She ruled my life

I am 48 years old and for forty years, I allowed my mother to rule my life. When I was a kid, she had a fierce temper and I got scared. I resolved at an early age to avoid her wrath, and since I am a pretty smart person I was generally able to do that by anticipating what she wanted and making sure that was done. Or if I was doing something different from what she wanted, making sure that she didn’t know. I was successful at this but there was a huge price for me to pay and that was I was living my life around her values and goals because I was scared of living my life around my values and goals.

When I turned forty, that changed. I turned forty during Y2K, and that was kind of a psychological marker for everyone who uses the western calendar and for me personally. All of a sudden I could not live my life around her. I couldn’t constantly obey her voice in my head that would immediately make judgment on what I was doing–this is good, that is bad.

I started changing and this was the most painful thing I have done in my life. It meant that I had very little contact with my mother for five years in order for me to break my own habits. She has no insight into how she controls other people (three out of three children have bad relationships with her and yet she thinks she is the biggest expert on child raising there is). So, I could not get her to acknowledge any of her part in why things were as they were.

She got really sick last year and I went and saw her for the first time in five years. God gave me the grace to be able to minister to her needs without letting her into my life the way I used to. It has to be God because I was otherwise incapable of doing this myself.