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Even if we cut off all contact with the mother, invisible bonds bind us forever. And it is almost impossible to get away from the internal dialogue that – whether we like it or not – affects our lives. Two heroines shared their story.
“I admired her, loved and at the same time pulled away”
Olga, 45 years
“My mother divorced my father when I was five years old. After their divorce, I lived with my grandmother. Sometimes my mother took me away for the weekend, and we almost always spent time in the company of one of her admirers. She married one of them, we began to live together, and soon my sister Oksana was born. And after a couple of years, my mother broke up with him, experienced it hard and started drinking.
I sat with my sister, fed her, comforted her when she cried. I tried to do everything so that my grandmother would not find out about anything.
I wanted to be with my mom, but it was getting harder. Increasingly, she found herself drunk in the evening and in the same drunken company.
One day her friend came into our room and picked up Oksana in her arms. It seemed to me that she would offend her, drop her. She ran to the kitchen, cried, asked to give her sister. I remember how my mother turned, looked at me with her slightly slanting beautiful eyes and asked with a challenge: “Don’t you trust me? Go, everything will be fine…”
But nothing was good. Grandma took us to her. From her telephone conversations, I realized that my mother became very ill. She ended up in the hospital. Grandma often cried. If I found her in tears, I said: “Go, my girl, to your room.” Even as a child, I realized: when people have nothing to say, she asks you to leave. As if you can get out of pain with ease, like out of a room …
However, my mother found the strength to cope. When I was in the last grades of school, we began to live together again.
She had a new man – her mother was true to herself and did not remain alone. I watched as she was about to leave the house, looking in the mirror, powdering and raising her eyebrows to make up her eyelashes. She had the lightness of a beautiful bird, and nothing could break her attractive feminine power. I admired her, loved and at the same time pulled away. I was afraid of the pain that was always associated with my mother.
I had a good relationship with her new friend, but I noticed that Oksana began to avoid him. One day, the sister confessed that when they were watching TV, he began to stroke her leg until she got up and left the room. I told my mom, but she didn’t believe me. Said my sister was always a little liar.
And then he left his mother, taking, as it turned out, jewelry and money. This again pushed her to a breakdown, she began to drink. I graduated from high school, entered the evening department and went to work. My sister was taken back by her grandmother. Since then, Oksana has completely stopped talking to her mother, she could not forgive her. I, overcoming internal resistance, called my mother.
That day she did not answer me for a long time. Feeling something, I urgently took a taxi and rushed to her
I found my mother in the bath. She had an asthma attack, she could not move. I called an ambulance. I remember this endless flight of a car with a siren, then a gurney along the corridor to the intensive care unit.
For a week I froze from calls and lived in anticipation of the news of what could not be prepared for. But mom survived. I was offered not to leave her in the hospital and immediately take her home. She barely moved and, to my horror, completely dependent on me. But I couldn’t leave her.
She is alive. She’s nearby. This feeling was so strong that it blocked everything that I had carried in myself since childhood. For the next two months, she learned to live again, to walk on a walker.
When we first went outside together, my mother leaned on me and was almost weightless. She squinted in the bright winter sun, took her first steps, and it seemed to me that we had changed places. Now I am her mother and she is my child. And everything was smooth between us. We start life over. And now I have nothing to forgive her for. And a week later, my mother was gone.
“We don’t need to play non-existent intimacy”
Oksana, 38 years old
Everything ended between me and my mother when I was thirteen years old. When this person left us, I remember she was sitting on the floor and looking at a vase of flowers. “Beautiful, right? He had taste,” she said. Next to her was a glass of red wine. “He had nothing. Hate him. It’s good that he’s gone,” I said.
She looked at me with hatred. His departure destroyed both my mother and our relationship with her. My grandmother took me again – our kind angel, who was always there.
Olya and her mother got along better, and our meetings ended in tears and quarrels, until I realized that we don’t need to play non-existent intimacy.
One day I told her, “Imagine if you didn’t have a second child. And never call me again.” We stopped talking
I got the news about her through my sister. I knew that she was in the hospital, but I decided that even if I call her now, it will not change anything. Everything has been broken between us. My childhood and what my sister and I experienced cannot be changed.
I rarely spoke to anyone about my mother, I just cut her out of my life. But suddenly she came to me. Young, beautiful, she smiled at me, a little one: “Well, why did we quarrel with you like that. Let’s make peace. Run to me.” I woke up, and on the same day I learned from my sister that I would never run to my mother again. She died. I couldn’t imagine how hard it is to live with that never. I failed to forgive her in time. And forgiveness came to me only after her death.