Not so maternal mother

My mother was a difficult person to deal with at the best of times. Raised on a farm near Belfast by a conservative Afrikaner family, I doubt if she was smothered in love and affection. She did manage to complete some schooling and become a nurse and by joining the FANY's (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) in the second world war, escaped the confines of the farming community of the Lowveld and went off to discover the world.

While serving in Kenya, she met an English RAF pilot and they got married. He wrote home to tell his parents that he had married a girl from South Africa and his parents response was that he could have waited till he got home to marry a white girl!!! When my mother gave birth to her first daughter, she impishly sent a photograph of a bare breasted black woman, with a stretched neck and sporting bangles and beads galore; with a naked child perched on her hip to her parents-in-law. Needless to say, when the family arrived in England, she was not recognised as they kept looking for a totally different person.

The pilot died a few years later and my mother subsequently married another 3 times, gave birth to two more daughters (all 8 years apart) and never quite managed to divulge the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about their respective paternity. I for one, was born during a period when she was definitely not married and whoever sired me, remained a mystery for the best part of 14 years. If she was asked by someone who my father was, she either told them he was a deceased RAF pilot, a german adventurer, a South African diplomat, I was adopted or whatever else she could think of at the time. At one stage she even told me that she was forced to fall pregnant or she would have died and she did have two other children to raise.  Nevertheless, she told wonderful tales about her adventures abroad and about meeting interesting people which provided a happy, carefree lifestyle. These tales would carry her through to her later life when she complained woefully about being bored and dissatisfied with her circumstances.

She had all the worst characteristics of a Leo female - demanding, egotistical, arrogant, selfish and never did display much of the "protective" side of a lioness. She gave all and sundry permission to wallop me if I misbehaved. You have to remember, this was the best part of fifty years ago when negotiating with a child was mere science fiction. If you did wrong, you were given a hiding first and could explain later. I jokingly used to state that there was a time in my life that I got more hidings than a plate of food. Exaggeration perhaps, but not by much. She was also the mistress of emotional blackmail and could bend things out of shape to such an extent that the facts were totally obscured.

Nothing I ever did, tried, achieved or excelled at was considered good enough. It was always a case of "you could have done better" and never a kind word or acknowledgement. If I brought home a report card with 4 A's and a B - the A's were ignored and my shortcomings in producing an A were highlighted and examined and many admonishments dished out because I "could have done better"

Now combine that rather harsh attitude with a Taurus female, more renowned for stubborness, independence and hard-headedness and the recipe for an antagonsitic relationship was fostered and bloomed. The more she hammered me for not doing better, the less I tried - having the sentiment that I was going to get into trouble whatever I did - so why bother?

From an early age I discovered that adults were not to be trusted, were incapable of looking after me and that I had better be prepared to look after myself and learn to stand on my own two feet really fast. So I learned not to show when things hurt and could defend myself pretty much against anybody - except my mother! She always found the weak spot and targeted those insecurities to ensure that I toed the line within the parameters she found acceptable.

When I fell pregnant with my son, she convinced me that I would be a terrible mother, that I was incapable of raising a child decently. When he was born he lived with my parents for a few years while I as an unmarried mother, worked to provide a home for us both. During that time she convinced him that I would abandon him and was incapable of looking after him. She also told him that if I took him away from her, she would die.

She died on the the 1st July, four months after I had brought my son to live with me, and incidentally the same day as my son's birthday. There is a part of me that believes she planned it that way so I would always have to remember her while remembering my sons's birthday. Which does effectively give her the last laugh and she wins after all.

Impulse control

Perhaps its the frustrated writer hidden somewhere in all of us - but when you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea of something that should be said - you heed the call as best you can and write it down (or in this case) type it!!!

Walter Rinder, (Wikipedia describes him as a " gay American humanist poet/ philosopher/ photographer") had a beautiful way of looking at the world. In his "Spectrum of Love" he writes

  My understanding is determined by my parents, friends,

 places I have lived and been.  

All experiences that have been fed into my mind from living.

And that sums up who we are. We are all the culmination of our upbringing, influenced by people and places, experiences and things we have read or seen, our relationships and beliefs are all wrapped up to create the individual we are today.

But at what stage in our lives do we consciously decide to discard those influences and be different? Do we really change who we basically are or just change our behaviour to reflect who we would like to be.

Some wise fella told me years ago - you cannot do anything about your feelings, but you can do something about your behaviour. It took me a while to believe him when he said that you DECIDE to get angry, and as astonishing as that sounds - it is actually true. Try it next time - decide NOT to get angry about something that pushes your buttons and see if it works:)

So then if anger is the feeling, and you can do nothing about it - the only thing you can then control is your behaviour ..... and therein lies the cause of much women and child abuse. It is the behaviour that causes so much harm. Perhaps life  skill lessons about impulse control is just as important and any other subject taught at schools.