What if you had a bad mother?

And what if it's also your birthday?

It has been an odd day. I am starting my 60th rotation around the sun today (I'm 59) and it's also Mother's Day. I'm smack dab in the middle of the astrological influence called the Saturn return. Saturn, being the giant planet that it is, takes a very long time to return to the point in the birth chart where it began. This influence happens at 28 - 30 and 58 - 60, and, if you are still around, 88 - 90. The influence takes place over a two year period, and it is truly a death/ rebirth cycle. The themes are about your core identity and your soul's purpose in coming here.

I was born into a family with the deep and tragic wounding of sexual abuse in both lineages. My paternal grandmother, orphaned at age 12, had been sent to live with two 'bachelor' uncles - set-up for disaster if there ever was one. And I know in my bones that my mother must have been sexually abused. As I've unwound the damage from my own abuse in childhood, I've developed some compassion for her. And there's still anger. Her stubborn unwillingness to speak to me, because I'm no longer capable of tolerating her inability to talk about the past and the ways that we have always been disconnected, has brought about her complete ejection of me from her life. I've grieved her as if she had died. A part of me longs for her death, so that the outer connection that we share, that all mothers and daughters share, will at last be severed. My most challenging spiritual task is to forgive her completely. Logically, I can imagine that someday I will be able to do that. Emotionally, I still have a wounded little girl inside me that just wants the unconditional love that a good mother has for her child. I have that for my daughter. There is nothing she could do to cause me to refuse contact with her. But my mother is adept at shutting me out, even though I have made attempts at reconciliation and been met with the black hole of her hatred of me.

Over the years that I worked in a federal prison, I was often struck by the number of men that would tell me that the only woman that visits them is their mother. The thing that I can see that I've done 'wrong' in our relationship is to ask the hard questions, wanting, needing answers to what happened to me, and to understand what had happened to her. The crazy-making part is that my mother is the most charming, engaging person you'd ever meet. She was so kind to strangers, so interested in and attentive to my friends. Her light shone on everyone but those of us closest to her, my father, sister and myself. She allowed her dark side to be present with us, and especially with me. Everything that she could not accept in herself, she saw in me, and criticized endlessly.

If I'd been a bit older, I doubt that I'd ever have had a child. The responsibility of motherhood is huge. As mothers, we form our child's future, their personality and character. There are no perfect mothers, and there is no training for parenthood. If dysfunctional patterns remain unconscious, they are passed from one generation to the next. Even at the age of 17, when I became a mother, I was determined not to parent the way that I'd been parented. My greatest joy is in seeing my daughter's fantastic mothering skills and the potential in my grandchildren's lives, because they are being well raised.

My mother is my fiercest and most terrifying teacher. It has been a strange Mother's Day and birthday, and of course, I did not talk to my mother today.