deeply as anything I've seen in one of her books:
"I am thinking of absent friends, and those people you lose in your life, some through death, and some through them just walking away. There is a reason I’m back in therapy, because the thought that went through my head is one I’ve had before. Why? Why wasn’t I enough? Good enough, pretty enough, whatever enough. But it’s a child’s thought, to believe if you were good enough, or better behaved, or better at something, that they would have stayed, or loved you better, or hell, even loved you at all. It doesn’t work like that. It really isn’t your loss, but theirs."
This ties in painfully well with the episode of "True Blood" that Jack and I watched last night, involving a confrontation between the adult daughter of an alcoholic mother, and the mother in question. Tara, the daughter, points out that she gave up her entire life to care for her mother, and received only abuse in return. Now, when Tara needs help, she again receives only abuse.
It was... painful to watch, and tears welled up in my eyes.
I don't know why my mother hated me. I don't know why she deliberately made choices to hurt me. I don't know why she chose to justify those choices by claiming they were "for my own good," despite knowing better.
I don't know why my mother made the decisions she did.
I'll never know now, because she's been dead for almost two years.
I keep wanting to make excuses for her, convince myself somehow that her behavior was "okay", was somehow noble (if misguided). I want to make it my fault, not hers. My father's fault, not hers. Her parents' fault, not hers. But there is no excusing the maliciousness of the things she said, the things she did. There is no way to make her flaws my fault.
As LKH said, that is a child's thought.
And I am not a child anymore.
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