Quote:
Originally Posted by IndestructibleGirl
Again, this is just my opinion - but now I have thought about it some more, I think she is doing you a disservice by bringing the 'mother' angle into it at all. She does some wonderful, precious things for you, but in my mind it is damaging for you, with your pain and your past, for her to hang this relationship on a mothering framework. Her poor choice of words ('like a mother') cheapen the profound care she has for you, imo. If I were you, I'd be agonized and confused, because I'd see how much she genuinely did care, but it would feel like she was playing mummy to me like kids in the playground, lightly picking it up and setting it aside on a whim, not quite realizing how deeply these isolated acts of 'mothering' affected me.
I'm answering from a position of someone who lost my wonderful mother who adored me utterly to cancer, when I was twenty five. So my loss is a different kind to yours, which is the 'never having had a mother'. Perhaps my kind of mother-pain is located in such a radically different place to yours I struggle to understand, so maybe that is skewing my perception, but I don't know.
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Yes, sometimes I do feel like she is picking me up and setting me down without really realizing how much of a roller coaster it sends me on. The thing is that I could tell her about this. I could pull her aside tomorrow and tell her. I know she won't explain her behavior to me or try to make it right because both of us know that I'm obsessing over her solely to avoid obsessing over being afraid of going to Detroit. She'd much rather have me worry about our relationship than have me worry about facing my abusive family in less than 48 hours and if that means going slightly crazy thinking about my T, she is not going to take that away from me now. She also won't take away playing the mom role right before I have to go back. Why would she suddenly pull the carpet out from under me even further?
I worry that she'll forget about me over the break. I worry that she won't call when she says she will or answer my emails. She'll get lost in time because I'm not there to lend her my watch and she'll be 30mins late to calling me because she was talking to another client. Someone who is actually paying for her time. I worry that she'll move on to another client and forget me completely, leaving me alone in that basement to rot. I worry she won't set up times with me and she'll just disappear from my life completely like every other mother figure I've ever had. I don't want her to fade away.
I worry that she'll be happy that I left. I worry that I annoy her and she will appreciate the distance. I worry that she looks forward to being able to hang up the clock I made her take down in the meeting room over a month ago because I hated the ticking noise so much. I worry that in my absence, she'll realize her life was better without me and lose interest in me altogether.
I worry that I'll build her up over the break so much that she couldn't possibly live up to my expectations and I'll be crushed when I return. I'm scared of the relationship changing when we move to weekly sessions as opposed to basically constant contact. I know that change doesn't mean change for the worse, but it's still scary.
I probably should talk to her about the last three paragraphs I wrote because those are tangible things that she can actually address without worrying that she's robbing me of a potentially helpful coping mechanism that isn't as maladaptive as others.