Bear, hang in there.
I cope with bad days better now because I know they are just that - moments in time that will pass. There are things that ease bad days for me - long walks, trips to the park, comedy films, curling up in bed with a good book, endless cups of tea and some chocolate biscuits. Do you ever go to the cinema with your little one? I've just started doing this with my son and I love it, such a great escape, hidden away from the world watching films about fairy tales or talking gnomes or whatever is on at the time.
Good days I treasure all the more because the bad days make them seem shinier, you know? I look at my mum and I see her on the same path as me. She grew up in a difficult home, just like me, with parents who didn't do a great job and who made her feel worthless, useless, lazy and ugly. She had bad relationships, which made her problems worse, she struggled financially and so on. She got to a point where she had to choose between facing all of that - all the pain, the hurt, the betrayal, the abandonment - and working through it - mostly on her own - and ignoring it, burying the pain deeper, drinking more to blot it out. Short term, she made choices that eased her pain. But she lost herself, her children and her grandchildren along the way.
The way I see it is that I learnt from her mistakes. I took the painful path! I stopped being around them and started working on myself. It's been four years now. I sooooo understand where you are now. Anniversaries are hard, birthdays are hard, Christmas and so on. But you're building a future for yourself that will feature your child (children, maybe), good friends, a healthy sense of self, an awareness of who you are and what you want. It's harder, in the short term, than burying it and pretending, but long term I think it must be worth it's weight in gold. You're making sure your child won't have to deal with this when they are raising a family; they'll be able to concentrate on their children because you did all this hard, hard work for them now.
I have more good days than bad now. I'm finding my emotions come to the surface more readily than they used to and, perhaps more importantly, I understand them and can work with them more easily than I used to. There's a lot of old stuff coming up at the minute and some days I just howl, it hurts so much. But once the pain subsides it somehow feels a little bit better, a little bit cleaner? I don't know how to describe it. But it feels like it's worth it. I feel like I'm growing into myself, more and more.
I feel sorry for my mum more than I feel angry at her these days. That empathy for her used to be my downfall, it's what made me keep going back because I could see how messed up she was and I wanted her to get better. But eventually I realised that she had to make those changes, not me.
Your mum could have made some effort to resolve the situation, Bear. If she really wanted to see your daughter she could have called or written to you and asked if you could talk, make some arrangement, made some sort of gesture that she wanted to work on the situation properly, like an adult. I don't think she's done that? Not in a way that makes you comfortable. Which kind of shows you're doing the right thing, even though it doesn't always feel like it.
Hang in there. It does get better over time.
(((((((((((((((((((((((((Bear)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
