I don’t like my mother, but I love her. She was never very nice to me

She brought me up to believe my nose was too big, I was ugly, couldn’t sing and that no one would want me. There was physical violence too, but never any physical affection. As a result, I have spent the rest of my life trying to undo the damage – as well as building on the occasional good she did for me, such as encouraging a love of books and realising the importance of regular meals.

When you are a child, your mother’s words are the only truth. She is the one person in your life you’re meant to turn to for unconditional love. She has tremendous power over us and it can work in our best interests or against us. To start your life with a mother who truly loves you and wants only the best for you is a gift that nothing in your life will ever erase. Freely given, mother love nurtures self-esteem, courage and confidence. To be born to a mother who is never emotionally available can stunt emotional growth and engender fear. You have to make the rules up as you go along and hope that along the way you will meet someone else who will fill the mother role. I was lucky – I had a sister much older than myself and she taught me at an early age that the unconditional love associated with mothering isn’t monopolised by the woman who bore you.

When I first gazed into the eyes of my newborn daughter I promised myself I would never do or say the terrible things my mother did when I was a child. So, I became the mother I would have wanted for myself; fun, always ready to listen, always praising, encouraging, cuddling, and running an open house for all my children’s friends. Yet, only recently my now grown-up daughter turned to me and said, ‘You are so like Nan sometimes.’ I was horrified but shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we inherit a fair dose of our mothers’ genes and we learn how to mother from our mothers. No wonder it’s hard to break away from the maternal blueprint they set us.

An irritating sentimentality surrounds mothers and mothering. Mother’s Day is just a small part of it. Mothering is supposed to come naturally to females, and while there are women who are born to it, there are plenty more who find mothering hard work – something to be learned, mainly through mistakes. Some, like my mother, never succeed. Quite frankly, being a mother is the most difficult thing I have ever done, and continues to be even though my son and daughter have now grown up and left home.

Being a daughter is just as hard. Whether a mother has had your best interests at heart or not, her shadow trails behind you as if it were your own, no matter how hard you try to shake it off. Now that my mother is old and frail, I have learned to embrace the shadow and focus on her qualities. How could she, as a woman who did not love herself, and was probably not loved by her mother either, show her children love? Neither she nor I can undo the damage she has done but, as a mother myself, I can see that in her own limited way she did what she thought was best for me. The negative messages she gave had been passed down through generations of females in my family. I have worked hard to erase them and tried, in the process, to forgive her. But as my daughter reminds me, we can never truly escape our mothers and their imperfect love for us.