understanding my mother ~ understanding myself
by reeta bochner wolfsohn

I suspect that if your mother was not ideal, even perhaps a source of great pain, somewhere in her heart she always had green feathers for you.
-Julie Savage Parker

I spent much of my life trying to create the relationship with my mother that I wanted and needed. Although that never happened, I continued trying to understand her and to be understood by her. Eventually I accepted that all I could do was to be the best daughter I could be, and her response belonged to her.

My mother spent the final half dozen years of her life lost to me and to my brothers in the downward spiral of dementia. As her time on earth drew to a close, I flew to Florida to say good-bye to her. As I held her in my arms, I told her that I loved her and that I forgave her.

Upon my return I told a friend of my sadness at losing the mother I had never really found. In words that were to impact my life forever, my friend told me that there must have been something special about my mom to have had a daughter who was so dedicated to helping other women.

Those words allowed me to view my mother as a woman, rather than a mother and altered my entire perspective on my lifelong mother/daughter struggle. It was the beginning of a journey that would eventually afford me greater insight into my mother and into myself.

My mother had a good childhood, although her family had little money. She adored her three brothers and parents. Unfortunately, her marriage was not as rewarding. My father came to this country at the age of eleven, after seeing many atrocities of war in Europe. He learned to speak English without an accent, but in his heart he was always a stranger in a strange land.

When my older brother was five, my mother gave birth to me and to my twin brother. At a time when twins were still a rarity and money was very tight, having two children when you were only expecting one, was no cause for celebration.
My father was a gifted artist and a bright man, but he was rigid, demanding and impatient. My mother was very smart but very unfulfilled. The difference in their backgrounds created a gap in their communication that left each lonely and sad. Their unhappiness permeated our home and our young lives.

The eighteen years I spent with my parents were filled with work, worry, and responsibility. The fifty plus years they spent together were joyless. They were good people stuck in a marriage that was not good, at a time when people tended to accept their “lot in life.”

Connecting woman to woman, instead of mother to daughter, helped me to recognize how the absence of laughter, beauty, appreciation, tenderness and meaning in my mother’s life left her frustrated and angry. That anger turned into depression that eventually led her to trade reality for the fantasy of romance novels and later on to escape into dementia.

What my child’s eyes had missed, my woman’s eyes now saw: the constraints of being a woman in the middle of the Twentieth Century disabled my mother. It depleted her resources and diminished her will. It stole her dignity, her hopes and her dreams and set her up to fail me and to fail herself.

It wasn’t until I was writing my mother’s eulogy that I understood how the emptiness and disappointment that limited her life ultimately defined my own. It freed me to have stability, love, friends, family and purpose and to value the opportunities available to me that were never available to her.

I regret that while my mother was alive I didn’t realize or appreciate that my passion for women’s issues was her greatest legacy to me. For me, this important discovery validates her life and enables me to honor her memory by doing for other women what I could not do for her—make a difference.

I’m sorry that my mother’s life was so filled with sacrifice and that she paid such a high price for being born female. I celebrate her memory by doing what I can to assure that the women with whom I come in contact, personally and professionally, have more options and opportunities than she ever did.

Reeta Bochner Wolfsohn, CMSW is the founder of the Femonomics Institute (femonomics.com). She is a therapist, author, and motivational speaker.[ 828-658-1919; reeta@femonomics.com ]