The worst thing your parents ever said

[Sekhmets Daughter]

49. Good Morning...or whatever time of day it is when you read this!

Yes, your mother sounds like so many others...jealousy mixed with disappointment because you were not living up to HER dreams, regardless of how unrealistic those dreams might be. Some people have dark places within them, that can never be fully understood.

My mother had a hard life herself growing up. Between the time I got married and the time I had my first child, almost 8 years, I tried to make allowances for her behavior. After all, she no longer had any control over me or my life, I could afford to be generous...or so I reasoned. When I had three children within 3 years and 4 months, I learned an entirely new perspective. My husband worked long hours and I was pretty much on my own with these infants and toddlers. As they grew and got into more mischief I realized just how brutally mean my own mother had been. How totally unnecessary the beatings and abuse. My father and I had always been close, another resentment on her part, so of course we would go to see them and they would come to visit us. One day she lit into my kids with the same horrific expression on her face with which I was so familiar...I entered the kitchen just in time, or she would have begun swinging, I'm sure. That was it...as much as I loved my father I couldn't remain in such close proximity to her. My husband had wanted to move to FL, after that incident I said I was ready to move and we left NJ in 1987.

I was 56 when my mother died in 2004. At her funeral an aunt, who just likes to needle people, said to me, "You haven't shed a tear, you're so cold. That's your mother lying in that casket" Some of the incidents of my life flashed across my mind before I looked her straight in the eye and said, "Yeah I know, about 45 years too late" That pretty much sums up my feelings toward her. I used to worry that my complete lack of affection for my own mother said something horrible about me. Perhaps it does...I no longer give a shit! One of the great things about growing older is that you finally learn what is important and what is totally superfluous.