Dear Nichole:

(I just realized that you posted a reply and a question for me in your last thread about a month ago and I didn’t respond to it- I wasn’t aware of that post, otherwise I would have responded to it).

I read this thread, your heartache. Of course you loved and love your mother. There is no person more important to a child than her parent, usually the mother. We love our mothers when we are babies, we love her throughout our childhoods (sometimes we forget that we do, when we are angry), and we love her for the rest of our lives.

It doesn’t matter who the mother is, it doesn’t matter if she didn’t really love us, if she was not even there, we love her anyway. Truly, the real unconditional love is the love of a child for her mother.

You asked for help. The help I am offering you is to suggest to you that you keep your thinking congruent with reality: accept your love for her as the unconditional love you always had for her. Accept it that she had other priorities throughout your life with her and you were far from being the first priority. Accept that in the context of your relationship with her you were not the guilty one. She was.

It is not you who failed her. She failed you. Her death doesn’t change this fact.

And yet, her pain was real, what drove her to her addiction, what kept her in it, the consequence of it, the vomiting, amputation, she was in a lot of pain. And now her pain is over. All that pain is no more, not for her.

What is left is that love you have for her, that need for her that has never gone away. We keep loving our mothers, we keep needing them, no matter what. We try to free ourselves from loving her when that love harms us, we get angry, we yell sometimes, but we keep loving her underneath.

Now, you feel nothing but that love and that need and she is no longer alive, so there is no hope for a better relationship. There is much sadness in this.

Please do post again and for as long as I am on the computer I will be looking for your posts and respond the moment I realize that you posted.

anita