After my mother had told me that if I left the house to call my father I would never be allowed to come back, at the age of 15, I had hope. I convinced myself to keep calling her, once in a while. At first, I called in hopes that she would change her mind, even though, not that deep inside of me, I knew that once she set her mind to something, there was no way of changing it. ‘But I’m her daughter. It must be different’, I lied to myself. She had gotten rid of every single person she cared about, or who cared about her. Her closest friends, her brother and sister, her father and mother. Everyone. Not once did I see their faces again, and now it had been my turn.
So yes, I cheated on myself and contacted her. At first it would be every week, then every two weeks, every month, and so on. The response was always the same: “I want nothing to do with you”. Months went by, and then years went by, and her response to my calls went from rejection to insults. She would always say what a pain it had been to have me around, that I was a nuisance and the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to her, besides my dad. She was constantly drunk and I held on to that for all those years: ‘she doesn’t mean that’, I would tell myself. I graduated from school, from college, and got engaged. I called my mom to tell her I was getting married. Today, her response still shocks me… “I don’t like that man for you”. How could she ever know???? She hadn’t met him, and I certainly hadn’t engaged in any conversations with her – of any type…
Life carried on, I got married, and had my first child. I called her again, to tell her Daniel had been born, and she told me she wanted to meet him. My heart froze, not knowing what to expect. Yet I took my child to her apartment so she could get to know him. In her own way, she was very nice to him, yet she was very harsh and cynical towards me. And, once again, she criticized my relationship. After I had delivered my second child, I felt hesitant towards going to my mother’s place for her to meet her granddaughter. So, I waited for my third son to be born, and decided to go with the three of them. As she stood there, observing each one, she made rude, offensive comments towards me and my marriage, forcing me to leave. I left determined to never visit her again.
I did. Once. When all my kids were born. But this time I went alone, to tell her that she had been right: my husband was not the man for me. She scoffed at me, while triumphantly smiling. All my hopes of being able to reconnect were – once again – shattered.
Not once, since the age of 15, did my mother speak kindly to me. Not one phone call was answered in a welcoming way. So I stopped kidding myself, I stopped trying to reconnect, and I stopped allowing verbal and emotional abuse. I stopped calling.
Many years later, when my oldest son was 17, I received a call from my Russian great-aunt: she had found my mother dead in her apartment. Alone and unable to reconnect with anybody who had been a part of her life. It was then that I realized I had still saved some hope that I would be able to have my mother back, on any level. I never did. That day I mourned her death with unmeasurable pain, but what I was really mourning was the way she had lived her life.
life & five 
Sadly so….
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