Saturday, May 21, 2011

maggie, still breaking my heart, even if it was in February

2 comments:

Joanna Cake said...

It was strange reading this today. I have spent the past week with my own daughter who is now a woman.

She still stomps and rolls her eyes and fights me as I try to keep her on the straight and narrow.

But, as a woman and her father's daughter, she doesn't have the words or skills to be able to ask for hugs and reassurance in the normal way. She has to kick over the traces and start a fight to compel me to give her even more attention, however bad the energy is. It's almost as if she craves some kind of confirmation that she is no good and will not stop until she has provoked such a response.

As her mother, I have to fight down the impulse to give her little voice what it wants and try to replace it with what she needs - calm reassurance and guidance in the right direction, no matter how much she fights me.

I remember back to the little girl who behaved that way on a smaller scale but who could then be scooped up and hugged, no matter how much she fought.

And with the woman, I hold on to those isolated islands of calm companionship as I tread on eggshells to avoid precipitating another tsunami.

Jo said...

I have a tough one too. I read Ms Moon's blog, about the sea of love her family floats in. It's inspiring, but sometimes it's hard to read.

She did have a daughter who was miserable til she was 18, and spent plenty of time fighting and staying away, and is now a shining ray of sweetness and light and a beautiful mama. But it sounds like there were not so easy times before...