Reconciling with the mother: two stories of distance and love

The relationship between Catalina (31) and her mother broke down the day when, in an attempt to kill herself, her mother turned on the gas in the kitchen while all her children were inside the house. At this moment, Catalina made the decision to walk away from her to protect herself. He was barely eight years old. Luckily no one was killed that day, but years later her mother died of a degenerative disease. It was after his death that Catherine managed to forgive him.

“In the 1990s and early 2000s, psychiatry in Chile functioned poorly. For a long time they kept my mother medicated and disconnected from reality. At that time, she was in a relationship with a man who abused her. When they started having problems and he dumped her, she fell into a suicidal phase, spending weeks locked in her room, me alone coming in every once in a while to check if she had taken any pills or him. remove the knives from the hands to prevent it from falling. I felt like I could save her from anything, but I couldn’t understand how she always chose to leave life instead of staying for me. I didn’t understand how, if my mother told me that I was the most important thing in the world, she could decide to abandon me.

That was the breaking point in my mind, but the real breaking point was during the kitchen episode, when my mom tried to kill herself with me and my brothers inside the house turning on the gas. At that moment, I felt we had to escape. I completely ignored her and never got to see her again. I felt that I was in grave danger. As a child, I knew strangers saw my mother being careless or inappropriate things happening, but I had never felt unsafe with her before because I felt like I was her savior. But it was one thing for me to have to save her, and another for me to have to save myself from her. I was deeply afraid of his irrationality and I felt that he could no longer take care of me.

That day, when I was eight years old, I ran away from home. I opened the door and left, never to return. We went a few years without speaking to each other. I went to live with my father. That’s when I lost the innocence of childhood. From then on, I assumed, until recently, that I was alone in the world because I didn’t have my mother. This break with her was like a break with myself. It took me a long time to get over it, because I always knew it wouldn’t be solved while she was alive.

For many years of my life, I insisted on not being like my mother, not looking like her. However, as I get older, I realize that I mirror her in many ways. My character, my hands, my face. I remember when my mom was my age and I feel like we’re so alike. Before, he found it contradictory that my character was similar to his, but now I accept it and think that this strong character does not have to be negative or conflicting. It is part of me and I carry it with me.

When I became an adult, I understood a lot of things, especially because I repeated a lot of the negative patterns that I saw in my mother and that I always denied, promising to get away from them, but in the end I repeated them. In the same way, I could understand that she was a person with many emotional deficiencies. Her own family structure was very complex, she was alone and I think she clung to life through me. During her lifetime, I never understood that my mother had serious problems and that it was far beyond her will to recover or not. As an adult, I understand everything that happened to him and I don’t think it could have been any other way.

Today, I live with the memory of my mother in a more positive way and I have a better relationship with her. I find her in places and when I write things, I wish she could see them. It makes me want to hug her from the inside, something I didn’t feel in her lifetime. Maybe it’s because deep down I feel like I’m doing things that would make her very happy. Today, I’m working on accepting that these were the moments that life had prepared for us, it was the reality that touched us and that we did everything we could,” says Catalina.

While Kamila (26) was in her mother’s womb, her biological father abandoned them, which was very difficult for her mother. She had to face life’s challenges alone, struggling very hard. Over time, her economic and emotional situation improves, but the wound of abandonment remains deeply rooted in her mother. So much so, according to Kamila, that this emotional charge was transmitted while growing up. “Your father abandoned us because he didn’t love us both,” his mother told him. Unconsciously, her mother’s abandonment wound also affected Kamila, who now claims to have attachment issues and a fear of abandonment. Even when they lived together, before Kamila went to university, this dynamic repeated itself but with other problems. Her mother negatively projected her own experiences onto Kamila and her siblings.

“When I graduated from college and came home, I realized that my mother was doing the same thing that had hurt me so much, with my brothers. He was taking her sorrows and exhaustion onto them. At that time I was going through a phase of general anxiety and experiencing symptoms of depression. I did not want to continue living in this world and I felt that my mother had emotionally abandoned me. As a result, I decided to distance myself from her. I had a conversation in which I told her that the dynamic we had was hurting me and that I needed to distance myself. I did, and for three months we didn’t communicate. During this time, I started going to therapy to treat my anxiety and depression. In that space, I realized that I was blaming my mother for everything that was happening to me. also understood that she didn’t know how to help me and that she wasn’t guilty, all he had to do was forgive her. It was a process of healing, of accepting that these are the events that happened and accepting it. I can’t change her or our past. Taking the blindfold off and being able to see past the guilt I had been carrying with all the negative things helped me understand her.

My mother always had trouble expressing her emotions. She rarely talks about her past, and when she does, it’s with sadness, pain, and remorse. I feel like she was not valued throughout her life and childhood. Now I understand why: she grew up in a family where she was neither listened to nor supported. While I don’t justify what she did as it caused real harm to me and one of my sisters, I believe all of these factors contributed to her wearing it and passing it on to us. .

As I got older and had more intimate conversations with my mother, I began to see her as a human being who, like everyone else, goes through difficult situations, needs to be heard and healed. Now that we no longer live together, my way of perceiving her has changed. I see her as someone who needs a lot of support and who has feelings. Getting to the point where she realized it, apologized and understood my situation was a huge breakthrough. He has grown a lot and it is magnificent. She is ready to listen and express herself. Recognizing what she was doing to us helped all of us be able to guide her in that direction, because I don’t think she could have identified it on her own.

In this path of self-exploration, I was also able to recognize my own mistakes. I was very critical of others. Today I managed to be nicer and try to listen without judging. I strive to approach everything from a listening perspective, expand my mind and try not to cling to what I was taught or my own ideals. Currently, my relationship with my mother is good. He is stable and healthy. That doesn’t mean we don’t have disagreements, but we managed to build a healthier relationship. It’s daily work, because having discussed and resolved things in the moment does not guarantee that they will not happen again. Now we support each other and we are in a better place. We forgave each other,” Kamila says.