If you asked me to recount my happiest Christmas memory, I’m not sure I could select a single one that has not consisted of tension thick enough to carve, wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the inevitable slam of the door as my mother walks out before Christmas pudding has even been served (perfectly timed to avoid having to wash the dishes, so very her). In fact, if there has been one Christmas even close to enjoyable, my mind would still be too occupied with comprehending this anomaly to actually recall it.
My mother and I parted ways almost two years ago, after yet another pretend-happy-family-Christmas turned volatile. The nature of who made the decision to sever the relationship with whom is murky but either way, as the second Christmas estranged from my mother approaches, I realise there is less conflict of emotion this year than there was last year around all of this — that the complicated layers of rejection, abandonment and isolation have eased, leaving in their wake only a dull ache that I have come to understand as grief.
It’s not a type of grief that sees me saddened at the loss of the toxic dynamic that would accompany every holiday event I sought to enjoy with my own family — nor the days of stress, anxiety and irritability leading up to them. I do not miss the inevitable victim-playing, gaslighting. blame-shifting, attention-seeking and bouts of sobbing that come with having a narcissistic parent.
What I grieve is the mother who could not be what I needed her to be.
I grieve the yawning, yearning hollow of years without love, nurture, guidance and belonging — years I raised myself, as best I could. I grieve the innocent, carefree childhood that was never mine to know. I grieve the joy of extended family my children will never experience. It is an abstract grief. A loss of that which I never had, yet profound in its magnitude nonetheless.
And this is what I have come to understand of estrangement: that it is a type of death. It is the loss of someone important in our lives, but a loss that exists in this convoluted sense where — plot twist — the person is still very much alive.
And because of this — because we must still process a loss in this most labyrinth of ways — we must implore ourselves to stand at the burial ground of our estrangement and grieve the end of our relationship the way we would the end of a life.
It was Swiss psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who introduced the five stages of grief into the psychology landscape in 1969. My own healing work over these last two years has taught me that these five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — are imperative in allowing us to move from our complicated and difficult feelings around estrangement to a place of acceptance, and eventual healing.
As in the case of death, we must allow ourselves to grieve however we need, for as long as we need.
We must allow denial to soften the blow of estrangement — of the rejection and abandonment we feel around this — and give ourselves time to come to terms with the reality of the severed relationship.
We must allow ourselves to feel anger at the injustice of it all; to rage until our anger is spent, until we can feel beneath to the sadness and loss surrounding the relationship with our mothers — not just for who they were, but for everything they weren’t.
We must allow ourselves to bargain the way we have always bargained — to hold the belief that if we can only be and do what our mothers want, then maybe they will love us the way we needed and wanted them to — until we can come to the place where we recognise the futility of such things.
We must allow ourselves to dwell in the season of depression that comes with the reality that our mothers could not love us, and the shame we feel that we are somehow to blame for this.
And only when we have gone through these stages; only when we have mourned the mother and relationship we lost — or never had — only then can we find our way to acceptance: to the understanding that although we may continue to struggle with our reality, we will no longer invest our energy into this loss but instead, invest it into the life we have made for ourselves.
In her book, Tiny Little Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed writes:
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realise there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
And it is here — here in this small, quiet room — I will be found this year: creating joyful memories with loved ones that will exist because I made it to be so. That will exist because of everything I have struggled and fought against; because of everything I have strived to make different, and better, than was given to me.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Roberto Nickson on Unsplash