Monday, June 1, 2009

Isolation and abandonment

11:47 AM by Christi Bowman

This weekend a friend asked a question and it haunted me:

"If we were born for community why are we isolated by our own private hell?"

It is a question I have asked myself in a different way.

All sex with my husband is not equal. Once is a great while we can actually become one with each other while being intimate. We can not make those moments happen. They are a gift from God. I am unaware, during those times, of my individual self; I only know an us. In the deepest way I am communing with my husband, perfectly, and all is how it should be. The heaviness of isolation lifts and I experience oneness...I am no longer alone. When that perfect community comes to an end my individuality comes crashing down on me and it is so burdensome, so permeating, and so instantaneous that I begin to weep. I feel like a prisoner in my own body; freedom was granted for a small time so that I may experience something grander than myself. But perfect community, in this fallen place, cannot last forever. I must be returned to what was sought after in the garden: individuality and isolation...a cell.

Childhood, I believe, is when a person begins to notice that he or she has the possibility of feeling alone, even in a crowd. My mother did not allow for me to begin reckoning with isolation. I was my mother's and she was mine. I do not know if my mother had what I described above with my father while my brother and I were growing up...that is not for me to judge. I do know that my mother and I had a very unhealthy attachment. I met emotional needs for my mother that she should have only let my father meet. No, we did not have a sexual bond, but we were very intimate none the less. She used me to fill up her empty spaces. She called us "best friends" many times, and besides work and school, we were rarely, if ever, apart. I was her sidekick and she would be tremendously upset, to the point of rejection, if I dared to step outside the parameters she had set. My mother insisted that she know me inside and out and I had no choice but to oblige; in return, she was very open with me as well. I knew things about her relationships that no child should have to bear. The roles of adult and child were extremely blurred; there were no boundaries.

The other day she told me in no uncertain terms that she could never forget what I did to her when I rebelled from age eighteen through twenty. She confirmed that my rebellion was the reason that we could not have a good relationship even today...almost fifteen years later. At first I did not understand how spending just two years, a mere fraction of the time I spent being her constant companion, trying to figure out who I was could be so heinous. But, in light of isolation I am beginning to figure it out.

My mother has abandonment issues. She has told me a countless number of times how her mother would leave for several days only to come home smelling of sex and booze. She recounts having to go into the bars on several occasions to pull her mother out...I am not sure why her father made that her job, but nevertheless, from what I hear, it was. At a young age her parents got a divorce and although she loved her mother dearly, she had to choose her father because she did not trust her mother. This so infuriated her mother that she did not see my mother again until my mother asked to come live with her at the age of twenty after a bad break up with a fiance. At twenty, now an adult, my mother wanted to talk about the past with her mother in an attempt to heal, I assume. Her mother would have nothing to do with the discussion and would deny any hurt she had ever caused my mother.

I do not believe that my mother is angry with me for the things I did during those two years of my life, although those are what she likes to focus on. I believe that she is angry because she felt that I abandoned her. She was never able to heal from the abandonment of her past. She is angry because she allowed herself to love deeply once more only to feel abandoned once more. I am feeling the force of her anger for both scenarios.

What she does not realize is that her unhealthy relationship with me was doomed the moment she set it into motion. She should never have put that much stock in a mother daughter relationship; that level of need should have been reserved for her husband only. I was always the child bound to leave at some point in time and begin a new life with my spouse. Because of my mother's abandonment issues I was never given the blessing to leave. Instead I was smothered and I wriggled free in unhealthy ways...but I was never free.

Without my mother's blessing I have lived in the tension of trying to appease her and live my life at the same time. For my mental health and the health of my immediate family the time to appease her must come to an end; it was a worthless pursuit anyway since, after my choices, she refused to be appeased. I must learn to move forward without the continual seeking of her blessing. True to who she has always been, when I quit seeking her blessing she rejected me. Someone once told me that if I do not forgive my mother I will become her. I am seeing this play out in my own mother. My mother cannot forgive her mother. My mother now sits in denial of the hurt she has caused and is abandoning me.

Labels: abandonment, abuse, isolation, ment

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