A STROKE OF LOVE

Written by Nandini Gosine-Mayrhoo

When I was just 11, my mother had major surgery for a life-threatening illness. As my father ushered my siblings and I into the nursing home room, we saw our mother attached to a myriad of tubes. Our young minds tried to take in what was happening. My youngest brother began to cry. I wished she would die.

In the last few months, my mother suffered a stroke. As I walked into her hospital room, I noticed the one IV tube inserted into her arm. She looked fine. The shock was her inability to focus, to speak coherently, to demonstrate that she was understanding my words. My heart ached. It ached more than I could bear.

During the intervening years between that surgery and her stroke, I have tried to come to terms with the pain my mother caused me in my childhood. Emotional abuse, unseen and difficult to quantify, leaves a wound - a wound so deep that one wonders whether it can ever be healed. The scab of that wound is ever ripe for the picking and the nonchalant words of anger, intimidation, and humilia- tion thrown at it are like birds pecking at a dying insect fighting for its life.

Hallmark will have us believe that a mother’s love is the most perfect, most unconditional love that can be experienced — by both mother and child. If like me, you’ve spent hours searching for the right birthday or Mother’s Day card, one that doesn’t gush with fake sentimentality, reflecting a love you find hard to feel yourself — you know that a mother’s love doesn’t always pass the Hallmark entrance exam.

Ugly, a book by Constance Briscoe, is the retelling of the childhood abuse the author suffered at the hands of her mother. That book marked the beginning of my understanding that I was not alone, that there were others who never experienced the nurturing love, adoration and encouragement that a mother should give their child. Ugly resonated with me, because that awful word had been spat at me many times, producing a lifetime of wondering whether I was ever good enough — for anything. When I heard a radio announcer explain his choice of career as due to “having a face only a moth- er could love”, the realization that my face was one that not even a mother could love sat in the pit of my stomach, growing and gnawing at anything resembling self-worth.

Although Ugly showed me I wasn’t alone, even the benefit of that knowledge left me wondering whether I deserved the abuse.

A determination to heal the deep hurt fueled a desire to be strong, strong enough to not feel the pain. Nonchalance can be easily misinterpreted as personal strength. It’s not, and it doesn’t help. Worse, it can bring you to a point of not feeling, or at least doing your best to suppress any feeling. And isn’t the lack of feeling a large ingredient in the peculiar mix of traits that allows a person to abuse others? A desire to be strong and impervious to pain doesn’t heal. Rather, it can bring us close to reflecting the behavior of our abuser.

I eventually came to realize that I needed to confront the F word. It is said that in forgiving others, we do ourselves the biggest favor. Trite, but true. I learnt that in order to forgive we need to understand. We need to understand