How I Fell in Love With My Mother

It took me nearly sixty years, but I think I finally have fallen in love with my mother. I will never be as much in love with my mother as I was with my father, but I had an unusual breakthrough.

What woman isn’t ‘in love’ with their mother? It’s why they shop together and bake together, and share women stories and woman jokes. It’s why they fix each other’s hair and eat chocolates together and put on nail polish together. It’s why they pass jewelry back and forth and pass lace from one’s wedding dress…and are one of the first to hold a grandbaby and give advice on baby care.

I imagine they do all kinds of stuff in some woman-love-kinship-bond that I never really experienced so much with my own mother. Maybe I don’t even know what is normal in this regard. I know that it’s normal for very young girls to be in love with their Daddy…but…what about their Mommy?

I am grateful to God for every twist and turn my personal journey has taken me to this point. I honestly could have never arrived here by any other route, I am certain. It really took a series of interactions with another descendant of Thomas Kennedy to open my eyes in a new way to how generational spirits may have stolen my mother’s life from her.

The more I know, it seems quite ugly to me, and I only wish that I had been able to ask my mother the things I would now want to ask her when she was living. What I have now discovered doesn’t excuse my mother’s behavior at times and its damage, but it gives me a glimpse into how she might have been had not her family seemingly decided she was curse-worthy.

I am not saying they knew what they were doing, but it does make me wonder at the dynamics. Every family with the level of dysfunction that was in my mother’s clan inevitably needs a scapegoat, and my beautiful, intelligent, creative, talented, hard-working, ambitious mother was to be the one. I only wish I had more photos than the one single photo discovered which might have shown my mother’s natural teeth before a brother of hers knocked them out of her mouth in April 1946.

My mother mentioned this incident once or twice but didn’t articulate in a way that I paid attention to. I was too affected by her general condition at that point in her life to ask the right questions and follow the details. She mentioned places and events and universities and more that existed in some little town in West Virginia.

How was I to even know what to ask?

Even when I got her diaries after her death and browsed parts, my eyes were blinded to the meaning of certain notations. I already had the family narrative of my mother embedded in me; the little I was told about her younger years was biased and confirmed my experiences with her in some way.

Now, there are just too many questions and connecting of dots–dots that are like the silence of crickets in this family legacy. There was only one relative, and not a blood relation, who tried to tell me what was known. I do believe she told me either what she knew, or, what she felt could be told to me or alluded to. I honestly don’t know what went on, but there are several aspects of my mother’s life story that I’m not buying.

I suppose the thought process I now have at nearly 60 years old is even more mature than I had at 35, or at 25…or at…16 years old. I’ve been around the block with a lot of things in my life by now, but the interactions in the past two years with a family member was truly eye opening, taking me around a block that I found quite shocking, quite cruel, and seemingly quite demonically energized.

And that is the story of how I fell in love with my mother. After all these years.

I do plan to continue writing out some of my life stories from my younger years, but I need to give some type of caveat as I continue. Again, stories must be written with the thoughts and emotions, perceptions and facts that existed in the event (not sanitized), yet there is new information that seems to retroactively soften the way I might now tell some things.

Trauma and healing are complex processes, and anything less than authentic exploration and wrestling through the difficulties produces what Jesus described as whitewashed tombs.

For starters, how did my mother’s very name become as though a curse word? To mock someone as “Margaret-like” is quite telling of how family viewed my mother. Imagine your own name being inserted by extended family members to induce shame and mockery.

In a family that valued the passing down of names, I find that astonishing. More on many things and interesting family research, to come.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I think I now know why when I was in foster care in 11th grade you wrote me a strange message in my children’s bible, selecting the story of Joseph. I once showed these strange notes to a Pastor when younger and he wondered why you didn’t select the story of the Prodigal Son. Since most everything you did seemed strange, and you certainly didn’t show randomness. Everything you did that was bizarre, had some deeper meaning in your mind.

So, you chose a biblical story about jealous siblings throwing their brother into a pit. Got it. Finally, I got it. ❤️