The following sentences are taken from a lengthy message my birth mother sent to me.
“What you choose not to believe is that I have a mental illness. Bipolar is a disease. I never meant to do all those horrible things.”
“I understand you had to cut me out of your life when you were younger, but you're old enough to at least try to understand.”
You win, Emmy! I cannot do it anymore.”
“You need to take a class on mental illness.”
“Yes, I hurt you. Yes, I destroyed our relationship. Over the years you have hurt me too, and I cannot take anymore. I'm giving up after you and dad left. Yesterday I had a severe anxiety attack. Now I'm in a depression. I know you don't care, but I just thought I'd let you know that.”
While I’m not the one to air my life problems online, I felt there was a lesson in this.
You see, my birth mother and I are estranged. She was removed from my life when I was 12. But up until that age, she was there. She was psychically there for me, but mentally, not so much. Looking back I realized how dysfunctional that part of my childhood was. I’ve seen things I hope no child has to see. I’ve experienced overdoses. I’ve experienced Mommy running after me with a knife. I’ve experienced 911 calls and ambulances. I’ve experienced countless trips to see the inside walls of mental hospitals. What I’ve experienced most, though, is the raw emotion and backlash of witnessing that behavior, from both her and me.
In this current moment, I have no empathy for her. All I get these days are text messages like the excerpts from above. I often get upset from these texts, but waking up to those excerpts was really upsetting for me.
My instant reaction was: How can she blame me for all her pain? I hurt her? I wasn’t the one who did any of the awful things she did.
For most of my life, the overall consensus has been to have empathy for her, because she isn’t well, she isn’t in the right state of mind.
But what I’ve come to realize is that you don’t have to have empathy. You are allowed to deal with things in your own way. Everyone deals with problems and situations in ways that they can handle it, and sometimes it may not always be having empathy. There is no wrong or right way to think and feel.
I’ve also learned that you can’t let others blame you for their actions. For the longest time I felt like maybe if there was something I did, our lives wouldn’t be like they are now. But I can’t be blamed, or blame myself, for her actions and hurtful words. She chose to do the things she did and live the life she has now.
I refuse to let my mother push her own actions onto me. I refuse to let myself believe that what’s happened is my fault. I also want others to realize that no matter what the situation, never let anyone blame you. As humans, we are going to feel and have emotions. There is no right or wrong way to feel. Never feel ashamed of what you feel. You are you, and that is the best possible thing to be.
