptionally decent man. Then, the first morning I was home, as I was coming
down the stairs from the bedrooms in your house, you said, “Don’t touch
anything, don’t break anything, don’t steal anything.” Why? Because I had slept
in, and you were pissed off about it. I was home for a week but I changed my
flights so I could leave early and spent the remaining days out of the house
with friends. Maybe you did miss me, but your actions, your derision, your
anger, your belittling me and you suggesting I would steal from you put lie to
everything you’d written in the two years I’d been gone.
I am deeply, profoundly resentful that you poisoned my relationship with my
dad. Thanks to you, I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. I spent my life
thinking he despised me, and I didn’t know any differently until two weeks
before he died. I didn’t get to know my dad, thanks to you. You painted him in
such a false and maligning way, that, at his funeral, I was blindsided by the
things people said about him. I didn’t know my dad the way people knew him. I
didn’t know how much he loved me, but how incredibly difficult it was to do
that, because I was so deeply distrustful of him. I’m resentful you stole our
relationships with my dad’s family. I never knew my grandmother. I was
terrified of her, and of Carol and John, thanks to you. I had the same
experience at her funeral – of hearing people talk about a woman – my
grandmother – who was a complete stranger to me, but who was absolutely not, in
any way possible, the woman you lead us to believe she was. Maybe she was
horrible, but we never had the opportunity to discover that because we’d been
poisoned so young.
In 2020, I obtained your divorce records – 123 pages of
documents including your 10-page, hand-written letter. At 60 years old, I
finally understood not only were you abusing me and scapegoating me at home,
you had used me as a pawn in court. You put words in my seven-year-old mouth –
things I never said and would not have known how to say – to deprive my dad of
his children. These documents confirmed the extent to which you are
untrustworthy and mendacious and willing to hurt and use your children to achieve
whatever your goals were. Those years are etched on my skin like deep burns.
Had I known any of it before my dad died, I would have been able to connect
with him, to talk about what had happened, and to explain my understanding was
false and manipulated by you, and that you never stopped speaking against him.
You brought that divorce action, not him. You lied about
still being married for almost two years after you were divorced, and by doing
so, you fostered the falsehood my dad was a philanderer. If I have my timelines
right – and I have these documents by which I can verify this – you only
stopped claiming he was your husband because you were pregnant and had to
remarry.
You sacrificed EVERYTHING that could have made you happy. Yes, you and my dad
were mismatched, but you chose that union, probably for the admiration you
expected to obtain from your family. I think you always felt less than for
being from the farm and maybe, by marrying my dad, you thought to elevate
yourself – and you could have, except you let your anger, your anxiety, your
inability to be happy, ruin that marriage, and then you lied about what
happened.
Then, you married GG, who was one of the most stellar men, who took on a
pregnant wife in the context of the Baptist church, who committed to RA and me,
and then G, who stabilised all our lives, and yet you still would not be happy.
I miss him, but not because I was unsure he loved us. I miss him because he was
a wonderful dad, granddad, friend. I wish so much the people in my life now
could have known him. He was everything a man, a dad, a granddad, anyone could
wish for. In this entire morass, he was the best thing – and, I was not able to
appreciate him, because you caused unending trauma around him, between he and
I.
Occasionally, and far less often now because so many people have died, people
say I look so much like you. I can’t describe this in any other way than that
observation make my skin crawl. I don’t want to be like you, look like you,
think like you. I want to be a trusting, confident person who can accept the
love and care of my family and my friends, and to trust the people around me; I
want to care for my appearance but not be obsessed with it: this has been
incredibly, debilitatingly difficult throughout my life.
From when I was little, your obsession with how I looked,
how my hair looked, what clothing I liked or wanted to wear was the basis for
constant little wars. You wanted me to be a compliant little dolly with no
voice, and when I wasn’t, you used that as a weapon. How many times did you
erupt in anger, sometimes to the point of hitting me with your hands or some
implement, because you didn’t like how my bangs looked, or that I wanted to do
my own hair at all, or the colour of my shirt? How many months did you threaten
to send me away – every morning pretending you were on the phone with a
boarding school -because who knows what had set you off before it was even 7:30
a.m.. Occasionally an old yellow wall phone, or an orange desk phone will turn
up in some thrift shop somewhere and I am instantly back in that trauma – it’s
as real now as it was when I was seven.
How many months did you belittle me by saying the then-fashionable colour was
“prostitute pink,” yet years later that became a colour you wore often; how
often did you disparage my hair – even dragging me off to the hairdresser to
have 18 inches of my hair cut off because you didn’t like the style. How often
did you disparage my body by pulling open the front of my shirt and saying “Oh,
you poor thing,” or when you would suggest I was somehow improper, or bluntly
suggesting I was sleeping with some random person, most often people I barely
knew. How could you have been so vicious over things – clothing, hair - that
didn’t matter? Not once did you ever understand the immense damage you did, or
the hypocrisy of your actions. You tried this with my children too – even once
calling C a “heathen” because she happened to be wearing a black dress one day.
Horrifying. So, when you said to my kids and to G and RA you didn’t know what
you’d done and why I wouldn’t come see you, you made it ever more impossible to
reconnect with you.
