Getting Water from a Stone

We recently had Mother's Day. For years, my Mother's Day celebrations were a bit unusual, compared to other people's.

There was my "real" Mom, Patricia, who gave birth to me, and from whose arms I was wrested at the tender age of five years old. From age five to about 14, it was made my "duty" to call my mother on Mother's Day, and on her birthday, and on Christmas and Easter, etc etc. My phone calls were carefully overheard. I had to tell my mother I loved her, and I dutifully did so.

What I wasn't allowed to say was how desperately I loved her and missed her, and how my soul had died inside from the lack of her, and how I couldn't feel anything because of my painful separation from her, and how I had shoved all my love, all my feelings, deep down inside me in order to follow the rules, so that I might, for a few minutes each year, hear her voice, and maybe be allowed to see her.

That situation crippled me for life. Oh yes, I have learned to cope. I have even come to terms with what people did, and understood why they did it. And I have got on with my life, learning to love once again.

But my relationships have all been screwed, and it is hard work for me to become "normal," and it's an ongoing struggle.

Albeit one I am grateful for. At least I DID reunite with my mother, and I DID come to know her a bit, and though I had developed a habit of not listening to anyone, I was eventually able to hear her advice, even though she might not have lived long enough to know that.

Moving on...

I had also to wish my Grandma a happy Mother's Day. Grandma wanted everyone to think I was her daughter, not her granddaughter. I dutifully told her I loved her, when beneath that I hated her for removing me from my mother. And beneath that, I loved her for making sure I was kept in contact, a very distant and infrequent contact, but she did make sure I kept in contact with my mother.

And beneath that, I love her because she was my Grandma.

Then my father remarried, and I was told to love my new Stepmother, which I did. Not much choice in anything in my early years! Minnie won my heart on her own terms, first with her cream-cheese-and-cherry-pie, after which I felt she could do no wrong. And later, with her questions about feelings, questions I had never heard before because my father and grandparents didn't want to know the truth. Questions I didn't understand at the time, because I had sequestered my feelings somewhere where even I didn't know they were. But questions which nevertheless came back to me when I was old enough to start dealing with all the s**t that had befallen me.

Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, Easter, birthdays...they were all spent with people who loved me, who I loved, and all of them were spent apart from the people I loved.

Then I became a mother myself. I was still not "fixed" from the injuries of my youth, but my Daughter dragged me up above water, just by existing. Ever so slowly, I began to learn what love was really about - how you can't really help yourself, how there is no way to ignore this other being. We think it's the infants that are helpless. No, it's the mothers - we can't help ourselves where our young are concerned.

And we usually go on to make a bunch of mistakes regarding our offspring. Some people are too indulgent. Some too strict. We spend an awful lot of time worrying about them, and not enough time enjoying them.

It's my Daughter who has taught me the most about a Mother's love, and she who has motivated me to do countless things I would never have considered.

This morning, it's the protein or vitamin shake I'm having for breakfast. I wouldn't say it's delicious - there's no where NEAR enough sugar in it for that! But it's blueberries and chocolate almond milk and real cranberry juice and green powder. It makes my Daughter happy to think I'm drinking this stuff, and it beats making breakfast.

But it got me thinking as I was using the hand blender to mix it all up, who came up with the idea to get milk from almonds? Almonds, in my experience, have very little liquid in them. It certainly wouldn't have occurred to me to try to produce any large amounts of liquid from them!

This is quite an age we live in. We have surpassed our own ability to comprehend our world. We now have so much information we don't know how to process it. We can make such technological gadgets that revolutionize how we do things, that anybody over 15 can't take it all in. Our ability to understand our own lives decreases exponentially with each decade we claim in our lives.

Life is as confusing and bewildering for most of us over 50 as it was to me, as a little girl, not understanding how I could make things work to my advantage, ie, how to get my mommy back.

But if we can get milk from almonds, we may yet one day get water, or blood, from stones.