The Full Circle Moment I never Expected — Finding gratitude in grief.

I am from the kind of family where the black sheep is a great thing to be. Conformity was not an option for me, as I decided early in life to break the cycles of dysfunction that had been passed down, generation to generation like cursed heirlooms. From the time I was a teenager, my only real goal was to move away from rural Michigan, and experience life beyond the tiny patch of wilderness we called home.

Through the years, I became mostly estranged from my parents. Life was easier for me that way. But, part of me always had survivor’s guilt. I felt incredibly lucky to have a good, comfortable, happy, healthy life, and at the same time, felt like I didn’t really deserve it, because my family continued to live in poverty, addiction, abuse and denial. I found it hard to be happy and proud of me while I was sad for them.

Moving thirteen hours away from home was not easy. It came with many challenges, huge culture shock, and crippling anxiety from realizing that I was wholly ill-equipped for adulthood. That first jump out of the nest was brutal, but each year that passed got better, and each cross-country move after that got easier. Soon, I was living a life that looked nothing like the one I left behind.

Separating myself from my past geographically allowed me to heal emotionally from years of abuse and neglect. It allowed me to begin the process of forgiving my parents. It gave me space to figure out who I was, and want I wanted to do with my life.

At the pleading of my baby sister, after a few years away, I resumed some contact with my parents. With careful boundaries in place, I rejoined our family, mostly because my parents were aging, their health was declining, and I didn’t want them to die thinking that I hated them.

To be clear: I don’t hate my parents.

To be honest: I don’t know if love is the right word, either.

That’s the thing about forgiveness. It is a cutting of the emotional cords to the people and events that brought us harm, so that we can move on with our lives unencumbered by those things. Forgiving someone doesn’t excuse their behavior, and it doesn’t necessarily change the relationship we have with that person after we’ve forgiven them. Toxic is toxic, and boundaries are our birthright.

For me, this meant that forgiving my parents for the abuse in my early years didn’t fill me with warm fuzzy memories that weren’t there before. We didn’t have much to build a relationship on, but we did the best we could to stay in touch. I had a couple of pleasant trips home before mom passed, and I am grateful for that time with her. I feel like I got to know more about her in the past three years than maybe ever before.

I now understand that the dysfunction in my childhood home was a product of untreated and poorly managed mental illness. My parents were not well. What they considered “normal behavior” in our home was extremely toxic for all of us. If they had been well, things probably would have been very different. Understanding this helps me look at my parents with compassion because I know they were trying to do the best they could for us through impossible challenges. Seeing this makes me sad that they had such a difficult life, and lacked the resources needed to make things better.

While most little girls had imaginary friends, I had imaginary parents. I remember standing in our kitchen window watching, waiting for my real family to come back. I began mourning the loss of my mother the day I realized that my imaginary one didn’t exist, and wouldn’t be coming to my rescue.

Sitting at my real-life mother’s bedside, I felt as much on the outside as I ever did. She had gone in for routine surgery, and was expected to go home forty-eight hours later and return to her normal life. What happened instead was a horrific avalanche of one complication after another until she died eleven days after her procedure.

Eleven days is a long time. Let’s establish that.

Eleven days was an eternity for mom to suffer while fighting for her life.

Eleven days in a row was my longest trip home since I moved away twenty years ago.

Eleven days, is about eight days longer than I can be around my dad before I become completely neurotic. Long story.

Eleven days, was long enough for me to see our family, and the roles each of us came to play in a new way.

My baby sister was the obvious favorite child in our house. We were only two years apart in age. We grew up across the hall from each other in the same house, with the same parents, and we had completely different experiences. Where I felt unloved, outcast and neglected, my sister felt that she had a wonderful childhood with parents who loved her and gave her everything she needed.

Watching my sister care for our dying mother helped me see how much they loved each other. My sister said they were best friends. It made me happy to know that my mother had a daughter who loved her. My sister was able to do all the things for our mother that I was not. She kept contact with her through the years, and kept her kids close so they could grow up nearby and spend time with her.

She stroked mom’s hair and kissed her face with tears in her eyes, as I watched with the same detachment as any other surgical case I’ve ever seen, and in that moment, I saw the gift my mother gave to me when she chose my little sister to be her golden child.

I will say that if mother had been abusive to both of us, I would have liked that better as a kid. I never understood why my mother didn’t love me like she loved my sister. Watching the two of them together was painful proof that my mother had the capacity to be a loving, gentle, nurturing parent. Seeing the contrast in the way she treated us made me believe there was something wrong with me — like I had an inherent flaw that made me deserving of abuse.

My relationship with my parents was one of the biggest reasons why I left my hometown. I was hell bent on living a life that didn’t look anything like their war-torn trailer on the family farm. If mother had loved me and protected me when I was little, if she had kept me from harm, sheltered me, and made me feel like that was my home and they were my people, I might have never left that place. I might still be right there today, living my worst nightmare.

I was envious of my sister when we were kids. There were days I would have done anything to trade places with her — to feel the approval and affection from my mother that I needed so desperately. Today, I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.

The painful rejection I felt from my parents was a catalyst that pushed me farther than I ever imagined I could go. It showed me that sometimes, life brings the most beautiful gifts to us in the most painful packages. It’s up to us to sift through the ugly stuff to find those gifts, and use them to make miracles happen.

I could have taken that box of pain my mother gave to me and used it to become a perpetual victim, a hateful monster of a person, or a carbon copy of her and all her toxic traits. Instead, I used it as a stepping stone, to break those cycles for myself and my children, and become the woman I was born to be.

I didn’t know how I would feel while watching my mother die. With a twinge of sadness for what might have been in a different place and time somewhere, I mostly felt at peace.

Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt grateful for the home I never had, and the family who could not love me, because they led me to the beautiful life I cherish today. I found a place to belong in this world because they gave me so many reasons to go searching for it.

Godspeed, mom. Wherever you are. Thank you for the shallow roots that allowed me to follow my heart, and find my home.