Her Life and Ours

She sat at the bus station with her two children by her side. After 4 long years she finally found the strength to leave. Even so, she couldn’t help staring at her two children as if she had let them down. Closing her eyes for a moment she looked back to her own childhood. Her mother had stayed with her father for 27 years, enduring emotional and severe physical abuse along the way. When her mother finally did, she wondered if this is how she felt. This mixed emotions of freedom and guilt. Looking back at her children, she knew the choices she made where right, and that the abuse she had started to suffer had to stop. With her 3 year old daughter and infant son with her she then loaded the bus, and started her life as a single mom. It has now been over twenty years since that day. And I know my mother still looks back to that day. My mother suffered depression for a while after. At the time that was a very smart move, one of the best decisions my mother had ever made for me and my brother. But after her abusive childhood, she seemed to bring that into her adult life. She started dating soon after, and her depression led to more horrible choices in men. My mom suffered abuse in many relationships that followed. Her childhood experiences though, made it to where she never stayed for more than a few years with someone who was abusive, either to her or to us though. She tried to make up for her relationships in men by pouring her time into her children. Through neglect of her own mother, she thought that as long as she could be twice the mom it wouldn’t matter who she was with. Though her relationships caused me and now two brothers problems I will never forget how strong of a mother I had. Never being shown to be a mom and being placed in an environment where men where cruel, carried on into my mother’s adult life. After many failed marriages and relationships, I started to see my mom had a problem with first being alone and second trusting any man. Even what I could best describe as ferocity when it came to these relationships, the relationship she had with her children never faltered. It surprises me even now how my mother was able to show so much compassion, love and enduringness to me and my brothers, when she has never been shown these things herself. My mother