It was not a representative of the Church that wounded me, but someone else, a long time ago. I want to tread very carefully because I cannot know what suffering other people have endured, and I would not presume to tell anyone else what to do. All I can tell you is what I have experienced.
The other day, I realized I wasn’t angry anymore. It’s taken many years to get here.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
“But the relationship is valuable enough to me that I now choose to make the relationship be about the good things that are there, rather than the bad.” I think this sums up how many adults deal with their parents. I had to come to terms with the fact that my mother was a cold, Catholic mother and suffering from some kind of arrested development. I’m grateful, despite the difficulties, that my father stayed with her and provided a stable home. Still there is a wound, a lack. What is a normal mother-daughter relationship like? For many years I resented that my mother wasn’t like other mothers, that she had produced insecurities and dysfunction in the family, that she had left me handicapped on how to relate to my own children and other women. I very easily could have turned from the Church if I hadn’t met my husband (a substitute for therapy). In early mid-life I came to realize that my relationship with her (however odd) was valuable to me and my children and I had to bury that resentment and concentrate on the good. There is sadness, but that is better than anger.