mulberryshoots

Have you ever found yourself feeling bad about something and then taking it out on someone that you love? When we enter the ‘autumn of our years’ it’s possible to see that when you look homeward at your life up to now. For me, most of the time, it was because I felt neglected or ignored: that my feelings were dimmed out by the noise of what everyone else needed or wanted at the time. These occasions multiplied until a little core of regret formed, sometimes feeling not important enough or mattering less than everyone else around you.

Even so, it doesn’t excuse being thoughtless to others when there seems to be a general clueless cloud around this issue between us and others, especially if we’re mothers too. Otherwise, why would Hallmark have to work so hard on the messages when Mother’s Day rolls around each year?

It’s not too late to apologize, though, when an instant memory appears of an occasion when you could have been nicer or paid more attention instead of being rude or exhausted. I think it’s important to make our beds before we go. To smooth out the sheets and blankets of the past and to be able to lie in the bed we make for ourselves with a clear conscience. There are also some, a very few, for whom reaching out isn’t all that apparent anymore. For those, it’s better to just let it go rather than feeling any regrets because it doesn’t do any good, only harm…a dynamic that goes so far back that it isn’t worth remembering really. All of us have some of this kind of pain, I think. It’s how we handle it that offers us a way out for consolation of some kind. A reckoning of sorts that we take charge of for ourselves before it’s too late.

Hard to go through. But better afterwards, little by little.