How deeply does the imprint of DNA embed within our psyche unalterable motivations? Murmurs and shadows of predestined factors that conform us to a portrait of who we are, despite all our painful quests to contradict them.
Retrospect is both a gift and a curse, and coming at mid-life when honest reflection and realistic self analysis can serve in transforming us into the wizened crone - or so we hope.
Looking back we see the landscape for what it is, not what we hoped it was or wanted it to be. We can't fool ourselves anymore. Mid-life is a time to be both brutal and gracious to our ageing self - honest and forgiving.
Motherhood. An institution with as many faces as there are mothers. Womanhood. A multi-prisimed wonder embodying motherhood as a dazzling centrepiece, a pivotal expression of worth and value - its failures and successes are the very children of life.
Yet we do fail. And our successes are often discovered only when our beloved children become aware that they, like their mothers, are also victims of victims, and each of us in turn must own our own lives and become adults, facing the realities of life as we emerge from the bubble of childhood, realising that life is difficult.
How easy it all sounds. Accepting, accepting, accepting. But it is not easy. We long for our children to forgive us, as we struggle to forgive ourselves. Forgiving our self over and over again as we muse on how different we would do it if we had the chance to do it all again. It takes time to acknowledge the debris, and then to realise that that debris has become our children's pain.
We hold fast to the mother mantra - 'I did the best I could', which paradoxically is more often than not, the truth.
"...I am large, I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman
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