processing my relationship with my parents
processing my relationship with my parents
Meme swiped from this helpful Insta account.
There’s always multiple paths to get to where you want to go in life. Some are littered with more painful potholes and booby traps than others. Ultimately, we lived with my father for almost a decade. It was both wonderfully healing, and maddening. Grateful for my relationship with both my parents, complex and multifaceted as it is.
I've been in an altogether different headspace over the past few weeks, which is to be expected what with my mother's passing, our move, rearranged living circumstances, etc.
I'm listening to a song right now (Okay, it's Panic! At the Disco!) that just sang the line, "Hey kid, you'll never leave this town," and it's a funny coincidence because I was always afraid of being that kid.
The kid who'd be agonizingly stuck in Middle-o-Nowhere, Texas, with a perpetual "present tense" that never changed.
And now, 12 years later, I'm living in my childhood home (EW?)--but feeling none of that.
If you'd been able to show me a "preview" of now, even a month or two ago, I would have been amazed. (Initially, I was going to say "disbelieving", but quite clearly I WAS able to believe it because otherwise, it wouldn't have happened! Ha!)
No, all the bad tidings that I feared a move into this place would bring were really just paranoid nonsense.
No, really. It's been better than expected.
An acre and a third out in the country versus a cramped, mildewy apartment is heaven.
The kids are so free and happy here. We already have gardening plans in the works, and we're gonna plant a Magnolia tree with my son's placenta (finally), in honor of my mama. Magnolias were my mom's favorite tree, and the miserable ordeal that ended with her passing, started with her falling and breaking a hip--right after my fourth child's amazingly wonderful home-birth.
It's even kind of...nice--refreshing (?)....living with my dad.
Three years ago, he wasn't speaking to me. Two years ago, he had only recently met my then-one-year-old daughter, and still wasn't speaking to my husband.
Now, I brew coffee for both of us in the morning, and he sometimes calls me on my cell phone to ask jokingly about room service.
Being around the kids seems to energize and mellow my dad, and he's finally lost some of the "grouchy old mean-guy" disposition--which he even had when *I* was a kid. It might be the big-pharma antidepressants he's on, but I'll take it.
I no longer feel that he's trying to usurp my power or strongarm my family with his "advice" and opinions--which, it's about damn time.
My dad says he finally wants to travel--or in his words, "disappear over the summer", and with us here to care for his cats, he can do that without guilt or worry. Those cats were my mother's babies--Ginger and Pepper (AKA "The Spice Girls" - Yep, she really did call them that--LOL). They are the two most paranoid, skittish Persians I've ever seen.
My sweet friend did an intuitive reading for me recently, and she said (among other things that were spot-on) that the feeling she was getting from my mom was "ecstatic" - like, almost manic, thrilled, brilliant happiness.
She was almost hesitant to say it...as if a recently departed soul shouldn't be coming through that way! My husband (another creepily-accurate intuitive) actually used the same word about her energy earlier. Isn't that curious??
>>A few weeks later, we found out baby #5 was coming to join our family, and the "ecstatic" feeling from my departed mama all made sense--!!
The way that they explained it was that my mom's greatest desire was always to bring her family closer together.
She ached, those years that my dad and I didn't speak. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if she is "checking in" on us, and feeling like, "HA! Finally, they get it!"
In a way, her ordeal has healed mine and my dad's relationship in ways that may never have happened otherwise--and I think she's enjoying a sort of "last laugh" about that.
She used to say things like "Love will prevail!" all the time. You were right after all, Mama...
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