I’ve been thinking lately about my mom. I wish that it was like a light switch. It would be wonderful if I could just turn it off. Unfortunately, it is more like this onion in my life and no matter what I do, I will never be able to peel back all the layers.
She told me that she wanted to die when she was sixty. I prepared myself for that. She is eighty-three now. I have been preparing myself for her death for twenty-three years and I feel like it is just another one of her sick games, especially because she continues to say that she wants to die. At the same time, I see life passing before my eyes. People are dying because of illness, old age, and war. I can understand why bad things happen to good people, but I cannot for the life of me understand why God keeps someone who has so little regard for life alive.
A few years ago, I decided to stop worry about her. I didn’t want my life to revolve around her anymore. I stopped worrying about what she would think or how she felt. She never cared about me. Yet here I am still feeling weighed down by the pain.
I wonder if my problem is forgiveness. My therapists always told me that I should find a way to forgive her and the rest of my family because they did the best that they could with what they had. And maybe I have forgiven what they did to me. I have had years to write, think, and cry about it. I don’t really want to feel bad anymore. Yet, I do. I think it’s because I look at these people who were supposed to be the closest people to me for the first twenty-eight years of my life and when I see them, I just see people who are in worst prisons than the one my mother tried to keep me in. The saddest part is I don’t even know if they can see the prisons bars around them or that they have the keys in their hands.
Despite what I think everyone thinks of me or despite what my mother has implied, I am not a cold unfeeling bitch and I do love my family. I guess it really hurts and makes me angry to see what they have done to themselves.
I have pondered that if my mom really didn’t care about life, then maybe God was punishing her with life; keeping her alive until she got the point. Today, I am starting to realize that God wouldn’t do such a thing. He just doesn’t work that way.
God listens to each of us, and He has his plan for each of us. I have faith the God has a plan for me, and I give my life over to God each and every day because I trust in His plan. I have to trust in His plan for my mom, too. I hate seeing her in pain and confined within the walls of her own making, but I also know that I am powerless because I don’t control her actions. It’s the good old Serenity Prayer all over again.
Today I pray for God to grant me the courage to change my life for the better and the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change. I ask Him to hold my mom in His hands and I hope that He grants her mercy from her pain.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
