Life lesson: forgiving my Mum

Trixie Lestrange - 6 Jan 17

I’ve never ‘got on’ with my Mum.

This probably sounds so mystifying to those lucky women (and men) who are close to their Mums. And believe me I longed for that too. Growing up, I gravitated towards friends who, in my eyes, had the perfect Mums – there at the school gates every day, always something cooking away smelling delicious at home time, enjoying a stable and loving relationship with their husband and a close and caring banter with their daughter. Rose-tinted and probably not the full story I know, but how I envied their cosy domestic setup.

Me and my Mum were a different beast all together. Mum was glamorous, ambitious and sociable. She was also forgetful, selfish, and prone to bouts of depression. She was a single mother determined to educate herself and forge a career, which meant I spent mornings and evenings with a child-minder and was shipped off to my Dads every fortnight while she was studying and schmoozing.

Mum was lonely – the company of a young daughter clearly not enough for an intelligent women in her thirties – so my primary and secondary school years saw a catalogue of boyfriends come and go, kind eager-to-please men with their own ‘modern family’ baggage. But none of her partners were committed for the long run, hence the catalogue of frosty breakups and multiple house moves for me and Mum.

Resentment bubbled under the surface for both of us, and by the time I reached university age we were a complete car crash. We’d go through periods of completely ignoring each other, or falling out over petty things and building in to huge angry arguments, hurling insults at each other that cut deep. I saw her as a joke, a poor excuse for a Mum, a selfish woman who never put me first. She saw me as a surly judgmental young woman who didn’t know a thing about the real world and the sacrifices she’d had to make.

I felt broken, the product of a childhood without motherly love, and carried the weight of it throughout my twenties – a tight ball of hurt and rage that affected my outlook on life, personal relationships, and connection with my family. I could barely be in the same room as Mum on my wedding day and the strain had reached fever pitch – something had to give.

And that something came in the form of my newborn daughter.

When I fell pregnant, subconsciously I realised it was time to grow up. The anger and bitterness began to fade. Old grudges and pent up frustration started to seem pointless (thank you hormones). Fellow daughters will emphasize that in some situations, the only person you want to speak to is your Mum. We started to tentatively talk on the phone, meet up and shop for baby things, I’d text her pictures of my growing bump. We had turned a corner.

And then when my baby arrived, Mum came as fast as she could – and broke down in tears at the sight of my cradling my newborn. A fresh dynamic was formed – it wasn’t about me and Mum any more, it was about a grandmother supporting her daughter bringing up her child.

I wasn’t a self indulgent twenty-something, I was a mother in my thirties and I wanted to set an example for my daughter. With age and experience comes empathy, and I realised I had to understand why Mum acted like she did in order to have a relationship with her. Our entry in to motherhood couldn’t have been more different – Mum had a poor upbringing, marrying very young as a way of dragging herself out of poverty, having a child barely out of her teens and becoming a single parent with no skills or support in her early twenties. She had a turbulent relationship with her own mother and was tasked with bringing up a child with no caring people in her life to guide her. How alone she must have felt.

And yet she managed and despite our differences, she did a pretty decent job. I’m university educated, have a thriving career, and I don’t take any of it for granted because I’ve experienced the hard times.

I never knew my grandmother, and whatever has happened in the past, I don’t want that for my child. With her arrival, we’ve halted history in its tracks and allowed new life to heal old wounds. It’s early days, but I’m proud to say that I now ‘get on’ with my Mum, and she’s getting the chance to make up for lost time with her precious granddaughter.

Trixie Lestrange

Mum to one, juggling all the fun of a small one with freelance writing. Constantly asking myself 'does my child watch too much Peppa Pig'

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