If It’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

My relationship with my mother is complicated. Of course it is. She is a product of her childhood, as we all are, and hers really sucked. Big time. She spent her formative years in the Tarnopol ghetto with a front row seat to starvation, cruelty and death. She and her mother escaped from the ghetto right before it was made Judenrein (Jew free) and were hidden on the attic of a barn for a year before being liberated by Russian soldiers. Upon liberation her legs were so atrophied that she had to learn to walk again.

A relationship with a mother can be complicated.

Nowadays, if you have one traumatic experience, you go for years of counseling. But, back then, after the war, you simply carried on. End of story, or so they thought, but those of us who have been picking up the pieces, know better. Trauma goes on and on.

Dad gathered mom in and sheltered her in the cocoon of his love. He never pushed her. The boundaries of her comfort zone were narrow and carefully maintained. She took excellent physical care of my brother and me, but emotionally it was a long climb down from that attic and I think she’s still stuck somewhere on one of those downward rungs.

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When I was growing up mom had frequent, recurring nightmares about a little girl being chased by the Nazis. Perhaps not surprisingly, the little girl in the dream was her. One morning, as I was getting ready to go to school, mom informed me that she had had the dream again but this time when the little girl turned around she realized that the little girl in the dream was me.

Recently, while we were driving somewhere mom told my kids that when I was a child she tried not to get attached to me because she was afraid something would happen to me. She failed in her attempt “not to get attached.” She never said that. She didn’t have to. I just know it to be true because she is me and I am her and she and I are bound up in that complex and timeless dance between mothers and their daughters.

We don’t all get a Hallmark mother. Some of us get a good enough mother with a great deal of baggage. If I complained to my father he would beseech me, “She’s doing the best she can. What do you want from her?” What indeed? There are no perfect mothers, just as there are no perfect daughters. Today, I thank God for the gift of a mother who emerged from her attic prison, bent but not broken, hobbled but not hopeless.

And from one flawed mother to another, I love you, mom.
Happy Mother’s Day.

Related:

18 Years: Our One Shot at Parenting 

Why This Mom Thinks Her Sweet Spot of Parenting is Right Now 

About Helene Wingens

Helene Wingens has always been passionate about painting pictures with words. She graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in psychology and three years later from Boston University School of Law with a Juris Doctor. In a year long clerkship for an appellate judge Helene honed her writing skills by drafting weekly appellate memoranda. She practiced law until she practically perfected it and after taking a brief twenty year hiatus to raise her three children she began writing a personal blog Her essays have been published in: Scary Mommy, Kveller, The Forward, and Grown and Flown where she is Managing Editor. You can visit Helene's website here

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