Dear Namaste87:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words. I hope you don’t mind my long post here- it helps me to develop my thinking as a result of reading yours:

The hope to  see one’s mother happy is a universal hope of children of unhappy mothers. This hope doesn’t disappear when a child becomes an adult- it still feels euphoric/ the best feeling in the world to imagine one’s mother happy. About doing this or that, or something being done by someone else to make the mother happy (“I thought if I did this, it would make my mum happy again. If my father won a big contract, she would be happy”)-

It took me a long time to truly understand that really, really.. there is nothing I can do to make her happy. I still wish that she was happy. I am smiling right now at the thought/ image of her being happy, but I know that I was not, can not, would never be able to make that happen. When I used to feel very badly imagining her being hurt about my choice to not be in contact with her, at one point on, I countered that imagining with saying to myself… wait, wait.. she wasn’t happy when I was in her life every day, year after year.. when I was a little girl and loved her completely, she wasn’t happy then.. if I got back into her life now, why would that make her happy.. she would surely still be unhappy.

Your sister was 14 when you were in your early 20s. My sister is 6 years younger than me and while I stayed at home all the time when not in school, my sister was out a whole lot, busy with friends etc., but when I left the country at 24, my sister was alone with my mother for the first time, and that’s when she was hurt the most.

At 14, your sister walked into the ocean in an attempt to end her life following a confrontation with your mother, and yet, after that, your mother did not change her ways. What kind of cold indifference does it take for a mother to not consider her ways following such an event, it has to be a frozen heart in her chest… at least when it comes to her daughter.

“I believe one cannot help a person who doesn’t want to help oneself for a prolonged period of time”- at one point I thought to myself something like: wait.. all this time I thought I could help my mother and all this time, she didn’t see me as a person capable of helping her. She looked up to other people.. never looked up to me as someone resourceful or capable .. or valuable.

Person X is not open to be helped by person Y, when X does not value Y.

“My husband sometimes tells me to treat my mother like a patient and discount her behaviour. But, I do not have the professional training to do so and as Pink pointed out in her post…It’s hard to keep my guard up!”- when it comes to our mothers, no matter our professional training, we can’t see them as.. just people, or patients.. they meant/ mean too  much to us… which brings me to the thought I had yesterday in regard to your story: you will have a lot of power to help/ make a difference in your child’s experience of life,  while having no power to help/ make a difference in your mother’s experience of life. This is why better invest in your child, and no longer in your mother.

anita