Come a long way baby...

Note: This may be triggering for some people, including me.  

This week was exhausting but gave me plenty of time to think and compare my daughter's experience with childbirth to mine and my mother's.  My mother gave birth to a 9 lb (4 kg) boy over 50 years ago.  It was just her and a nurse that came in from time to time and poor instructions on how to cope.  Her mother arrived the following week to help out.  Fast forward to 34 years ago I gave birth to my 8 lb (3.6 kg) boy with my husband there.  We went to 7 weeks of birthing classes to allow him into the delivery room.  Now, my daughter had the baby's father, sister and me, a nurse, midwife and a team of doctors for backup since there were complications.  I was so in awe that my daughter invited me to participate in this amazing experience.  I thought long and hard.  Even if I could, I would not have invited my mother.  Here is an example why.  When I was in the hospital after the delivery of my first child, I didn't know that you had to order every little thing on the menu.  If you said toast that was exactly what you got, a piece of toast.  No butter, no jam, nothing but a piece of toast.  I didn't order enough to eat and I was starving hungry.  I called my mother to bring me something to eat when she came to visit that night.  She assured me that was no problem and did I like honey dew melon?  Love it.  Yes, please, bring me some honey dew melon.  She was so generous she brought me an entire melon but no knife to cut it.  It was totally what I asked for and totally useless for meeting my needs. Now, most people would say, get over it.  It should go down in history as one of life's bloopers.  But it was just one of many such times.  Do what looked good but leaving my needs unmet.  I think about how many times I have tried hard but just didn't meet someone else's need.  I have certainly done such a thing myself.   Letting it go is doable.

Why the deep resentment that really pushed my buttons?  It wasn't her lack of meeting my needs that still leaves me upset so many years later, it is a combination of things that she did.  She used fear to raise me.  She told me how she worked in a children's hospital that the badly deformed children had teenage mothers.  I was 19 when I married and became pregnant.  I was so terrified I couldn't bring the baby home after the delivery that I didn't even own a baby blanket to bring the baby home in.  Through out the pregnancy, she pointed out all the negatives and emphasized the nightmare possibilities.   My reaction - I had nothing ready for the baby to be born.  Not because I didn't want this baby very much but because I was so afraid that because I was a teenage mother the baby would be too deformed to bring home.  No use preparing for something you can't keep.   (Later learned that very young teenage mothers as in 13 and 14 years old are the ones at high risk.)

My mother also declared to me that she was too young to be a grandmother.  She associated becoming a grandmother with being old and how dare I make her feel old.  Narcissism reared its ugly head.  She decided that my children were not allowed to call her grandma, they had to call her Gram.  (There is a piece of irony,  she insisted on being called a small measurement of weight.)  She totally rejected my children before they were even born.  She made a big joke about only her children were important, not the grandchildren.  What she refused to grasp my children are the most important thing to me.  Rejecting them was rejecting me but then that was no big surprise.  I moved a thousand miles away from her for over 15 years.  My children only saw her about once a year.  Now, she blames me that she has very little relationship with my children.  I am impressed my my children that recognize her poor behavior for what it is but are kind and respectful any way.  (I have amazing kids.)

I realize that the more I write the angrier I feel.  After 34 years of carrying this pain I need to let it go.  Now, I make lots of baby blankets.  I give them to my daughters, my daughter-in-laws, friends, family, whoever I meet that is pregnant.  I want them to have what I didn't have, the hope to bring your baby home in a blanket.