Sunday 22 July 2012

Grief

On a forums I rarely 'visit' thread was started titled feelings of mothers after relinquishing their child.  One of the responses reminded me of the day of my mother's funeral.  I had found it hard to grief for my mother, most of the time I felt numb.  There had been unresolved issues between us mostly to do with my son.  She had never accepted him and I could never understand why she could love her first granddaughter yet so easily reject him just because I was single.  My mother loved all her granddaughters as they came along.  

When my son found my family my mother still couldn't accept him.  He was an adult, there was no mistaking he was my son but something inside my mother still wouldn't switch on.  I cannot understand how a mother can reject a grandchild when she knows what it is like to love her own children.  The rejection was bad enough for her to send him a letter in 2001 telling him to accept I didn't want to be found.  She knew that I wanted to be found  so it was cruel of her to lie.  What else could I have expected though as my family didn't tell him where I was.  The lame excuse was that they didn't know where I was but my sister had told my husband about my son.

On the day of the funeral I was okay until the service ended and we were going outside.  I got to the vicar then I absolutely howled.  Naturally he thought I was crying because it was my mother's funeral.  It went beyond that.  I was crying because she never once said sorry for what she put me through to make sure my son was adopted.  There was also the verbal abuse I suffered at her hands that I was never good enough.  I was always the black sheep of the family.  Nothing I could do would ever change her mind.  I was also crying because my mother had had the attitude that I was nothing to my son.  In her eyes his only mother was his adoptive mother.

Since then I have not been able to cry for my mother.  There was too much damage done and nothing could put it right because my mother refused to accept that she had been wrong.  It is such a profound feeling of pain being separated from a child and it can't be truly explained.

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