Mothers and Daughters

What's the deal with me and my Mom? Here's what my therapist opines: "Your guilty feelings stem from your ambiguous relationship with your mother?" Huh? Our relationship is hardly ambiguous - I love her and I hate her. Ok, ok, I guess that's what "ambiguous" means but the the way he said it made it feel like this is not normal! Well it's normal to me. It didn't used to bother me (I thought) until my own foray into motherhood - particularly when my daughter became a teenager - became a really dark place.

I think my approach to raising a teen might be labeled as anarchic. I pretty much let her do what she wants. She's always been a very independent child and I saw no reason to curb that side of her nature once she was old enough to begin the process of self-definition. It was not always this way.

When she turned 13, my daughter began to assert her new-found sense of independence in most dramatic ways: coming home late from school, staying out past curfew, in every way doing exactly the opposite of what I requested of her; in other words, rebelling. This caused me endless frustration and kept happening over and over. By the time she was 14 I was seriously ready to kill her or myself! Looking back, she did tell me to "lighten up" and "give her space" - very clearly expressing her needs. So what did I do? Exactly the opposite: calling her mobile every hour to check on her; giving her a curfew that was not appropriate to her age; checking out her friends like I was the FBI and well, just about everything else a scared, needy, over-bearing, insecure mother could do. Needless to say, this went down about as well as liquid cod liver oil.

Thankfully however, my inner guides stepped in, made me focus on me and showed me what and where I need to heal in order to stop creating so much turmoil in both of our lives.

So what does all this have to do with my own uncomfortable relationship with my mother? Guess what names I (inwardly, of course) call her? Scared, needy, over-bearing and insecure! Quell surprise, right? You gotta know that "if you spot it, you got it!" That's right. The reason I could spot it so easily in MY mom, was because she was playing the role of MY mirror. The universe - in it's infinite wisdom - was simply reflecting back to me, well, ME. This was what I was shown by my guides. Once I did the work of forgiveness necessary to heal the error in my thinking that led to these negative behaviors, my daughter's behavior totally changed. Actually I'm not sure how much her behavior actually changed as much as my perspective on her behavior. It was like little miracles were sent every day to help us forge a much clearer, smoother path.

So now when my Mom calls (and take note, she calls often!) and gets that unmistakeable note of censure in her tone when we begin to discuss my daughter, I now, instead of getting pissed off, thank my angels because I know that hidden in any negative emotional response is a holy message that says hey, you still have some inner work to do girlfriend!