MOTHER FORGIVING

By Lynne Renoir, MA,

Lynne Renoir, the author of the memoir Leaving Faith and Finding Freedom, writes about her mother. A woman who stood by and did nothing while her husband, a religious zealot, viciously beat his daughter.

In this article, Lynne tries to reconcile her feelings for her mother with the reality of the situation she faced.

My mother was a mystery. She had married the wrong man but could never admit it, even to herself.

In her eyes, her husband was a man to be admired. He was successful in business and wanted to pass on his talents to the sons he hoped to produce. Unfortunately for him, he was given four daughters but no sons.

Each time my mother gave birth to a daughter, my father could barely conceal his disappointment. Being unaware that he was responsible for the gender of his offspring, his anger was directed toward my mother. My father had grown up with the view that his own father was a wonderful man. This was despite the fact that his father beat him severely. Nevertheless, my father believed that his wonderful upbringing had caused him to become such an amazing man. My devoted mother accepted his opinion of himself and never questioned his views or behavior.

Because of the way he had been raised, my father felt he had to discipline me through physical punishment. At first, he used his bare hands to smash me across the head and face. This treatment began at four when I had forgotten to put my toys away. Soon after, I was hit on the bottom, bending over his bed. Nothing less than perfection would satisfy him. I was hit if I forgot to say goodnight or accidentally knocked over a glass of water on the table. Also, I was punished whenever I put forward a view that was contrary to an opinion my father had expressed.

Then when I was nine, my father went out into the bush to look for a small tree branch from which he could make a cane. He felt that by just using his hands, he was failing his duty as a father. My first experience of this form of punishment was when I tripped and fell into a hole in the street, breaking three eggs. I badly hurt my leg, but when I limped home, with blood pouring from the gash, my father beat me before attending to my injury. On this occasion, my mother made a weak attempt to get my father to treat my leg first, but to no avail.

A further problem I had was my absentmindedness. I had left a cardigan at school but could not think where it could be. My father grabbed me, and we walked a mile in silence to the school. When I eventually found it, he wasted no time telling me that when we arrived home, he would give me "a father of a thrashing."

My mother never attempted to protect me from my father's cruelty, but her rejection of me became even more evident when we discussed my future. I had done well at school and wanted to become a teacher. But in her eyes, I was too "aggressive." She felt that, as a female, I should have a gentle and quiet spirit. As she saw it, my ambition was a weakness in my character that would worsen if I followed my desired profession.

I equated my mother's failure to stand up for me with her inability to love me. I had rejected my father completely. Yet I desperately needed my mother's love, though I could never have it. Despite this reality, up until the time of her death, I was still seeking it. On many occasions, I would ask her, "Do you love me?" but the answer was always the same, "All mothers love their children."

Many years later, reflecting on her response, I formed the view that there are two kinds of love.

One is the kind of unconditional love that most parents have for their children, no matter how much they may disapprove of their behavior. The other is the delight parents have in the qualities and characteristics that make their children unique. My mother's inability to love me in this second way was no doubt due to the dominating influence of my father and her adoption of his belief that behavior less than perfection could not be tolerated.

One thing that puzzled me about my mother was that although she rejected my personality, she did everything she could do at a practical level to make life easy for me. She made all my clothes and even did my washing and ironing. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone outside the family how she had spoilt me. And despite her inability to love me the way I needed her to, she disci- plined herself to be interested in what I was doing and to spend time talking to me. It even seemed that she had some compassion for me when I was upset. But how she truly felt about me, I could never fathom.

I wondered whether my mother's kindness to me was some compensation for what I had to endure at my father's hands or perhaps even a way of making up for her inability to love me. The beatings from my father continued right throughout my teenage years. My mother had previously told me that my father would beat me until I was twenty-one. But the saddest day of my life came when I was twenty-three. I had forgotten to be at the place and time I had agreed with my father to pick me up. When I arrived home, my father unleashed his fury with the cane.

I confronted my mother, reminding her of her previous promise that the beatings would stop when I came of age. Her response chilled me to my core. "The age of twenty-one", she said in the coldest voice imaginable, "is merely something recognized by the state. It has no relevance in this home. As long as you are under his roof, your father has the right to discipline you in any way he chooses".

It took me a long time before I could forgive my mother: for that episode and for her failure to protect me from my father's cruelty. What helped was a growing awareness of my mother's terrible upbringing. Her father died when she was a toddler, and her mother, a vicious woman, treated her with contempt.

Perhaps when we can empathize with what our mothers had to endure, we can be more acceptingof their failures, and love them despite their limitations and the pain they have caused us.

Australian author Lynne Renoir, MA, has lived a life of contemplative service to humanity. She is the author of two books. God Interrogated: Reinterpreting the Divine, and her memoir, Leaving Faith, Finding Meaning: A Preacher's Daughter's Search for God.