Getting Along With My Mother

One of the most difficult parts of my relationship with my mother was that my father had been the one who told me about their marital separation--and he told things from his point of view, of course....  It happened just before I turned 14 years of age....  My father left our family home, although he came to visit often, and I became angry towards my mother....

My parents continued to be involved in each other's lives for a number of years with several, attempted reconciliation periods....  Sometimes I felt better than other times but my underlying anger was never addressed, at the time.  At school and church, I functioned fairly well on the outside....  Family counselling would've been helpful to me but it was't available, that I knew of.... And my mother probably wasn't as guilty as I'd thought she was....  But when I tried to talk to her about it later in life, she couldn't handle it and the conversation always broke down....

Dealing with my feelings has been an issue in handling my eating disorder and I've still been making growth within the past few years....  But when I was caring for my mother, I found a book called "Mindfulness for Teen Anger," by Mark Purcell and Jason Murphy, at the library; and I found it very helpful....  It was the beginning of my awareness of "mindfulness meditation" and I learned to recognize physical signals in my body that I was becoming angry; and I was able to trace the thoughts and feelings that were heading for an outburst....  [If people will Google the book's title--at Google.ca, they can easily find it available; and there are other helpful entries, also.]

Of course I had pity on my mother for being old and sick, and our relationship wasn't all bad but we did have some tensions between us--not the least of which were my legal matters....  She tried to be helpful up to a point [and she was extremely helpful, especially at the beginning] but beyond that place she was quite negative....  And we more or less decided to "agree to disagree" on this issue....  [I may write a little more about my mother later on....]