My older daughter was married, before I began to realize I did not know either of my parents at all.

I didn’t know them because I hadn’t dared to look. I hadn’t dared to look because everything in me wanted to keep believing the happy family narrative I’d embraced from a very young age.

But what you don’t know can hurt you. If left unseen, it can cause damage down through generations.

In September, 2013, both my parents were still living, and I had been seeking to know them in truth for about six years. That’s when I tried to put into words my thoughts and feelings about my mother. That’s when I wrote the rest of this post.

Mama at the end

My mother self-destructed. Like everyone who self-destructs, she had help.

As I write, Mama lives in a nursing home. She’s doing remarkably well there. Everyone comments on it.

Though she cannot say more than two or three words in sequence, cannot go anywhere or do anything, except to be lifted into and out of her reclining chair, she seems more at peace than – well – ever, that I can recall.

People are taking care of her, giving her attention, meeting her needs, like someone would take care of a newborn.

The irony and the tragedy

My grandmother wasn’t supposed to have a second child. Doctors told her it would kill her. It almost did. The baby she brought into the world was my mom.

Emphatically not chosen

In the middle of my grandmother’s labor, when the outcome looked bleak, one of the medical staff went to my grandfather to ask, “If we have to choose between your wife and your baby, which one should we save?”

Granddaddy repeated the story often, ending with his cry, “My God, man! Save my wife!”

I don’t know how Granddaddy acted after the trauma surrounding his daughter’s birth. But I know how he reacted in his 70s, when Grandmama lay in a hospital dying. He verbally abused everyone around, including the doctors and hospital staff, the daughter who had lived to birth four children of her own – and his dying wife.

I didn’t realize until after Granddaddy himself died that he had carried deep abandonment issues from childhood because of his rejecting mom. I did see the anger that resided in him, always bubbling just below the surface and regularly erupting at whoever happened to be in his way.

Grandmama taught us to excuse and deny it. After an unpleasant episode, she would whisper, “He has a good heart.”

So from the womb, my mother heard about her dad’s good heart and felt his rejection and the false blame he put on her – for being born, and for whatever else he counted her fault.

Lost in the chaos

Now, at last, my mom is getting to experience what a newborn should experience.

But it didn’t have to look like this. It didn’t have to end where it should have begun, with the middle of the story lost in the chaos of trying again and again to rewrite the start.

If Mama had been able to see, to grieve and to embrace the truth about her dad, her mom and herself, she would have had a shot at moving beyond the lies that greeted her arrival into the world. She would have had a shot at moving successfully into and through adulthood.

Instead, she self-destructed. It happened right before our eyes. As my siblings and I grew up, married and started families of our own, we saw it – but we didn’t see it. For decades, we too did denial very well.

Then, trauma in my own life in a ministry situation began opening my eyes to much that I hadn’t previously “seen” in myself and my family. Ultimately, my new ability to see brought a shocking realization: My own mother was a stranger to me.

That realization slammed me early in 2007. Mama had been hospitalized with a near-fatal urinary tract infection. A friend and I had driven to my parents’ house from out of state. We stayed for more than a week, while Mama stabilized and I searched for a caregiver to employ on her return home.

Mama, who are you?

That week, my friend did me the wonderful favor of initiating a top-to-bottom house-cleaning. I joined in. As we worked, I discovered much about Mama that utterly upended me – years of evidence of unresolved trauma and mental disintegration.

What’s more, most of the evidence had been hidden in plain sight. How had we missed it?

For one thing, Mama (and Daddy) had gone to great lengths to conceal/deny her true state. Further, my sisters and I lived in widely scattered places, each of them hundreds of miles away from our childhood home. When any of us visited home or talked with Mama by phone, she often seemed “fine.” And honestly, we wanted her to be fine.

Yet, with each passing year, the signs of her distress had become more evident, more insistent. Had we not continued to frame her as the person we thought we knew – and to dismiss or explain away what didn’t fit with that picture – we might have recognized the real significance of words and behaviors long before we did.

When we did realize, belatedly, we did everything we could to help. Thankfully, it did help. God intervened and worked major miracles in our behalf and in hers. For example, long-withheld inheritance money – that Granddaddy had willed away from both his children just before his death – came back to Mama just when she needed full-time care.

And so, concurrently, we thanked God, and we mourned. We celebrated the provision, and we deeply grieved the circumstances requiring it. We wrestled with the irony and the tragedy that the man who provided the inheritance had also stolen it in so many ways – just as his mother had stolen a heritage of love from him.

Are you my mother?

Perhaps you’ve seen the children’s book, Are You My Mother?, by P.D. Eastman.

A baby bird hatches while the mother bird is out, seeking food for the baby’s first meal. The newborn falls from the nest and goes in search of its mom. It asks everything from a hen to a cow, from a car to a huge machine, “Are you my mother?”