When my girls told me you were in hospital and going to
respite, I STRUGGLED to know what to do. I knew you were very ill and that I
had very, very little time should I want to see you. The trauma and the
indecision that caused were brutal. But here’s the rub: my lovely girls – C
particularly – and G (after the fact) told me you would not have a moment of
clarity; you would not accept any responsibility, and that there would not be
any kind of reconciliation. They said if I chose to go see you, I should expect
you to chastise me for not having come sooner and perhaps even chastise me for
having abandoned you or some similar accusation. I am sure this is true, given
your note that I come make you happy. Even when you knew your life was coming
to a close, you didn’t write a single word I could have interpreted as you
having any awareness. The mother I wanted to know and love never
appeared.
When G messaged me to say you were gone, my first thought
was regret for YOU, that you could have, but didn’t in twelve years, and not in
the last six months when you KNEW you had little time, you would not overcome
whatever drive you had to never acknowledge your actions or behaviour. My
mother died without doing anything to reach her eldest child. My mother died
welded to never being culpable, to never acknowledging she had any part in my –
our – life-long trauma. How could this be possible? When I was very sick in
2021 particularly, I was estranged from my children – because I had caused an
immense disruption; I had caused an impassable catastrophe. I didn’t know how
sick I was until A wrote me a message in which she called me her abuser. She
was correct and I had been incredibly abusive for six months.
That message felt as brutal as being kicked in the head with a jackboot. That
message sent me immediately into crisis care. That message caused me to accept
everything I’d said and done, and to get help – medication and six months of
intense therapy – rather than lose my children or continue traumatizing them. I
will regret my actions for the rest of my life, but I am so very grateful my
girls are as confident as they are, and that A was willing to risk terminating
her relationship with me so that I would hit the wall of reality and facts, and
be propelled into seeking help. Had you done this – ever, at any point in our
lives, even last year – it would have changed everything. It would have given
you your family back; it would have given me a mother I was so desperate for;
it would have changed all our lives. But because you refused to acknowledge the
things you said and did, you died without contact with your eldest, and with
your grandchildren saying “good,” regarding your death.
I can forgive you for being a victimized child – I’m
assuming you were – granny was unkind to us as children, and inexplicably
derisive of you when we were to Nova Scotia for that reunion; I have to let
that be my reality; I can forgive your anger and depression resulting from the
effects of being an abused child, but I don’t know how to forgive you for the
things you stole from me – my sisters, my self-esteem, my feeling worthy to
exist, my father, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my paternal grandmother,
and for leaving me motherless in every way but biology.
I can forgive you for your own deep and debilitating
insecurity that made your life performative, rather than authentic, leading to
acquisition of a revolving door of friends, catastrophic disagreements with
your family, and termination of your relationship with your Nova Scotia niece
and nephew, but I don’t know how to forgive you for doing everything you could
to isolate me – belittling my friends, leaving me questioning everything and
everyone, leaving me unable to trust anyone, and to my being paranoid – because
you told me so often you had people watching me. Although you did hit me, in
the context of being scared all the time, having nobody to talk to, and having
my sisters disliking me, being distant from me, and the three of us unable to
overcome your abuse and the fracture of our relationship, being hit is the
thing I remember the least.
Recently, I watched an episode of a popular series, The
Bear. The mother character is, in many ways, you. Abused as a child, deeply
insecure, anxious, depressed, angry, and vicious to her children to the point
one has taken his life, and another left the country for years, and her
daughter is left walking over the broken, sharp bones of a destroyed family.
Following a catastrophic, violent family altercation at a Christmas dinner
(quite like what happened to us in 2007) her living children will not see her.
Unlike you, she has her “come to jesus” moment, when her living son comes to
her house. She is overcome. The soliloquy is riveting. She bares it all,
acknowledges the damage she’s done to each of her children, her part in her
son’s suicide, the distance she caused between her children, and she begs her
son for forgiveness. The night I watched that episode, I made that speech mine.
I made that be the apology I had always hoped to hear. I know it’s a TV show,
and I don’t believe TV characters are speaking to me, but I have been desperate
for such an apology for most of my life, and there it was. I know you didn’t
say, or ever think any of those words, but the fantasy mother gave the fantasy
apology. It is what it is.
In another life, I would be mourning my mother’s death as so many people do. So
many are blessed to have had good loving relationships with their mothers,
blessed with the opportunity to mourn and to miss their mothers, and then to
fill that space left by loss with good memories. I mourned for perhaps three
years, but now, at the moment of your actual death, I don’t feel loss; I feel a
combination of nothing, freedom, release, sadness that I have very few good
memories to fill whatever small void, and guilt that I am not mourning. I wish
we could have reconciled, but I also wish I have known for all these years it
was impossible. I mourn the life you could have had.
I want you to know that despite a lifetime of abuse, I have
survived, and I am happy. Jason and I have been together 29 years this year. My
girls and I are unbreakable. I have graduated five times from university.
I own three businesses; my clients appreciate me, and the members of my studio
have a safe, warm, welcoming space because I make it that way. I have real,
long-term friends who actually know me – my successes, my failings, my
insecurities. I deeply hope my sisters and I can reconnect, and I hope with all
my heart, body, and soul RA and I can finally, finally find each other, learn
to know and trust each other, and that we can be supports and champions for
each other.
