“I’ve written a list,” my mother explained as our session began in her therapist’s San Francisco office. “It’s called ‘the 40 most unforgivable things I’ve ever done to my daughters.'”
She fidgeted in her seat, twirling her blue chiffon scarf, as fog floated above the skylights. I cringed. I despised the idea of therapy, but Mom embraced it. She had persuaded me to go, despite my protests, telling her, “I don’t need any apologies.”
I was still frozen in fright at 30, as if I were 7 years old and hiding under my bed for fear of being beaten again.
I sat opposite my mother as she smoothed her light powder pink matching skirt and jacket to remove any wrinkles, as if this would help us iron our own.
My parents, Russian Jewish second cousins, met at a bar mitzvah and married when they were 19. Mom was 20 when I was born.
She became addicted to speed while trying to lose baby weight and used barbiturates to sleep. When I was seven, my parents divorced. My father moved to Mexico, but my mother, sister, and I remained in New York City.
Mom had been seeing a psychoanalyst on a weekly basis for decades to process her pain from being an abuser for the first 13 years of my life.
I’d spent decades pretending I wasn’t damaged, focusing solely on becoming a college professor and starting my own family. Denial protected me, and I had never seen a mental health professional.
Twenty years after she became sober, she scheduled this time to formally ask for forgiveness. Until then, we’d frequently gotten together and had perfectly pleasant times while never discussing the past.
My lower back ached as I sat in the stiff beige leather chair, wishing I wasn’t there.
The author, 12, stands in front of her family’s NYC apartment building.
“Today’s session is for your mom,” Terry, the therapist, said. “She wants to apologize for the abuse you experienced when you were younger. “She has been plagued by guilt.”
I looked at my 50-year-old mother, whose hazel green eyes, petite frame, and dimples I had inherited. I also have the same thick wavy brown hair and, possibly, the proclivity to fidget, as I couldn’t stop nervously twisting a strand as she spoke that day. But in every other way, I felt nothing like her.
“The fact that your mom is about to apologize for specific acts of violence and neglect in no way excuses her past behavior,” Terry told you.
I sat motionless and silent, staring at Mother. I knew what she was about to say and didn’t want to hear it.
“When Leslie was 5, I repeatedly closed her in the garbage room and told her I didn’t want her anymore,” she said. “Each time she tried to come out, I slammed the door shut and told her she was being thrown away.”
I quivered as if she were still locking me in that filthy room in our posh Manhattan apartment complex. I shrank back to being small and helpless.
Mom continued, “I know I can’t change the past. I am in so much pain that I don’t want to die without saying sorry for everything on my list.”
She read aloud from her categorized maltreatments, which included strangling me, dragging my sisters and me around the apartment by our hair, hitting us at midnight when her speed kicked in, forcing us to clean at 2 a.m., telling us repeatedly that she wished we were dead and had never been born, regretting the drug dealers she brought home, and holding primal scream groups at the house where we had to hear adults yell obscenities several nights a week.
Mom got only halfway through her list before I couldn’t take it anymore. My mouth was open, and my breathing was jagged, as if I were gasping for air in a burning room.
Red ribbons streaked across the skyline as the sun set. The session ended in eerie silence. Still driven by a primal desire to please her, I finally spoke.
“Mom, I forgive you.”
I hadn’t gotten over anything—I’d just gotten used to saying I had.Mom’s description of each act she regretted reminded me of everything I tried to forget. Hearing her express these truths in front of her analyst was both traumatic and validating. Even though I remembered everything, hearing her recount the details made me aware of my deep and unprocessed pain.
Mom’s face turned pale, and her limbs went limp. Perspiration engulfed her hairline as she lowered her head and whispered softly, “I can’t believe how mercilessly I hurt my own babies.”
In 1973, the author (left), her younger sister, and her mother were on a hammock in New York City. “My mom was stoned here,” the author adds.
A late lunch at the Thai restaurant directly below her therapist’s office had always been planned, but I didn’t feel like eating after the session. The scent of lemongrass and garlic wafted through the room, but it did nothing to awaken my senses.
Mom must have known. Before I scanned the menu, she said, “I’m not sure how you can sit next to me after hearing all that. You must think I am a monster. “How can you stand to look at me?”