The story has a happy ending: Mama bird comes home. She and her baby reunite.

Recently, I came across that book title online. I remembered reading the book to my daughters when they were little, but could not recall the exact story line. So, I clicked through and watched a YouTube video of a woman reading the book aloud. As I watched, a light dawned.

Ah yes. Oh my.

Trying to rewrite her story

In recent years, I’ve formed several friendships that have proven disastrous. Happily, I have other friendships that are healthy. Yet, at this late date in life, I’ve repeatedly found myself playing with relational fire, so to speak, and getting badly burned.

The day I saw the book title and watched the YouTube video, I had gotten myself into another fine mess. And I had asked God, “What’s going on? Why am I setting myself up for this pattern to repeat? What can I do to stop it?”

When I read the question, Are You My Mother?, I knew: I was asking the same thing the baby bird had asked. I was seeking the same happy ending.

Subconsciously, I was being drawn to women whose lives bore similarities to my mom’s. I was trying desperately to know them as I hadn’t known her, to relate to them as I hadn’t been able to relate to her – and to do for them what I hadn’t been able to do for her.

Come to think of it – oh my! The first of these volatile relationships had started at the same time I began to suspect my mother was much more deeply troubled than I had dreamed.

Of course, none of those relationships had worked. Instead, each had recreated the trauma of not being able to know, or to save, Mama.

Learning to go a different way

Finally learning to see, I’m actively seeking to break the cycle and to go a different way. That involves:

• Learning and facing still more about my family and myself.
• Grappling with my previous “blindedness.”
• Grieving deep losses that, until now, I haven’t even recognized as loss.
• Forgiving my grandfather and grandmother, his mother, my mother, others who hurt her, the women I tried to rescue and – this is a biggie – myself.

Even more crucial, going a new direction requires acknowledging and laying down my judgments against God for allowing my mother’s life to play out as it has.

It also means admitting, “I need help.” I need help seeing what I haven’t previously been able to see, before I walk into the big middle of another mess. I need help making different, healthier choices on the front end of potential relationships.

As sure as the sunrise

As peaceful as Mama seems in the nursing home, it’s hard to visit her there. It’s hard to sit beside her, with so many questions begging to be asked, still unable to know her or to rescue her. Especially, it’s hard not to venture off onto the pointless path of “what might have been.”

Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing:
The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue,
fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.
(Lam. 3:21-23 GNT)

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. (ESV)

Thank you, Jeremiah, for those words

As I sit with both translations, reflecting on them, I know you were not uttering platitudes. No, you were watching a whole nation of people self-destruct – people you deeply loved.

You spent much of the book of Lamentations crying out in great distress to God. Yet in the big middle of raw lament, you reminded yourself, and us:

What the Lord offers to us,
from deep within himself,
heals brokenness.
And he offers it every single day.

Thank you, Lord, for your faithfulness

You have not failed nor forsaken my mother. And also: What she hasn’t seen or conquered, her offspring and our offspring do not have to repeat.

With great urgency, her life cries out to us to go a different way.

With ears and eyes now opening, I hear that cry. I can choose a new path. And you, Lord, make the way for me to do it.

But more, as I come to you in my grief, you hold me. And what envelops me astounds me:

Hope. Love. Mercy. Every day, newborn.

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Afterword 2025: Finding what is life-giving

I was right when I wrote, “I need help seeing what I haven’t previously been able to see.” Specifically, I needed help seeing that I was still looking for Mama’s love.

My mother lived four more years after my musings above. She died in the fall of 2017. My father died before her, early in 2014. After his death, we discovered a trunk in the attic of my parents’ house. The contents of that trunk forced me to face something I had hidden from myself all my life.

In short: The family pattern had repeated. From my birth, my mother had rejected me. Unlike that baby bird’s mother, mine never did come back.¹

It broke my heart to admit that. It still breaks my heart. Yet it explains so much. And knowing it has freed me from much false responsibility and false guilt. Over time, as I have faced and mourned this grief too, I can attest:

In Christ, seeking
leads to finding what is life-giving –  
regardless whether we find
what we had hoped.

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This post is based on, and quotes significant portions of, one of the first posts I published on this Key Truths blog. I titled it simply, “Newborn,” posted it September 8, 2013, and retired it when this post went live.

See also

• Enigma: A heart hidden, that appears open
• The dream – and awakening 50 years later
• Dear wounded, grieving one, I pray you float
  
  
• Resentment and its victims: Hate without cause
• Facing shame – so freedom and favor can flow
• Trauma and truth-seeking Desperation, spirit, life

Footnote

1. I’ve written about that part of my story in the post, The dream – and awakening 50 years later. ↩︎