Thinking of the rainy days

Sometimes I think of my mom, when she was at my age, or even before that – when she was taking care of us, when we were children. 

Maybe you can remember the time from your childhood – the everyday rush, work, food shopping, every day cooking evening meals, baking pies for dessert, washing dishes, ironing in the evening when trying to watch a bit of TV, cleaning on Saturdays, then going to the grandma – helping there with the garden, bake the apple pie with fresh apples, making the pickles for later, packing everything up at the end of the weekend in the car and go for another week exactly the same way. 

My mom was in all that she did for everybody else, almost perfect. When she was fifty, we grew up, but she kept baking pies, making the pickles. She somehow forgot she could do something else. 

Through all those years, she forgot she could enjoy doing something only for herself.

When she was left at home with only my father, after we grew up, she concentrated all her energy on him – she cooked for him, baked for him, made everything for him. He liked some of it, but later, he started to be annoyed. He started to have a go at her – why on earth can’t she do something else? But she had never done anything else. She had never done anything only for herself. 

Partly because at that time everybody else did things the same way, partly because she would feel terribly selfish.  Things became acute, when my father started to criticise her for all you can imagine – her neglected look, her overweight body, her boring personality.

Eventually he started to have an eye for a much slimmer neighbour who had a whole list of hobbies and didn’t know how to cook. My mom at the age of fifty-five, at the edge of a divorce situation, asked finally her psychotherapist: ‘Why is he doing this to me when I sacrificed all my life for him?’

Coat: Zara

Maybe you think the level of self-sacrifice in this example was exaggerated… nevertheless, are we so much different from our moms?

I think we still carry the twisted moral pattern inside of us… hopefully we’ll learn our lesson one day…