My mother at age 90.
Welcome to Transforming Through Love.
You may know February 14 as Valentine’s Day. For the rest of my life, I’ll know February 14 as the day of my mother’s funeral and the day I launched this website.
My mother was a wonderful teacher of love, but not for the reasons you might think.
She and I had an awful relationship for 43 years and a loving relationship for the last 15 years. The last 50 months of those 15 years were taken up with helping her find a way to live with the damage she sustained from a catastrophic head injury, the damage that gradually turned into the dementia that ended her life.
I grew up with a mom who was stubborn, controlling, manipulative, self-absorbed, damaged, and depressed.
Some love story, right?
It was some love story. When I was 43, I’d had enough. I told her to knock it off. I told her I needed a mother and was tired of treating her like the porcelain doll her family, who were now dead, had taught me she was.
Bless her, she stepped up. She was waiting for someone to call her out.
I believed she was hard to love until I realized I held the key to transforming our relationship. When I consistently demonstrated I would be there for her, when I focused on loving her in ways that felt like love to her, she relaxed into loving me. I experienced the gift of getting to know the real her, not the persona her difficult life had created for her. When she felt safe, she dropped a lot of the stuff I didn’t like about her. There was no need to defend herself against love. The real her was funny, caring, warm, self-directed, and sensitive.
I discovered we were very much alike, right down to the defenses she’d erected. We didn’t need to wear those 1960 grey mother-daughter dresses she’d bought the two of us to show up as mommy and mini-me.
I have a photo of her that was taken when she was 84 years old. It’s protected by a copyright, so I can’t share it. She’s six years older in the above photo, and she looks at least twenty years younger. I think love keeps us young.
I’d sensed she’d live a long life, and I’d sensed I’d be taking care of her. It’s one of the reasons I never wanted to have my own children. A crystal child born in the 1950’s, I always felt I’d been born to be her mother, not the other way around. It felt entirely natural for her to call me her mother during her dementia years. I tried to care for her in my own home until I realized my extreme energy sensitivity made me the wrong choice to be her full-time caregiver. She deserved better care than I could give her during her mood swings and behavior changes. I directed her care during the final 50 months of her life, even when she was living in the memory care unit. She appreciated my devoting my life to caring for her.
When she died, I grieved her passing the way a parent would grieve a child.
The marketing director at my mother’s memory care unit told me she’d never seen a tighter bond between a mother and a daughter than ours. The caregivers at my mother’s memory care unit told me she knew I loved her, that she’d told one of them, “I know Sheryl loves me because she always tells me so.” Near the end of her life, during one of those days when she remembered she’d given birth to me, she told me, “You’ve been a good daughter.”
I cherish that memory.
She never forgot me, she never forgot my name, and her face always lit up when I’d arrive. Even dementia couldn’t break our bond.
Thank you, Mom, for teaching me how to love.
I share our story, warts and all, as our gift to you. If both people are willing to drop their defenses that protect them from love, if both people are committed to trying something different, any relationship has the potential to be transformed. If we could do it, perhaps you could do it.
Welcome to our website. It’s as much my mom’s as it is mine. If you like, you can pour yourself a glass of iced tea infused with fresh mint and pretend you’re sitting with us on the front porch.
Are you comfortable? Good! Let’s talk about love.
Copyright 2015 by Sheryl Hirsch-Kramer. All rights for any further use reserved. For permission to repost or reuse the above only in its entirety, fill out this form: http://www.transformingthroughlove.com/contact/ Always consult your physician or trusted health professional to design a treatment plan for your own or for someone else’s wellness. All the information on this website is intended solely as loving support intended to accompany traditional medical care, not as stand-alone advice. We appreciate your donations; please send a message via the contact form for donation instructions.If you like what you’re reading here, please forward this website to a friend: http://www.transformingthroughlove.com.
