#settingmyselffree | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

myresonanttruths · 8 years ago

Text

Landmark Moments

This last weekend marked some landmark moments for me. Sometimes such moments really pass so quickly we don’t catch them until later when we look back and realise that it was there that a crucial decision was made, a person we didn’t know would be vital to us came into our lives, a word that we heard sank deep into our consciousness to slowly transform the way that we see ourselves and everything else around us.

Last weekend, my brother got married.

It’s certainly a landmark moment in his life, and I’m happy to have seen him go through it so happy and satisfied with how everything turned out. I’m sure we’ve all heard some horror wedding day stories; I’ve even witnessed one of those. Landmark and not pretty. It happens, though, and we just have to deal with it.

My brother’s wedding was a landmark for me not because of how well or badly it went, but because of how I was aware that I was witnessing it through different lenses, as different parts of myself.

A long time ago when I was six and he was three, my brother and I were victims in an assault. As such things will, our lives were irrevocably changed. There are scars we still bear, physically, and recently I’ve become aware of just how deep some of the emotional scars go, though all my life I’ve been conscious about wanting to work on them and to make sure that having them wouldn’t mean that I would fade away to nothing, into perpetual victim-hood.

Some changes, though, we don’t realise because they happen so quickly. Landmark moments, all over again, passing in a frantic, panicked flash, setting in so deep that you believe what you learnt through them forever after.

We lost our mother that day, and that made all the last moments I had with her all the more poignant. Which also means that what she said perhaps went all out of context. It so happened that day that we had quarreled - over what I no longer remember - but some unfortunate words were said. Like “I hate you!” in the way that impotent six-year-olds feeling too strongly their helplessness in the world can cry out. Like “Then maybe Mummy should go and die” in the way that parents, also frustrated with dealing all day with children still not yet old enough to know better can vent. And it felt like we jinxed it - like I jinxed it. Because she did die that day and so it was my fault for having made her say it.

I know now, having had that sit in the forefront of my mind since the day of the incident, that I carried guilt far greater than I should have for most of my childhood into early adulthood. It showed up in the way I chose guys to have relationships with and in the way I allowed myself to be treated by them. In time I forgave myself for that moment, for something I hadn’t meant that had only come out because I was angry and small and helpless. And six years old. I still am conscious about what I say when I get angry though - I would rather bite my tongue and brood than to say something I might spend the rest of my life regretting.

Another landmark moment, the implications of which have only fully hit me recently, was right after the attack had started, and my mother, dashing through the room had shouted to me, “Look after your brother!”

I’m sure my mother hadn’t meant for me to take that instruction and carry it around with me forever. And though, in our culture, older siblings are supposed to watch over younger siblings, I’m sure that she didn’t mean it in the sense that I had to do my level best to become a surrogate mother to my brother in her absence. I don’t think she planned to die that day in truth and it was a crisis-moment instruction.

It has only been recently that I have come to realise how seriously I had taken that instruction in that moment. Not just on the day itself, trying to hide my brother and then trying to sit on him to shield him when we were being attacked, but afterward. I never consciously thought about it, but the day I was told that my mother had passed away and wouldn’t be coming home from hospital like we had, I had taken on motherhood.

It wasn’t a mantle I took on consciously or willingly. Indeed, it often felt that being an older sister to an energetic, mischievous younger brother was trial enough. There were times when I tried - I have memories of sponging him down when he was ill with fever late into the night when I was 8 or 9 years old, even though there were adults around to do it. And though we didn’t always get along, I held myself responsible for his state of well-being and happiness, which is a bit of a rough do when one has so much personal trauma that one is trying to grapple with as well. Sometimes I was a good sister and took care of him; sometimes I would be a bad sister and ignore him or tease him. That might be the normal run of things; I didn’t understand that. I only knew that I often felt bad, like I was guilty for wanting to abandon him, and resentful that I had to be the one to care for him, and sad because I missed my mother and the wisdom that I imagined that she would have had to know what to do.

I was 18 when I became a bit more conscious about this choice to try to be a substitute maternal figure though I didn’t phrase it quite like that even to myself. I reasoned that my brother felt lonely and frustrated because my father had remarried and we didn’t get along well with my stepmother in the early days. I reasoned to myself: if he can’t talk to either of them, and I know from experience that his peers were as unlikely to be able to understand some of the struggles we have given our background as mine had been, then he has no one else left but me. I was also worried that if he didn’t have anything but angry feelings towards female figures, then he would eventually turn out to be a really awful husband to some poor girl. And so I decided that it was my job to try to make sure none of that happened. My timing was terrible though. He was 15 and angry with the world, and determined to indulge his view that no one cared to listen to him and that no one cared about him, even though I was right there making an effort through all the tantrums and grumps and swearing.

I felt disappointed in our relationship, and how it turned out. I felt rejected and insufficient and unappreciated. When we were older, I tried writing an email to my brother to share with him how I felt, only to have him write back: “Your email is too long. I don’t want to read it” and it hurt tremendously. Since I got married, I spent a lot of time talking to my husband about my frustration with the lack of relationship I feel with my brother and with my seeming inability to stop reaching out even though I kept getting rejected. Why would I be so stupid, to keep going where I know from experience is only going to get me hurt?

