Adult Children Helping Other Adult Children

For the past week or so my soul has been reeling from emotions I am having a difficult time articulating.

That's not like me--well--not the new me.

For the past thirteen years I have been in codependent recovery and I have done everything I can to get what I feel out in the open, and in addition--to be able to name the feelings I once felt so compelled to deny.

Through daily journaling, meditating and many bouts of crying in hot epsom salt baths, I have incrementally learned to stand up for the little girl in me that was silenced so many years ago.

The old me was so repressed I couldn't tell you what my favorite color was or what my favorite foods were. I could--on the other hand tell you what my family members loved to eat, and what colors they preferred over others.

The old me was accustomed to tuning out.  It was easier to tune myself out, than it was to be tuned out by others first.

Last week my mother called and admitted that everything I wrote in my books about her and her emotional abuse towards me was true.

And although I consciously know it is validation I have always sought after, this was not the kind of parental validation I was seeking.

For it to be validated--that yes--all the emotional abuse I have said I have suffered is valid--is quite frankly bazaar.

I wonder, "Would my mother have ever come to me on her own, had I not exposed our family secrets in print, or would she have taken that validation to her grave?"

And too I wonder, "For how long has my mother known the truth? For how long has my mother kept her acknowledgments from me--and why?"

For an entire lifetime I internalized her inability to love and nurture me in an authentic way as a symptom of MY lack--In my mind--I could hear my spirit feeling--that I was simply never enough.

And now, here I am a woman of forty seven, and the daughter of a woman almost seventy, and still splinters of me wonder--in spite of all my time spent in recovery--why I wasn't enough to acknowledge before I wrote my books?

Consciously I understand that I am healing on deeper levels than ever before, and that I am now sort of in a cosmic limbo of sorts--and the psychological soul I am has every right to ask questions and to feel the peculiar emotions that are stirring up now.

But what I feel happening now is--it is not my inner child that is hurting anymore.  Today, it is the woman who is wise enough to comprehend what she has lost.  I never had a mother I could call my friend. I never had a mother I could completely trust.  I never had a mother that I knew I could cling to when life got rough.

It is not my inner child that stirs this blustery evening here in NY...it is the woman in me...the mother in me...who understands that time--and alcoholism has stolen from me--the love of a mother I deserved--and who is also aware that time cannot give the mother and daughter we are--a do over.

Beneath all the grieving my adult self feels like she is doing--I caution myself to remember--that my mother and her mother never got their do over either...

I want to personally thank all the recent visitors to my blog, like Sandra, Christopher, Karen, Judy, Anonymous and others who have truly encouraged me during this time.

Knowing that something as painful as what I am experiencing, is in someway helping other ACoA face their own pain--is what motivated me to get my ass of my couch this afternoon and write this post.

You are all loved...and we are all lovable...no matter who in our life was able to validate those truths...

Namaste...