motherhood is hard.

When I first got pregnant, I saw it as an opportunity to have new conversations with my mother. We could talk pregnancy – a common experience we’d now have – and I’d be spared from the topics that always dominated in the past, like my parents’ overwhelming debt, how unhappy she felt about her life, etc.

However, during the first 5 months when I was semi-incapacitated due to severe nausea and fatigue, I started ruminating about the past because I retreated into my head, and sometimes my head was a dangerous place when I was not feeling physically well. I started reminiscing about the times when I suffered as a helpless child at the hands of my mother’s mental illness. I remembered how my father brushed off my experiences and told me I should let bygones be bygones when I was in my twenties and told him what had happened. I felt resentment and anger return.

When I started feeling better during months 6 and 7, we were busy preparing for Baby J’s arrival, and I forgot about those memories. I had some good conversations with my mother, as good as they can be, given her mental state and her ingrained habit of adding barbs to words. Even when the barbs weren’t directed at me, I had lower tolerance for negativity now than I had before, and I would change the subject or ignored the barbs completely.

As I’m nearing my due date, I am once again revisiting the past. Revisiting the past is not something I like doing, but I seemed to do it automatically when I look at my feelings toward Baby J and what I’d like to do as a parent, and compare this with my own experiences with my parents when I was a child. Even though I realize that our parents only “did the best they could given what they knew”, it was difficult to reconcile with some of the things my parents did.

On a recent walk with my husband, I told him about this. I told him that I could not understand how my mother could have done some of the horrific things she did to me, both mentally and physically. I told him that I could not understand how my parents could have just left me with the rubbles of their bad investments when I was just entering graduate school and left the country to pursue better opportunities, and leave me as the target for their debt collectors. I said that I’ve been feeling angry when I thought I’d come to terms with the past. My husband said that it was exactly because she was (and is) mentally unstable that she did those things. If I ascribed her behavior to deliberate malice, then I’d react a certain way, versus seeing her behavior as that of an untreated mentally ill person.

Over the past few weeks, my mother is starting to call more often to check that I’m OK. I do notice that she limited the extent of the conversation to asking how I’m feeling. She seems to be making an effort not to tell me how miserable and desperate of a life she feels she is living. I acknowledge her effort in doing this.

I suppose this is the most I can expect from a relationship with my mother.