if you love me like you say

i don't know when to give up. maybe i'm not supposed to. but it's not like i stopped wanting to know. or my curiosity was sated by just going without an answer for so long. but i believe (and maintain) that my relationship with my mother is strained because in a sense, by nature of being a working mom, an absentee one. the way i understand it, she worked because she loved us (my sister and i) so much. she didn't want us to be on welfare. she didn't want us to grow up poor the way she did. that was probably priority number one.

i told her one of the reasons i rebelled against her so hard as a teen is because i feel like she positioned herself as my enemy. always so haughty and obstinate. we rarely agreed on much and there was hardly a stronger purveyor of feelings of being misunderstood. i heard her say she loved me, but for all intents and purposes, i sure feel like i could have done without that love.

i never saw her working. i never saw her sacrificing. sometimes it seemed like i almost never saw her at all. what a catch-22 that her absence was due to her love for me, and yet communicated to me the opposite.

me and my mother had a confrontation on the phone a couple weeks ago, and in her usual modus operandi, she excused herself from the head and brunt of what i was concerned with. instead countering that she loves me, that has always loved me, that i have no idea how much she loves me, and that i may never understand... maybe when i get older.

i suggested to her "we should read a book." before i could follow up that sentence, she answered, "i don't need to read any books. you just need to..." and of course she proceeded telling me what she thinks i need to do. i'm so used to tuning out things that i've heard before, that i don't remember what she said at all.

i was gonna suggest she read the five love languages. why? because apparently all of her oh-so-all-encompassing larger-than-i-can-understand love is, albeit undoubtedly genuine, also sadly, frequently, and tragically miscommunicated. why should you put so much work into all this "love" if its net effect is almost nothing? that's an over generalization. i don't think her love is "in vain". but it just seems like such a waste and a contradiction no less. that lady has always been the conservative one who taught me her ways of making every resource count... not doing double work... doing what's necessary to get the most you can out of your time... your money... your ability. why not your love?

it just seems to me that if she loves me like she says she does, it shouldn't be so hard for me to perceive it.

it reminds me of her own account of her and her mother's interactions. she said that her mother never verbally said she loved her, but she always knew she did. or maybe she said it when she got older, while she was sick and my mom was taking care of her. i think that's the case. but how momentous and memorable and impactful would it have been if grandma had really brought the message home for my mom before she died?

apparently though, my mom finds no fault in that. at least it seems that way. i on the other hand see this as a problem. i'm still having a heck of a time trying to explain it to her so that she can understand it the way that i actually mean it. i hope can succeed in it though. i think my mother and her mother's relationship was probably at the apex of accomplishment compared to how they once might have interacted. my mother has seen to it not to make the same mistakes that the previous generation did, but instead made a brand new set of mistakes. fortunately hers are much less rough around the edges than grandma's i'm sure. it seems like it's up to me to start working out the previous generation's bugs so that i'll have less issues to deal with when my own kids come into being. tired as i am, i think it's still worth fighting for.