‘From my first childbed, my mother became false’

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Linda (36) is married to Jaap (38) and mother of Bowie (9), Lenn (7) and Mika (3).

“The relationship with my mother has always been complicated. I think she had a traumatic childhood, although she doesn’t talk about it. We don’t see her family. My brother and I didn’t mind that she spent our youth somewhat unconventionally. Our father did not take an active part in our lives and every two years a different man walked around in our existence. My mother drank a lot and worked even more, my brother and I more or less raised ourselves.

Physically we lacked nothing, thanks to a large inheritance my mother had enough to spend. In terms of attention, it was different. My mother was in permanent survival mode and when she was finally free, she was usually drunk. Even I could handle that. But when one of her flings got pawed at me and I told her that, she denied it and invited the man over for a few more nights. There was a breach of trust that would never recover.

Out of the house

My brother and I left home as soon as it was legally possible, in the last year of high school. My mother put no obstacles in our way and financed our apartment. We lived happily together there, until I met Jaap and my brother went his way in love. I didn’t have a fun childhood, but I didn’t have a traumatic one either, and I never blamed my mother. I admire how she took care of two children on her own, never complained or spoke negatively about our absent father and always managed to provide us with new clothes and pay for sailing, horse and scouting camps.

False

But then I became a mother myself. In a completely different setting than the one I grew up in, with a happy marriage, both part-time jobs so that childcare was not necessary and with an emphasis on love and attention for each other. It seemed as if my mother was jealous of it, because from my first childbed she became false.

When Bowie failed to breastfeed, she called me “not a primeval mother” and that all three of my children did not sleep through the first year, she said, was the result of my “inadequate” upbringing. She thought that Jaap took a lot of care off my hands, she thought I was weak, especially that I opted for pain relief during my second and third birth. She was downright mean.

It often led to quarrels between Jaap and my mother. I didn’t dare rebel against her, still yearning for the love she had never given me, I realized now that I was a mother myself. Many of her statements were gulps, I suspect, but that didn’t make them any less painful. Time and time again she hit me in my mother soul, the place where it hurt the most.

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Grandma

Strangely enough, she was a warm grandmother to the children. She spoiled and cuddled them; something she never did with me. Jaap found it hard to digest that I tolerated so much from my mother, but respected that I eagerly soaked up any semblance of love on her part.

“In one fell swoop I was healed and we broke off contact”

Until Lenn ended up in the hospital at the age of five with an asthma attack that we couldn’t control. I watched over him for three days, after which Jaap took over so that I could work for a while. My mother got wind of it, called me and ranted: ‘No wonder your child is already in the hospital for the third time, if you yourself have to work so much, while in your case it is not necessary.’ In one fell swoop I was healed and we broke off contact. This was so poisonous that her love for my children could never be sincere either.

On birthdays and Christmas I still find it difficult that she is no longer in our lives. But someone who structurally crosses my boundaries and deliberately hurts me cannot be part of our nest.”

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