My Mother's Ghost are My Own

My first memory of my mother is one of a fearless protector. She was my night in shining armor. I worshipped and adored her in every way and she knew it. As I sit here and think about my mother, it's really hard for me to appreciate what it was like to have two children by the age of 16. But my life would play that fact out like a severely scratched record on a never ending turn table.

How do you honor someone who makes it so difficult for you? How do you muzzle an instinct, restrict your heart from the one who helped create it. On the rare occasions I see my mother, I find it so hard to look her in the eyes. There is so much in them that she refuses to share with me and I think that is the most painful event of the many I have experienced because I am her daughter.

When we are not among the fortunate, or so we like to call them. Whose parents have taking on the responsibility of bringing life into this world as a mission. We spend a lot of waisted years trying not to be like our parents. How can you redo what has already been done? How can you come from a mold and rework the clay of the craftsmen?

If you are like me, you will eventually learn that there is nothing you can do about the fact that when you look in the mirror you see them. Mother, Father, Grandmother, Grandfather and on. They are there staring back at you wondering if you will break the curse and take your heritage to uncharted territory that time, tradition and bitterness will not allow them to see.

When Moses smote the rock, he couldn't go any further. He had to stand aside and watch all those who complained along the journey, enter in with ease.

I don't have the energy anymore to fight against the traits of my mother that are so strong in my veins. I just have to learn to sift through and take the qualities that made me adore her as a young child stand tall over the qualities that causes the bridge between us to be so long and wide.

The same things that cause her to go into dark places are the same things that send me there as well. But I have learned we go there for different reasons.