Here I am, an old lady (60), and I still feel the void of wishing that I had a different kind of mother. My mother went through experiences in The Depression when she was 6 to about 10 or so that are similar to WWASPS, except hers was a very poor family who had to use the "loving Catholic Church" to beat up her mind.
She was one of 4 "illegitimate" children [old-fashioned word now] of a single mother who would forsake her children at the first sign of interest by a man in her life. Sounds like the step-parent syndrome so many WWASPS kids live with. She was periodically dropped off at the huge brick orphanage in Omaha, Nebraska, while her mother galavanted off with yet-another boyfriend. Her stays lasted 3 months, 6 months...and then the mother would come straggling back to reclaim her kids when the current boyfriend absconded.
The Catholic nuns operated this orphanage with all the hatred, food deprivation, anonymity of regimentation, and forced child labor that the world thought was just fine because the nuns loved God. I'm sure God hated them. My mother was too little to work sewing machines, so spent her days clipping threads off shirts being made at the orphanage for the Arrow Shirt Company. She was the second Shirley to be in residence one time, so lost the only thing she had to call her own, her name, to be called by her middle name, Maxine. She had to eat oatmeal every morning in order to get the single prune offered as a treat at Sunday breakfast. She literally gagged from the smell later when she made oatmeal for me as a kid. As such a young child, she was at a work table all day except for a brief period in the paved central courtyard, when kids would "play" without equipment or balls, etc., and the head nun held court on a dias at the center. In a primitive "Group", any kid with "problems" was brought to the dias and publically beat with a stick which the nun ("God's wife") hid within her black robes. She was told the frequent lightening in Nebraska summers was God searching her out (this little kid) to strike her dead. Such was the pre-WWASPS agony of some children's life.
Since 1930, America is enlightened enough to outlaw such a life...except in Utah. Your political advocacy will someday make the world a better place when you identify WWASPS as such an abomination. Keep going; it will make you stronger as well as help us all.
The result of such a childhood was that my mother was a tough survivor. She met my father during WWII, when she was barely 17, and married him after a 3-week courtship. Theirs was a tight, fierce union, and he protected and loved her devoutly for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, I arrived to add to the mix. In their wonderful relationship of 2, I was not really wanted (she told me so), and I grew up knowing I was mostly a boarder in their house rather than a member of their small family. I ended up being a Only Child. I had 4 daughters myself plus several foster teens, have been married for 41 years, and still have close contact with *most* of my kids.
The one exception: our oldest daughter chose to send our oldest grandchild to Casa by the Sea soon after she married for the second time. In spite of our frantic protests, this then-14yo spent nearly a year in WWASPS, and never moved beyond Level II, never talked directly to her mother, never left the stockade in Mexico, never had a teacher, never played a game on the grass, never looked out the window at the sunset over the ocean.
This girl now lives with us permanently, is doing well in high school, has tons of friends. She is now in your position in that she would like to have a mother, at least the standard perception of a female mentor, but that mom has basically refused to speak to her. The mother is not a WWASPS groupie (thinks the seminars were really stupid), but has so many issues (mostly guilt, I think) that she cannot be with her daughter.
I have talked with our grandaughter about the process by which parents and child move away from each other as the younger reach adulthood. It happens...sometimes sooner, sometimes later. For this kid, it happened much sooner, and abruptly. The schism is there, never to be fixed.
From my own experience, I know there is always the "try" to re-create a parent, a family. Often, it just doesn't happen. Even as a grandparent myself, I still called my mom every couple of months, still listened to complaints and harangues, still spent the next 2 days venting my own anger to an understanding family, still hoped to have a mother who cared. Didn't happen.
Every one wants an *image* of a mother, but very often that just won't translate to a real person. My advice is to live with it, not give up the dream, realize it is a dream, and move on to make the best of your own world. You simply cannot convince your parent of the harm they did you, nor the shame they should feel, nor the righteousness of your anger. Your best hope is to be a Good Person yourself, and, if you're really lucky, your parent may say to you sometime in the far-distant future,..."I'm sorry". Ask Ginger.
