Mother love

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.