Today is a better day, I can feel it. It doesn’t even matter that it’s Valentine’s Day, the day after a storm is always more positive and uplifting than the day of. My mother is still in her room and hasn’t left since but that’s okay. At this point, I am over the whole situation. I don’t even want her to talk to me until she is ready to move on from this and go foreward because if we’re not moving forward in life, we are dying. Literally.
Mike is going into work later then usual today which is great because he can help with the kids somewhat and I need all the help I can get because Nate still has a slight fever and the poor guy goes from crying out of nowhere to acting totally fine and playing around like nothing is wrong. It’s truly the worst when kids are sick, especially the younger they are because they can’t tell you how they’re feeling or anything.
So about a week ago, I had a pretty big epiphany. It’s interesting how as kids we internalize certain sayings that we see or hear our parents live by and these seemingly unimportant ideas govern the rest of our lives without us even realizing it. Well, lately I have noticed one of those very ideas and how messed up it really was.
“We hurt those we love the most”, this is what my mom said to me more then once in my life and what I have always taken as plain fact. How messed up is that? This simple statement constitutes the idea that if we are not at turmoil with those we love or aren’t in some kind of conflict with them, that it’s not true or genuine love in some way.
Of course I am not going to hold this against my mother since I know that that’s probably the only way she’s ever lived her life and it’s all she’s ever really known. I don’t know much about her childhood but I know that that belief must have come from somewhere, early on in her young life.
Growing up, I realize just how much I was affected by this belief. I watched my mom’s relationship with my stepdad and all the pain that that relationship caused and brought into our lives and I thought that if love isn’t a rollercoaster, it’s just not real love. I used to compare my mom’s love story to the movie Titanic because it truly was a beautiful love story in the beginning. Something akin to “boy realizes that he can’t live without that one special girl and after messing up royally, is driven not to give up on winning back her love at all cost.” Although as long as it took him to win her back, once he had her, he ended up hurting her again.
I remember looking at my mom’s relationship and being in awe, thinking how special their relationship really was when in reality it was just not healthy at all. I thought that people who have been together forever and don’t fight much and just get along all the time are not in love, they are just in a companionship. And for the longest time that is not the love I wanted for myself.
Now, at 27 years old I can finally say with one hundred percent certainty that my view of love was skewed based on what I saw around me. And it didn’t only go into romantic love, it also reached those close family and friends’ relationships. I thought because my mom and I also had a relationship where it was the best ever and then would plummet unexpectedly that that was just a display of how strong and real our mother-daughter bond really was.
All in all, I can finally see things clearly now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen things so clearly in my life. Sure it’s going to take me a lifetime to heal these broken perceptions of significant things such as love and different types of relationships but the fact that I see them for what they really are now is a huge step in the right direction.
The Beauty in the Pain 