MINDFULNESS AS A POSSIBLE ROUTE TO UNCOMPLICATED LOVE
My relationship with my late mum was indeed complicated – as mother-daughter relationships often can be.
I always knew she loved me, however, at times, that love seemed to be coupled with a heavy dose of expectation. It felt as though I was expected to be perfect and when I was perfect (which I tried so desperately to be all my life), I was loved more.
Our relationship was one of push and pull. Of advance and retreat. It seemed to be pregnant with competition, it may sound Freudian, but I could honestly feel it.
My dear mum had her own barrel of crap to deal with, I am not sure she had room on her plate (or in her heart) to deal with any of mine. It would be much easier for her if I were perfect; a nice girl, smart, kind, pretty – all the things nice girls are supposed to be. So, I learnt at a very young age to keep my troubles to myself, to keep my confusions, my traumas, my pain to myself. I worked through it, as best I could with poetry and with friendships, and later in life with approval-seeking and perfectionistic behaviour.
As mum became more and more unwell, she was confined to bed in her dying days. My brother, Dad and I nursed her at home – that is what she wanted, she didn’t want to die in a cold hospital bed. She wanted to die at home, with dignity, in the embrace of the man she loved so deeply.
Those final days together; as I made tea for the guests coming to say their last good-byes, as I put flowers in vases and coordinated the palliative care nurse visits, were some of my most cherished times I had with her. I guess, as we both knew time was scarce, we let our egos melt away and we allowed ourselves to just be together, in pure love. The familiar competition between us evaporated, the expectations ceased to swirl around me and, possibly for the first time – we just were, together. Two women, two mothers, loving each other, completely without strings.
One morning, after listening to some recorded meditations, she looked up at me and said “I get it, I understand what you have been trying to teach me all these years, I have been nuts all my life and now its too late”. At that point we lovingly embraced each other, knowing it was too late to turn back but also knowing that she had glimpsed the possibility of how life could have been. That experience was one of the most profound and heartbreaking in my life and from it I learnt a lot.
As parents, I wonder whether we need to work on our own barrel of crap in order for us to be available to love our children in a free and open way. It is indeed very hard to see the beauty of the little being standing before us if we are looking through a lens of self-loathing or hatred or regret or fear.
My dear mum couldn’t love me freely, just as I was, as she couldn’t love herself, just as she was. Her body was ravaged by 40 years of ill-health, her dreams slashed because she was a woman growing up in an era where women were not encouraged to do much other than iron and cook and she carried many unresolved family traumas in the very cells of her miraculous body. She was angry with the way her life had turned out, those molecules of anger flooded her body and her heart and she simply slipped into survival mode. None of this was her fault, she did not know she had a choice – until it was too late and the cancer won.
This is the gift of mindfulness, it can give us a choice. It can help us to fall awake and see what is actually happening, rather than being trapped by the stories or opinions or beliefs we may have inherited or simply picked up along the way.
So, for me now the question isn’t “how can I fix my children” the question is “how can I love and accept myself enough so that I can see the magic of the child before me?”. This question is not always easy to answer as we are so very habituated at getting in our own way and having our natural ability of clear seeing attention hijacked by our stories, but I think it is one that is worth asking over and over again.