Not everyone dislikes their mother. But some of us do. There are times (when my rational self gives way to honesty and speaks the truth) ~ I dislike my mother. There is no other time that I feel this more than when I see her turn away from me in a parking lot or grab my father by the arm in a grocery store to turn in the opposite direction of where I am standing.

It is during these times that I find myself wondering how a mother can turn away from her child and not have deep regrets about it?

In recent days, as I began reading Betty Friedan’s book Life So Far, I suspiciously began to develop all the warning signs of panic attacks lurking for the opportune moment to strike. Symptoms that always overcome me anytime I explore my emotions in regards to my mother.

Some passages that had me practicing deep breathing exercises are:

My mother, to all of us, was the most important person in the house. If she was in a good mood, everything was fine. If she was in a bad mood, which, unaccountably, she was most often, we all shrank from her, were miserable, and tried to keep out of her way.

Mostly my mother made me feel bad about myself. Nothing I did was ever tight, ever satisfied her.

But I somehow sensed that if my mother had a profession that absorbed her, if she was really as strong and confident as she seemed, bullying us or the women’s committees, she wouldn’t make life so miserable for my father or us kids, she wouldn’t find everything we did, every present, so inadequate.

But I cannot remember ever being touched by her, in the kind of spontaneous hug I delighted in with my own children.

Though I was consumed with dread of her and, I suppose, hate, and even finally a kind of revulsion, there was a desperate yearning underneath for the love she couldn’t give me.

My mother was determined that I would get the good education – and the aspiration – that was denied to her.

And only now do I begin to understand the emptiness and fragility beneath her assumed superiority, perfectionism, and the constant unrelenting put-down of her husband, her children, her women friends. I was so repelled by her sugary sweetness on the telephone – “dear” this and “darling” that – and then the mean, vicious maligning of the caller after she hung up.

Tired, finally, of psychological deconstruction, I would say today, for good or ill, my mother’s frustrations…both strengthened me and scarred me.

Betty Friedan, Life So Far

As I read these passages I could not help but wonder how we could experience the same behaviors from two different women born a generation apart?

Another post for another time perhaps.