Dear Wanderer:

It is difficult for adult children to  talk about parents in a negative way, whether the parent is dead or alive. There is a sense of betrayal. When the parent is dead, maybe that sense of betrayal is more acute. Why do it then, why talk about one’s  parent negatively then, especially  when the parent is dead and the relationship cannot be corrected where it needs to be  corrected?

I will answer my own question, of course: because if we are  paying  a heavy price for not examining that relationship that formed us (hence Formative Years is a term for our childhood, as  we are formed within the context of our interactions with the parent or parents that are present in our lives), then we pay a high price for a loyalty to a person… who doesn’t benefit from this loyalty. It doesn’t make sense  to suffer when there is no one  to benefit from that suffering.

Your mother  I  am sure was a good mother in many ways and you mentioned some of those  ways. She was not a good mother in the following way: arguing with her children, being verbally aggressive with her daughter and her son.

The reason for her arguing is not that you and your sister were selfish, at least not in the beginning, you were not.  There is nothing a child wants more intensely than to please  the parent. The survival of a child of any  mammal depends on pleasing the parent, it is  inborn.

There is no one less selfish than a young child in his/ her relationship with his mother, nowhere else is empathy for the mother, desire to please and sacrifice for her well being more acute than in early childhood. This desire often lasts a lifetime.

So she  didn’t start arguing with you and your sister, individually because either one of you were selfish.

“Once I break contact with someone who’s ‘into me’, and they move on, if we manage to stay in  touch, I feel like I must win them back”- your use of the verb win makes me think of winning in an argument. Every time there was an argument, she needed to win, didn’t she? And you needed to win. It was a win/lose endeavor.

Love is about Win-Win. Arguing and arguing repeatedly as a way of life, is  about Win-Lose. One of the two wins, and the other loses.

anita