I tried dismissing her anxiety casually once more.
“Oh, of course I can look at you and have lunch with you because I love you,” I told you. “That all happened so long ago. We can move on now.
There were multicolored Christmas lights and twinkling mini-Buddhas around our booth, but I didn’t feel festive. As an abused child, I constantly craved my mother’s love and professed my own for her in the hopes of receiving more. In the years that followed, I discovered that my behavior was typical of children who had gone through similar experiences.
I blinked back tears, and the menu blurred. I knew I was lying to myself, and I wasn’t ready to move on. I still held unresolved resentment and anger toward my mother. Faking feelings was my thing, so after my first bite of pad Thai, I exclaimed, “What great flavors!” despite the fact that I couldn’t taste anything but bitterness.
Though I was upset, I realized that Mom’s bravery in apologizing for each of her specific offenses helped me understand that I would eventually need to begin my own therapy, but I wasn’t ready yet. My intense desire to forget my past lasted for years.
No one close to me understood why I continued to have a relationship with my mother after the abuse had ended.
Therapy, which I finally began ten years after that session, and Buddhism both helped to foster loving emotional connections between us. We started practicing Buddhism when I was in seventh grade.
My mother had planned to commit suicide, but instead tried Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, an ancient meditation chant based on Mahayana Buddhist teachings. She challenged me to try it with her for 100 days as a final attempt at happiness. I tried it at first to prove her wrong, but as we chanted day after day, I felt hopeful and noticed Mom becoming kinder.
Within a year, she had stopped using drugs and hitting us. This motivated me to stay in touch with her. The Sanskrit word “myo” means to revive. Through the visceral vibration of daily chanting with her, I began to feel maternal love from Mom.
Her actions to change our destiny began with our shared spiritual journey when I was a teenager, allowing me to spend time with her while the trauma of the unspeakable things she did remained locked in my cells. Before the end of the school year, she started seeing her therapist.
I was 32 when I received her formal apology. It was a positive turning point in our relationship, but I couldn’t quite move on. Eight years later, I became so ill that I ended up on the floor in a fetal position, unable to walk my children to school. I was diagnosed with severe, chronic ulcerative colitis, which is an autoimmune disease.
A Reiki practitioner I was seeing at the time asked, “Did you ever experience any trauma?” I giggled nervously and responded, “My mom used to smack, hit, and yell at me most days for over a decade, but that was so long ago, that can’t be why I’m sick.”
She looked at me and said, “That’s exactly why you’re sick.”
That’s when I finally started therapy and realized why it had such a significant impact on my mother’s life.
The author (center), her mother (second from left), and her two sisters
Our intertwined spiritual journey and her atonement marked the beginning of our family’s reconciliation, but I still had a long way to go if I truly wanted to heal. While we never had a second therapeutic hour together, I continued the work Mom started on my own.
My mother died of diabetes 10 years after I began processing my terrifying childhood. She was just 69.
I take comfort in knowing that I was able to share joy with her throughout her life, which I had never imagined possible.
On her deathbed, she looked at me and asked, “How can you truly love me?”
Unlike the lie I told in the Thai restaurant years before, this time I meant it when I told her, “Mom, I love you.” You can let go and transition to the next life. “I’ll be okay.”
After she died, I discovered nine of her diaries while cleaning out her office. She described the abusive years in each journal. I discovered she had been consumed by self-hatred her entire life, which is why she believed suicide was her only option when I was in middle school.
I also discovered the original atonement list in one of her notebooks. It covered ten pages. I discovered that her therapist had encouraged her to schedule a formal session to make amends.
Reading her words line by line, I was overwhelmed not only by her remorse for hurting me, but also by her desperate desire for my happiness.
Mom halted generational trauma by changing her behavior, allowing me to break the cycle. Even after she died, she continues to help me heal.
My daughters are fascinated by the transition from one generation to the next, and they have told me several times that they are proud of me for changing our family patterns.
I continue to practice the Buddhism that my mother and I started when I was 13. I still go to therapy to work through my painful past. But now, instead of just her wrath, I feel my mother’s courage to change her life and repent.
Remembering what she said to me so long ago helps me heal as I replay her apology in my head. I forgive her time and again. She demonstrated how darkness can turn into light. Is there any greater love than that?
