MOTHERING ISSUES

I stopped wanting a loving relationship with my mother, I am settling now for a simple civilized relationship, if at all possible.
Ours has been a ragged awkward thorny relationship all along, at best just plain lifeless and loveless.

For years I have questioned the reasons behind this eternal conflict. It seems my mother and I always fail to see the good intentions behind each other's deeds and sayings. I am hyper sensitive to my mother's destructive criticism and she is always finding ill will into what I say or do.
In my childish mind, I conjured fairytales about my biological mother and the step mom my father married to raise us all, the end is always the same, my real mother eventually appears for my salvation.

I ultimately grew old enough to realize this scenario was far fetched and the only way out of such emotional void is to talk myself into the lives of people around me. I have to say my social public relations skills are entirely self made.
For a whole decade, its been one down hill after another, projecting my own defects onto the men and women I associated with. My own ability to love was never the question I thrived to answer, it is how much those people made me feel loved constantly and unconditionally. It got tedious after a while, one person was never enough and I was soon jumping the thin line between betrayal and psychosis.

I just finished reading 2 books with similar themes, "broken verses" and "disobedience". The latter's title was really catchy, I immediately identified with the rebellious side of it. One is the struggle between a daughter and a missing mom and the other between a daughter and a dead father. Despite being set worlds apart, north London and Karachi, despite the varying ethnic identity, Jew and Muslim, the similarities were mind boggling.

How we are as adult women, how we behave, how we love and hate is all connected to how we were as children. How we idolized and feared our parents, how smooth we passed through the stages of growth and how we formed our first ideas about love, hate and sex, all that in summation is what we are as adults.

I finished reading "disobedience" and out of the sublime pages that engulfed me, the page 147 clung to my memory. A paragraph which I read over and over again…..
"It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you back. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble"

The journey with "broken verses" was harder and more painful. As I engrossed myself with the search for answers on behalf of the main character, many more were popping up in my mind about my own situation. Every night was colored with fleeting thoughts and sounds conversing in the vicinity, somehow , somewhere, all the parts of my self were trying to make sense of it all, but it is never easy.

All that remains for us is scrutiny on her part and utter disgust on mine.