mothers...mine in particular

my relationship with my mother was difficult, I know I'm not alone. 
she's been gone for eighteen years now, I moved myself and my four cats in with her for the last five months of her life so she could die at home.
when I first got there she asked me why I was there, I wasn't quite sure what she meant but I said I'm here because you want to die at home.
she looked at me for a while then said, if I were you, given the way I treated you, I wouldn't be here.
I just said well, I'm here.
she was right, of course.  once I moved out of her house I should have never looked back but I did look back, all the time, basically I never left.
we all want our mothers to love us and we all want their attention.  if they didn't give us enough attention we'd seek negative attention and I did.
like most adopted children I wondered what was wrong with me that my birth mother didn't want me.  as an adult I understand better but as a child that's the way I saw it and it hurt. 
what hurt more was my adopted mother didn't seem to want me either. 
what could a baby, a small child or even an older child have done so badly that two mothers didn't want her? 
I was sure there was something very wrong with who I was.

it took me more than thirty years to realize there was nothing wrong with me, I was a good person, I tried to treat others well, I loved animals...I was good.  the problem wasn't mine, it was theirs.

now I understand all the reasons for putting a child up for adoption, I sympathize with my birth mother because I know it couldn't have been an easy decision.
my mother told me she spent her life trying to break my spirit because even as a baby, when she got me, I wouldn't let anyone walk on me and she was jealous because she did.

I, of course, didn't see that at the time.  what I got from it was that I wasn't lovable on a serious level.
I chose men believing that, meaning, I chose men knowing that in the end no relationship would work, and it didn't, imagine that.
I don't blame my mother for my bad decisions, others have had worse childhoods than I did and not taken the roads I chose.  all of them were my own choices and I've had to live with the consequences of every one of them.

I often say I'm a wise woman from so many bad decisions and that's true.  I still have a long way to go.
what I do know is regardless of the pain, loneliness and confusion of my childhood, moving in with my mother so she could die at home is one of the best decisions I ever made. 
I thought I was doing it for her but in the end I realized it was for me, a wonderful gift I gave myself.  the fact that it was a gift for her too was a bonus.
to say this is a long story short would be a gross understatement.