When my mother died a few years back I was grief stricken in so many ways, yet at the same time I was filled with anger that consumed me. I loved my mother and hated her at the same time. I felt like I didn't even know her and I blamed her for every bad thing that had ever happened to me. Granted some of this anger was misplaced, but there was so many things that I had a right to be angry about. She was a distant woman that did not know how to love. We never had a mother-daughter relationship. She was selfish in everything that she did, always putting herself before her children. During my childhood years we moved over thirty times just because she felt like it. I never went to a school longer than six months and never formed bonds with anyone. I led a life of solitude not out of choice.

My mother was a runner. When things would not go her way she would pack up and take off, shattering three lives at once. My brother and I always had to suck it up and deal with what she did to our lives and never once did she question if her actions were harmful to us. I don't think that she didn't care at all, it's just that she cared more about herself than she did about us. She was the queen of our family and would not let anyone forget it.

Living in her dysfunctional life made me become a dysfunctional person. I never learned how to be a friend because she never gave me a chance to make a friend. I never learned how to love because I never received love. I never learned how to be a mother because I never really had a mother.

After she died I to do a lot of soul searching and somehow i knew that the only way to heal my pain was to forgive her for the mistakes she made. I came to realize that she did the best she could with the life that she was given. I wish that I could have seen it before it was too late to share it with her, but I believe she knows how I truly feel and knows that I forgive her and love more now that I ever did.

Learn more about this author, Jada Broussard.
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