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Abstract

it was one sentence I had written, in which I advocated for kindness, that was the trigger. Though completely unrelated to her or anything at all in my own life, she took my words to be hypocrisy. How could I speak about kindness when I had none for her?She wasn’t entirely wrong. But then again, that kind of reaction didn’t help. In a moment of self-preservation, I muted all conversations with her and let her stew.But although I was in my resistance phase and refusing to communicate with her, this, I believe, was a turning point. The exploding of the bomb simply needed to happen so that we could have the possibility to breathe once more.But while I sat in my solitary silence, something else erupted.There we all were, focusing on our own little worlds and our own little problems. Meanwhile on October 7th 2023, elsewhere in the world, a bloody and barbaric massacre happened. And it made our entire worlds stop.It happened right where our family was. More specifically, my mother’s family.Her great niece was one of the many trying to escape the AK47 bullets being fired indiscriminately by the Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival in Israel. Her great nephew was called up as a reservist to the army to help defend the northern border before, a day later, being sent home on compassionate leave when he learnt that an entire group of his friends had been murdered at that party in Re’im.Another of her great nephews left his home to take refuge with his parents due to the intensity of the barrage of rockets coming from Gaza.The whole family was in shock. The young girl was suffering from PTSD, her brother was sinking into a deep depression, and the aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents were trying to comfort and calm one another.My mother — the only one of her living siblings living outside of Israel — felt a confusion of mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was grateful to be away from the conflict and somewhere relatively safe. On the other hand she felt worried for her family, and, as many Jews around the world have done, she felt isolated amid the growing antisemitic feelings and was desperately missing the sense of solidarity with her family.Meanwhile, here in the UK, where both of her daughters have largely distanced themselves, and where she has felt more and more alone over the years, she has had no close support.In the early days of the war, I didn’t reach out to my mother. After the fury directed at me, I wasn’t ready.The events in Israel weren’t enough to push me to find the will to connect.She sent the occasional message in the chat group we have with my sister, but neither of us responded.My sister refused point-blank to get into any discussion with her about the war, and I refused point blank to get into any conversation with my mother, period.But I realised something else was happening. We were both simultaneously feeling the pain of the conflict, the worry about the hostages, and empathy for the trauma of Israel, separately yet in the very same way.As the weeks passed, I began to realise that this conflict was not going to stop anytime soon, and the rising concern for Jews across the world was not going to end until a resolution could be broached.But if that was the case for the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, what hope was there if two Jewish women, a mother and a daughter, both related to p

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eople living close to the epicentre of the war, could not even bring themselves to establish the connection between themselves?It was one day in mid-November that a message came from my mother that broke me down. It shared how the younger of her two brothers, Itzik, had celebrated his 80th birthday on a WhatsApp video call with her in the UK, her eldest brother in another city in Israel, and her niece in the USA. His large, happy, and loving family were all there in person with him.She described how they had all shared photos and videos of his childhood and all through his life. My mother had shared a video of herself at the age of four and Itzik at eight. She felt emotional watching it. Now, seeing Itzik at eighty, having been through cancer, losing a great deal of weight and looking very weak, she was acutely aware that he may not have long to live. With this war, she had no idea if she would see him in person again.She said in her message, “I am already missing him. I feel so sad. I wish I never left Israel. I wish I was part of the past years of this family that I watched today.”And that was when I knew I needed to reach out her.In the time that had passed, I had begun to see her vulnerable side. Her side that needed others, despite the hard, spiked walls she could put up. And it opened up a channel of emotion I didn’t instantly recognise, for it was so unfamiliar in this context — love.For the first time in many years, I felt that sense of familiarity of the mother-daughter bond. And with it, I felt a real love.She — well, she softened, and was receptive to the care and the connection I placed on my table of love, and she reciprocated, in her own special way.For the first time in years, I felt a deep sense of her vulnerability, sadness, and isolation from those who should be supporting her at times like this. And it made me sad.It made me especially sad that I had held myself aloft from her when what she was experiencing, and always experienced, was simply human pain. Something we all understand to a degree, and something Jews across the world are relating to and coming together with open hearts.The collective pain and the individual pain I saw in my mother finally broke down my own resistance, and I felt a real, true sense of love for my mother emerge.Of course, no relationship is ever going to be perfect, especially one as flawed as the one we have had. But I feel I am learning to see it all in a different light now.I don’t expect her to change her ways. I mean, she’s 76 and that just ain’t happening.She still has her quirks and habits that can send me into a here-we-go-again mindset, such as when she gets stuck on talking about our terrible government and all their evil tricks and I can’t get a word in edgeways, but I set aside judgement. I’m sure I’ll have my truly annoying habits when I’m 76 too, so let’s just not worry about that.I’m sure she’ll still be as aggravating as anything at times. She’ll always see fit to tell me what to do, and I’ll probably be just as lippy when I tell her where to get off.We’ll probably still find many things to argue about, especially once the war in Gaza is over. But for now I’m glad I found a way to bridge those once-seemingly unbridgeable differences.And I’m glad I found that way through love. A tried but true knowledge that love is more important than anything.</article></body>

