Hi everyone. :)
molly what you say about missing your mum when she dies..... it just made me think and I will share if that is okay. My DM was brought up in a very abusive household.... emotionally, physically, sexually, the whole catastrophe. Her mother was a very 'strong' woman - that's how she liked to see herself anyway. She was aggressive, opinionated, liked to think of herself as a matriarch. She played her children off each other, she expected them to jump at her every whim. My DM felt sure that when her M died, she would feel liberated and finally free of her. What happened, when she died though was that DM was distraught. I was still living at home then, and for what it is worth, my feeling is that my DM spent alot of her life trying to make things better with her DM... trying to 'fix' her mum, and 'fix' whatever was wrong with the relationship. Usually that manifested in DM being a doormat and trying to prove her worth to her mother. Once her mum died, my DM had no more chances to make the relationship into what she wanted it to be - it was all over. So she grieved the loss of the mother she wanted rather than the mother she had, and grieved her lost chances to make whatever was wrong 'right'.
That is just how I perceived it. From my perspective, no matter what DM did she could never 'fix' it. Her mother was a vain, bitter woman with a nasty streak. She abandoned her kids when my mum (youngest) was about 8. Then came back a few years later and enabled her husband to sexually abuse her children. (He was their father). She put her kids into roles.... my uncle was the scapegoat. My mother was the stupid slave at her beck and call.
I am musing, and it may not make much sense, but anyway, just one experience.
