((Trace)),

First of all, what you have been doing is "grieving" whatever YOU feel you lost in your history. When someone is reviewing their childhood the way you have, it's not about not appreciating what was there, instead it is recognizing whatever was not there for you and how that impacted you as a person.

Your mother had to work and support you without having a husband to contribute to that so she could be "there" for you. That created an abscence that left you feeling "scared" because most likely you were left to do for self when you were not ready to. Now, what you are experiencing in your effort to review how this affected you emotionally and psychologically is how a child develops "without". This is the more human side of what it means to a child that is "normal" to human development. This is not about disrespecting your mother and feeling guilty at all, instead it is reviewing your own personal puzzle and how your past contributed to how you struggle in the now.

When a child grows and develops it takes that child a long time to discover "self" and a lot of how a child develops also depends on what that child received in "nurturing". We are also designed to remember whatever we may not have gotten that affected us, we remember this because that is how nature designed us so that when we become parents we can provide our offspring better nurturing thus increasing that offspring's chance of survival. Even though you grew up without the safety of your mother being there for you, you did see how she survived and provided, if you think about what you were able to survive, you did survive because you imprinted what you saw your mother do.

Parents tend to say, "wait until she has to do what I did, then she will appreciate". Well, that is true because human beings don't really see or understand until they themselves go through an experience. When we are growing up we think of our parents as "supposed to know because they are adults", we don't realize what they manage to do without "knowing" and that they simply do not have all the answers just because they are grownups.