I Finally Found the Love I’d Given Up On

After years of trying, I can now say I love my mother

My mother, centre; me with my arm around her neck, and my sister beside me. On top of an active volcano in Sulawesi, waiting to erupt. Author’s photo.

Love is a word I have struggled to see written in the same sentence as my mother. It’s not for want of trying to find her a place at my table of love, but sometimes relationships become so complicated and traumatic that it becomes easier to just write them off.

And, although I am not proud of the fact, this is what I did with my relationship with my mother.

For years I have tried not to feel bad about it. I have tried to justify my inability to ever use the word “love” in relation to her.

She’s not been the easiest person to deal with. Far from it, in fact. Not only for me.

She’s difficult. She falls out with people on a regular basis. She can react to something completely disproportionately and turn a happy and peaceful moment into a stress-riddled one with angry text messages coming in every ten minutes. I have found myself resorting to the mute button if I can bear to, or the block button if I can’t.

Because I am not the only one who experiences this, it’s easy to reason that it’s her and not me. And therefore my lack of affection, my inability to honour her with love, is 100% justifiable. In my eyes, at least.

As my sister and I grew up, my mother struggled to relate to us. Close female relationships weren’t easy for her since her own mother had been too ill to spend much time with her, and her only sister was twelve years her senior, leaving home before my mother had reached tweenhood.

I believe she wanted to love us, but as we grew into women, she saw us more as competition. She either tried too hard and suffocated us or found reasons to fault us constantly, as if trying to raise her own self-esteem by putting us down. Either way, she only pushed us further from her heart. There felt to be no natural love or connection there at all from her, and nothing for me to reciprocate.

I’ve spent years in a mental struggle with myself over trying to heal my relationship with my mother, eventually coming to the decision that life is too short to torment myself by trying and failing repeatedly. And so I gave up. I gave up trying to give space to her, to make allowances, to make excuses. I gave up trying to love her.

But then, recently, something changed.

The first thing that happened was that all my frustration and resistance to her came to the surface for her to see.

While I had never intended to show her the truth of how her consistent criticism and endless demeaning advice to me made me feel, it all bubbled to the surface over a matter of months during 2023.

She found old writings of mine I never intended for her to see, seething with my fury and resentment at her. It’s not something I am proud of, and I apologised and conceded I was in the wrong. But something was still left unresolved. Rather than feel like the air had been cleared, it hung thick like an unexploded bomb.

And then, one day, out of the blue, the bomb exploded and her fury at me ensued. Her buried resentment couldn’t be contained. She followed every word I wrote online without fail and it was one sentence I had written, in which I advocated for kindness, that was the trigger. Though completely unrelated to her or anything at all in my own life, she took my words to be hypocrisy. How could I speak about kindness when I had none for her?

She wasn’t entirely wrong. But then again, that kind of reaction didn’t help. In a moment of self-preservation, I muted all conversations with her and let her stew.

But although I was in my resistance phase and refusing to communicate with her, this, I believe, was a turning point. The exploding of the bomb simply needed to happen so that we could have the possibility to breathe once more.

But while I sat in my solitary silence, something else erupted.

There we all were, focusing on our own little worlds and our own little problems. Meanwhile on October 7th 2023, elsewhere in the world, a bloody and barbaric massacre happened. And it made our entire worlds stop.

It happened right where our family was. More specifically, my mother’s family.

