{"id":4663,"date":"2022-01-06T18:41:21","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T18:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zuschlag.us\/?page_id=4663"},"modified":"2024-08-30T22:53:26","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T22:53:26","slug":"mom","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/?page_id=4663","title":{"rendered":"Maureen Parkhill Hopkins Zuschlag"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I am, in general, a very happy person with a very happy life. \u00a0I take great joy in everything around me.\u00a0\u00a0 But the one source of abiding sadness in my life has been my mother.<\/p>\n

News of her terminal illness in 2020 left me oddly unmoved.\u00a0 Or perhaps not so oddly unmoved. I certainly didn\u2019t want her to suffer, but I was unfazed by her impending death.\u00a0 I had, in fact, mourned the loss of my mother 10 years ago. \u00a0At that time she said some pretty unforgiveable things that I think no child should ever hear from his mother, much less from anyone else.\u00a0 Listening to her on the phone that day was pretty much the last straw.\u00a0 I told her that I had too much self-respect to listen to it any further, and that I was hanging up the phone, and would no longer speak to her until she apologized for those words.<\/p>\n

I never heard from her again. \u00a0I wrote her letters, often pleading ones, hoping that she would understand what she was doing \u2013 appealing to her pride in her behavior toward me \u2013 what would her grandchildren think, etc, etc?\u00a0 But never once a response.\u00a0 A few years later the invitation to my wedding was returned unopened.<\/p>\n

She wasn\u2019t a bad mother. \u00a0She wasn\u2019t abusive, nor was she ever outrightly cruel. \u00a0So I have very little to complain about in the wider sense of injustices perpetrated on others by their parents.\u00a0 And yet, I still feel robbed of a normal relationship with my mother. \u00a0I had a mother who was cold and uncompassionate.\u00a0 Who picked favorites among her children based on their willingness to shape their lives to meet her imperious demands. \u00a0She repeated the phrase \u201ctough love\u201d so much I sometimes thought she had coined it.\u00a0 If I ever got a warm maternal embrace, it was one of my aunts who provided it.\u00a0 Her sisters, thank goodness, had nothing of her distance or lack of compassion.\u00a0 I remember watching the film \u201cOrdinary People<\/a>\u201d as a 20 year old and being chilled by the sight of my mother being shown to me on the screen through someone else\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

I knew that deciding not to put up with her invective as a 50 year old man daring to seek a bit of happiness and security in his life, I did so at my financial peril. \u00a0In this regard, she is no different than one of those high-handed matriarchs in some Victorian novel banishing someone for displeasing her. \u00a0It\u2019s not that unusual. \u00a0It\u2019s happened many times before. And is no doubt happening still somewhere.\u00a0 Still, I can\u2019t find it in me to forgive her. \u00a0Is that un-Christian of me?<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t and can\u2019t mourn her loss. \u00a0In a very real sense, her absence is freeing.\u00a0 She\u2019s no longer there to continue poisoning the well.\u00a0 If there is an afterlife, I hope she finds some peace there instead of living in a world where I was such a disappointment to her.<\/p>\n

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    I am, in general, a very happy person with a very happy life. \u00a0I take great joy in everything around me.\u00a0\u00a0 But the one source of abiding sadness in my life has been my mother. News of her terminal illness in 2020 left me oddly unmoved.\u00a0 Or perhaps not so oddly unmoved. I … Continue reading Maureen Parkhill Hopkins Zuschlag<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4663","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4663"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4676,"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4663\/revisions\/4676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuschlag.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}