I love you

I wrote a great deal about my mother. After her death, this was my way of somehow, keeping the relation with her. A dialogue. With her, with me.

I wrote about things I would have like telling her, and I never got to, or maybe things I've said but perhaps I would have preferred to say in another way. I wrote to organise my thoughts, or to simply feel I "download" everything on a piece of paper, who doesn't judge me, and could never made me feel embarrassed to cry.

I considered it a therapeutic process. We all need to grieve after loosing someone so important, we need to express our feelings, and perhaps the worse thing we can do is to "get over it", without feeling the sadness, the loss, and to give our soul and body the chance to recover naturally. The truth is some voids can never be filled...

My mom never used to cry. I can isolate few events when I saw her crying. The most painful one - and the last time, when she wasn't conscious anymore, on the hospital bed, a day before she died. 

I visited her twice that day at the hospital. She wasn't conscious nor in the morning, nor the afternoon. She was asleep. But she had tears under her eyes, which I haven't noticed initially. When I saw them, I started crying. I left her in the morning hoping I will find her awake when I will return in the afternoon. But when I did, she was also asleep.

The next day, I was at the office when I receive the call.

When I was diagnosed, she was looking at me frightened, as if she was waiting any minute for me to react somehow...to start crying. For her, this was the worse thing possible. She would always say "Don't cry!". When I was sad, she would have done anything to make me smile again. I integrated, of course, this behavior, for many years. After a lot of individual psychotherapy work, I understood that it's ok to feel. It's ok to allow yourself to feel whatever you feel, and by denying whichever feeling one will only remove it from awareness. It will kick back in with the first trigger that will remind of the painful situation - The Repression.

Regarding my disease, we never talked too much about it. That involved emotional moments, and we wouldn't allow ourselves crying in the presence of another. Especially when my symptoms worsened. 

At the psychology training course I am attending once a month, there was a specific moment which scattered me. One of my colleagues in the training group, herself a mother,  was passing trough a similar situation: her daughter had gotten sick and apparently, the cause was unknown. Her distress, so real, her pain as a mother, reminded me of my mom's unexpressed pain. The pain which appeared in some key moments, surprising me as it was always unexpected. As it was one day at the hospital in neurology section, when as I was facing new, strange symptoms, she practically begged the Doctor, with tears in her eyes, to tell her where she could go, where she could take me, abroad maybe, anywhere to heal my disease (the Doctor's answer was a typical Roumanian Doctor, which I don't even want to mention, but funny I remember after...twelve years?).

Her unvoiced pain, which almost all the time hidden in the unconscious, was manifesting unexpectedly.

However, noticing the pain, a mother's panic in our training group, I got to be aware of my mother's pain, which she would have felt when I was diagnosed with MS. A pain who reappeared more vividly with every new symptom. A pain who was ignored too many times. By me, by her. As she wanted to protect me from every suffering. In my turn, I was hiding as best as I could any new symptom.

She will be remembered by all of us as the happiest, the most joyful and optimistic person! She is for sure the strongest woman, the strongest person I have ever met and

I am because of her.

All I have  now is to write about this, about her, about her pain, but also about the love we felt for each other. And the many things left unsaid.

Love,

Florența