What is this feeling?

It's a little something like being lost - or like you've lost a piece of you. You've lost a piece of your life. You don't want it back but something is definitely missing. Instead of your life, which is pliable, reshaping itself to fill in this once occupied space - there is just a hole. You have to fill it with something, because you can't stand an absence like that, the way you can't stand a feeling - the way you can't stand uncertainty. There was always drama and chaos, pain and rage, and God only knows what else involved in our relationship. I think she has been like a tornado in other peoples' lives at times. My mom told me today that she didn't know why she was talking to me, when it only made her feel worse.

That might be the story of my life and of my relationships - not just with her, but with men in particular. Why do I participate with this person who only hurts me and makes me feel bad - makes me feel as worse as my mother can - with this person who makes me feel like the most worthless thing in the world? I go back for more. I practically beg for it. I suppose on the theory that just once it will be different, and it never is. My relationship with my mother can only be described as one of both love and hate at the same time. That was the message I always got/get - I love you/I hate you. I love you, but.

My relationships with men follow this pattern. It is sickening really and not at all surprising. I've struggled with trying to break the pattern but my self-esteem has never quite been good enough to break it. I always find myself having the same relationship over and over, just with different men, with slight improvements every time, yet with the same underlying fundamental failure. I love you. I hate you. Come here. Go away. I want you. I don't want you. I keep trying. Trying not to be abandoned. Willing to do anything to keep myself from being abandoned. Tolerating the unthinkable and putting up with the unacceptable.

I can only hope that standing up to mother this time, once and for all, is the end of that pattern. Maybe it is the end of trying so hard, the end of feeling bad about myself, the end of tolerating people's bad behavior, the end of settling for less than I deserve. Maybe what I've needed all this time to change my relationships with men, is to change my relationship with my mother. At first I felt angry about the situation she has put me in, and then I felt sad, I still do, a little. Right now, I feel empowered.

There is somewhat of a hole here though. There is something that is missing. An absence in the shape of the space that she occupied.

This thing that I feel - it is like being lighter.