IstominFan wrote:
My mom has been gone six years, and I still miss her. I also felt as though my functioning went downhill and all my weaknesses were exposed after she died. I realized what a nothing I was: no friends, no driver's license, unmarried, no chance at ever meeting anyone, hopeless. I still cry today and feel sorry that my mom can't see what progress I have made.
Who knows. Maybe she can.
I tend to cling to that belief. Some days, the only thing that keeps me from giving in to pressure to do things I KNOW are wrong (like parenting my kids harshly, or being incredibly stupid with finances like my hubby's family) is the knowledge/belief that my mother, stepmother, father, and grandmothers are watching me from Somewhere. Considering the statistics for outcomes with undiagnosed autism, they raised me INCREDIBLY well. Believing that I'll have to explain my actions to them some day gives me the courage to do what I know is right in the face of a lot of pressure to behave in wrong ways.
That said, I feel very guilty/angry that I wasn't able to be a neurotypical daughter/granddaughter and give my mother and her mother the kind of relationships I know they wanted and very much deserved. I know that they loved me, very much, just the way I was/am. But I would have liked to give them what they SHOULD have had.
Again, I take some comfort from believing that someday we will see each other again in a state of being such that it won't matter any more.
I wonder, often still, why someone as completely worthless as myself was chosen to continue living and someone like my dad, who had an intellectually disabled wife, an abused sister, and a mother with dementia depending on him (as well as being a much better grandfather than I will ever be a mother) was chosen to die. I also wonder why it couldn't have been a complete ass like my FIL instead. Some things, I will never understand.
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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"