And then, recently, it came home to me why rejection from my brother hurts as much as it does: when I am rejected, I perceive the rejection not just as a sister, but also as a mother. In the latter role, I was doomed to fail from the start. At 6, no one is ready or equipped. Even at 18, I wasn’t ready to be a mother - and certainly not to a belligerent 15 year old. When my brother attempted suicide once when he was 17, I was besieged by fear and grief and helplessness - and an immense sense of failure. I had failed my brother-son. Truly, it should have been that my mother survived and I did not during the attack. Why did it turn out so different then?

I am aware now of how this invisible, subconscious identity which I adopted has created an underlying tension for me all this time. It is in our relationship - when I am rejected, I take the rejected as two entities; when I am acknowledged, I am only acknowledged as one. The journey of motherhood has already played out in my life and a part of me wonders what it is for because there has been no appreciation, no recognition for efforts or sacrifices made... How could there be? Even I hadn’t realised till recently how much I saw myself in the role of the surrogate mother- how could anyone else?

And so, when he got married last weekend, it felt like I was attending it as two people: as the loving, somewhat goofy older sister - even though he is 35 now and has been a man for some time, a part of me seems caught in the past where I played up the goofball to my then-shy younger brother who was lacking in self-esteem and -confidence that he could feel that, at least with me, he was the sensible, stable one - as well as the perennially unacknowledged surrogate mother who was giving away her only son to another woman to love and to care for. With the mother who exists to no one but me, there is no possibility of ‘a daughter gained’. I am just the sister who will tease her younger brother by wishing his bride a very serious “good luck - you’re going to need it”.

I recognise that I have an opportunity now, a choice I can consciously make for myself where I perceived I had been given no choice before. I can choose how to move forward in this relationship with my brother. And I can choose how to acknowledge this mother that has been quietly biding, hiding in the background, heavily invested in the happiness of another person as only a mother can be. I was not always successful in meeting my ideal of what I think being a mother needs to be - in fact, I failed more often than not. But it has shaped who I am, what I am like, and how I appear to others. I have been told by others, in these words, that I am “very motherly” or that I “have a strong maternal energy” or that they are sure that “you’ll be a wonderful mother yourself one day”. I am conscious of how there is a part of me that wants to care for others - and that meant things like making myself the designated sober person who would make sure everyone got home from a night out all right in my twenties. Or making that extra effort for those whom I love. But I wouldn’t accept these comments that were a kind of indicator that I was at least partly successful in my ‘mothering’ endeavours. I ignored them or laughed them off or pretended to be insulted by them when, really, I was embarrassed and, strangely, ashamed.

I understand that better now: I feel ashamed and undeserving of acknowledgement because I feel like I failed at it from the start. Of course I did. No one is ever able to fully substitute for someone else. We each bring something unique and different to the table; had my mother lived, she would not have mothered us in the way I had tried to mother my brother, most likely.

So although there is a part of me that feels sad that this mother is not going to be acknowledged by the one she has adopted as her child for most of her life, I see that the most important acknowledgement is not from him: it is from myself. I need to allow myself to see the times when I did the best job that I could; to allow myself to see the depth of love that I have taught myself to stretch to. I need to allow also that it was a huge challenge I inadvertently took on - and that no one expected it of me except myself.

I also need to recognise that what I went through was and also wasn’t motherhood. It has given me a lot of anxiety about the burdens and sacrifices and thankless aspects of motherhood but the beliefs that I carry now about motherhood are not representative of what is truly motherhood. I have fear that it is something that is forced upon one, that one can never be ready, that one will always fall short and be inadequate, that I have no choice but to allow it anyway. Motherhood can sometimes be all those things, but they needn’t be. Motherhood can mean many different things and take many different forms. There are social expectations to be sure, but, to society at least, I am not and have not been expected to fulfill any of those for my brother. I can choose now to let that go - it was maybe what was needed in the past, but he’s his own person now, and he has found his way to adulthood, to the discovery of what makes his life meaningful, and into a relationship that makes him (and his wife) happy enough that they want to build a life together. And, if I am ever so fortunate to find myself with child, it will be a different experience because, this time, it is my choice. I am older and know different things. I have stretched the limits of how I can love and my child will help me stretch those boundaries even more. And with that child, I will more fully be a mother - in my own eyes, to the eyes of everyone else and to the child.

I am still afraid when I think of motherhood and what changes it will bring to my life - I would be truly foolish if I had no anxiety whatsoever - but it has been a long, arduous journey just to get here, to this understanding. After 32 years of surrogate motherhood, I am now free to live my life. Again, not unlike the travails of motherhood - every fortunate woman gets to this stage at some point, and for me the moment is bittersweet. I am afraid, but I am excited - I am free to choose motherhood, this time, and I am privileged to know that whatever it brings, I will not let it be the breaking of me.

#landmarkmoment #revelation #self-awareness #growth #lifeaftertrauma #settingmyselffree #letgo

0 notes