Her great niece was one of the many trying to escape the AK47 bullets being fired indiscriminately by the Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival in Israel. Her great nephew was called up as a reservist to the army to help defend the northern border before, a day later, being sent home on compassionate leave when he learnt that an entire group of his friends had been murdered at that party in Re’im.

Another of her great nephews left his home to take refuge with his parents due to the intensity of the barrage of rockets coming from Gaza.

The whole family was in shock. The young girl was suffering from PTSD, her brother was sinking into a deep depression, and the aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents were trying to comfort and calm one another.

My mother — the only one of her living siblings living outside of Israel — felt a confusion of mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was grateful to be away from the conflict and somewhere relatively safe. On the other hand she felt worried for her family, and, as many Jews around the world have done, she felt isolated amid the growing antisemitic feelings and was desperately missing the sense of solidarity with her family.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, where both of her daughters have largely distanced themselves, and where she has felt more and more alone over the years, she has had no close support.

In the early days of the war, I didn’t reach out to my mother. After the fury directed at me, I wasn’t ready.

The events in Israel weren’t enough to push me to find the will to connect.

She sent the occasional message in the chat group we have with my sister, but neither of us responded.

My sister refused point-blank to get into any discussion with her about the war, and I refused point blank to get into any conversation with my mother, period.

But I realised something else was happening. We were both simultaneously feeling the pain of the conflict, the worry about the hostages, and empathy for the trauma of Israel, separately yet in the very same way.

As the weeks passed, I began to realise that this conflict was not going to stop anytime soon, and the rising concern for Jews across the world was not going to end until a resolution could be broached.

But if that was the case for the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, what hope was there if two Jewish women, a mother and a daughter, both related to people living close to the epicentre of the war, could not even bring themselves to establish the connection between themselves?

It was one day in mid-November that a message came from my mother that broke me down. It shared how the younger of her two brothers, Itzik, had celebrated his 80th birthday on a WhatsApp video call with her in the UK, her eldest brother in another city in Israel, and her niece in the USA. His large, happy, and loving family were all there in person with him.

She described how they had all shared photos and videos of his childhood and all through his life. My mother had shared a video of herself at the age of four and Itzik at eight. She felt emotional watching it. Now, seeing Itzik at eighty, having been through cancer, losing a great deal of weight and looking very weak, she was acutely aware that he may not have long to live. With this war, she had no idea if she would see him in person again.

She said in her message, “I am already missing him. I feel so sad. I wish I never left Israel. I wish I was part of the past years of this family that I watched today.”

And that was when I knew I needed to reach out her.

In the time that had passed, I had begun to see her vulnerable side. Her side that needed others, despite the hard, spiked walls she could put up. And it opened up a channel of emotion I didn’t instantly recognise, for it was so unfamiliar in this context — love.

For the first time in many years, I felt that sense of familiarity of the mother-daughter bond. And with it, I felt a real love.

She — well, she softened, and was receptive to the care and the connection I placed on my table of love, and she reciprocated, in her own special way.

For the first time in years, I felt a deep sense of her vulnerability, sadness, and isolation from those who should be supporting her at times like this. And it made me sad.

It made me especially sad that I had held myself aloft from her when what she was experiencing, and always experienced, was simply human pain. Something we all understand to a degree, and something Jews across the world are relating to and coming together with open hearts.

The collective pain and the individual pain I saw in my mother finally broke down my own resistance, and I felt a real, true sense of love for my mother emerge.

Of course, no relationship is ever going to be perfect, especially one as flawed as the one we have had. But I feel I am learning to see it all in a different light now.

I don’t expect her to change her ways. I mean, she’s 76 and that just ain’t happening.

She still has her quirks and habits that can send me into a here-we-go-again mindset, such as when she gets stuck on talking about our terrible government and all their evil tricks and I can’t get a word in edgeways, but I set aside judgement. I’m sure I’ll have my truly annoying habits when I’m 76 too, so let’s just not worry about that.

I’m sure she’ll still be as aggravating as anything at times. She’ll always see fit to tell me what to do, and I’ll probably be just as lippy when I tell her where to get off.

We’ll probably still find many things to argue about, especially once the war in Gaza is over. But for now I’m glad I found a way to bridge those once-seemingly unbridgeable differences.

And I’m glad I found that way through love. A tried but true knowledge that love is more important than anything.