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My relationship with my mother worked on 2 levels, there was the fantasy one I created inside to make up for what wasn't happening outside. Yes being adopted counts for some of this, but mostly it failed because my adoptive mother had nothing to give, there was no way to learn healthy attachement because she was to wrapped up in her fantasys created from her trauma. There was 4 of us at least in the relationship, me, my adoptive mother, her fantasy mother and my fantasy mother and this caused a great deal of let downs and disappointments and confusion.
I remember I use to sit at sch and day dream about being home with mum and her face would make me feel warm inside, but then when I got home the outside didnt match this "fantasy", she was sat there never looking up and never pleased with my return, more anger that I had gone, just like her mother had died when she was 5, so anything that happened between us was to bridge the holes we both had, never any real stuff going on because there was time or space for that to happen, we were both desperately surviving, sucking each others blood in a desperate effort to live.
With T, I am not there to fill her holes, if she has any, and she isn't there denying mine, so there is room for real stuff to happen, a real RELATING goes on, so yes the attachement is so much more fulfilling.
I have "divorced" my adoptive mother, I feel guilty at times that with all the therapy I have had that I should be able to just "put up" with my adoptive mothers "abuse", be the bigger person, but the more I see what a relationship should be like, the more shocked, and saddened I am by what my relationship with my adoptive mother never managed to be, as my attachment to T grows, my mourning for my losses grows and I realise there really wasn't very much real stuff with my adoptive mother so there isn't much to miss. I think it would feel even worse now to be back in her life, to be who I am now and her still being who she always was and me seeing this without the rose-coloured glasses I had to view her with growing up, I mean if I'd really understood as a child what an empty mother she was, I doubt we'd manage to surivive, now without those glasses I shudder, I feel now that I have taken my innerchild finally got her the care she needed a long time ago. Just living with someone doesn't a relationship make, we were like ships passing in the night, with T we are like on a cruise and stopping off at different ports and really having a good look around and getting the feel of the place.
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Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. ~Richard Bach
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