Revelation in Journal

This morning I was making coffee and I began to ponder.
I pondered and I thought and I pondered. (Yes I’ve been reading Winnie the Pooh to my son lately, lol)
I wondered why my mother told me that she never thought I liked her very much. I wondered how she could be so assured in her perspective that I knew exactly what I wanted, even when I was a tiny baby. I wondered what kind of relationship would allow her to perceive me as more intelligent, more resourceful, more knowledgeable, more confident in who I was than her.
And I realized that she has a weirdly reversed relationship with me.
She is seeking mothering from me. She is seeing in me the cold rejection of her mother. Her mother who ignored her suffering and then abandoned her. Her mother who never liked her much at all.
An unmothered mother, she regressed to the only mother-daughter relationship she knew. And it was a perverted one. Apparently, she was the one that cared, and so I had to be the one to reject her. I, as a tiny newborn infant, had to be the one to reject her.

The thought feels slimy and uncomfortable, like snakes in my stomach. It’s like watching an incestuous relationship play out. Very disconcerting, gross, and altogether disgusting.

Instead of standing back to really examine this profoundly irrational perspective, she just ran with it. “You never liked me” “You never wanted me to hold you” “You nursed and just wanted me to leave you alone” “You were so happy” “You always knew exactly what you wanted”

And even now, while I’m grown and she’s older. She tells me that she feels very judged by me. She feels like she never does anything right. Like no matter what, I’m going to say she is doing something wrong, or criticize her.
So I would ask, “why are you seeking my approval, mom? Why are you so sensitive to my negative or even positive feedback if you’re my mother? And mind you, you’re not at all sensitive about how you’re doing your job as a mom. Not about how you’ve utterly failed to support me. Not about anything to do with your moral obligation to be a mother to your child. No. You’re only sensitive about how I don’t approve of your inconsequential, trivial and annoying personality or habitual aspects. You know, the things that you’re convinced make you you. Not the things that actually make you. Not your foundational relationships with your closest family members. No, you’re not sensitive about that at all. You don’t care about that stuff. Just the other stuff. The stuff you for some reason care more about than your children.”