This is my goodbye letter to my mother. 'Adieu' comes from the Old French, for 'a' (to) 'Dieu' (God).
My dear Maman,
I have woken up this morning at 4am. I feel called to write a letter to you, as sadly you will be dying in the next few days from your brain tumours, as you know. So, I have sat down at my desk and I am doing just that. I need to say goodbye to you one last time, and to let my open heart speak freely to you before it is too late. I am not sure if I will get to see you, to hug you one last time: I want to tell you that I love you, but if I do, I am afraid that those words may be empty or may fall on selectively deaf ears. You will never read this letter but that is ok.
I’ve been dreading writing this letter to you for some time. I had to get it out. Sometimes just thinking about you makes me anxious, sad, or even angry. I just wish you hadn’t screamed at me every day of my childhood. I have courage, tenacity, and confidence now: I am not sure where I got all those things because I didn’t learn them from you. I must have learned them in school or in society - they always told us to strive to be professionals and to ‘be someone’ - you know, like a doctor. And because of them (and because of your abuse), I grew up thinking I was a “nobody” unless I became a surgeon. I did it with bells on, but it was never enough.
I feel that you made me feel shame just for existing. Why did you not take better care of your Self or find your true Self so that you could have helped others? I walked on a million broken eggshells trying not to break them further every day, because of you. The numerous nights as a child when I cried myself to sleep were inexplicable to me. I couldn’t verbalise my feelings or understand what was happening. Crying helped relieve some of what I felt until the crying stopped and my shell solidified, like a crustacean, to protect me. I wished I could fly far, far away, or escape to some fantasy land where all is well. Every time.
I don't know why you chose to make fun of me when I didn’t do something in the “right” way? I don't know why you expected me to be a certain way and it was never enough? I don't know why you used me as your punching bag, or whatever you needed: I don't understand why you yelled at me? I don't know why you would feed me, clothe me, take care of me when I was sick, hug me, maybe too much, make me feel like you 'loved' me, but then in the next moment scream at me and tell me that I was good for nothing? Do you know how harmful that is to a child? If you had been able to take care of your own needs, perhaps you could have helped your family? Did you think I cared about your friends’ affairs? I didn’t. I was a child. I was a child who wanted to look up at the sky, explore, be full of awe and wonder, and enjoy life. Why did you talk to me about adult stuff? I don't know why wouldn’t you let me be a child?
I know you were on your own mostly in a foreign country to where you were born, although it was your choice to come to England from France. I don't know what were you trying to escape? I know you did your best, despite the hell you put me through. I forgive you because I need to for myself. I understand why you did what you did and why you were so incredibly frustrated. I know that you sacrificed yourself for everyone and you became a monster in my life because of your poor choices. Yes, I am angry. I am so angry. I am angry with you for not being a better mother. All I can surmise at this point is that you learned or inherited this behaviour from someone. So, I have compassion for that. But then again, how angry can I be with you? You were only passing on what you learned. I don’t think you meant to hurt me. I think you did your best, even though you were very toxic.
I love you, Maman. I always have and always will. I can’t remain angry with a dying person. I can’t do that to myself or to you. It doesn’t make any sense. I forgive you for all of it. I imagine you when you were happy, giving, loving, and kind, before life got to you, when you were yourself a little child. I love that little girl that you were. What happened to you?
I know that there were always two people inside you (like most of us): Whatever the female equivalent of Dr Hyde and Mr Jekyll might be called. One always trying to fix others, not realising that you yourself were so sick, and the other one diving into the madness of self-obsession, oblivion, and tyranny. Narcissism was not the best fit for a mother, but it fit you like a glove or a glass slipper.
I need to be vulnerable with you and let my soul speak. So that I can release my Self from the concrete-clad walls of your heart. I have opened my heart and taken off the mask that you made me create in order for you to love me. I am sorry that you never got to do the same. If only you had known how to be unconditionally loving.
Throughout your life you gave me titbits of love. I feel that you dosed them out, infrequently: I assume they had been meted out to you in a similar way. I don’t want to be a victim of your childhood trauma any more. I was not your husband, or your parent, even though those were the only roles that you allowed me to play. All your world is a stage, and I did not want to play any of your parts. I have healed my Self: I just wish for your sake, and all of ours, that you had done too.
You moved back to France, knowing that you were dying, not thinking about anyone else but your self. I realise that you are taking the last place in the family grave in the Dordogne, next to your parents and your grandmother, for your sake, not even thinking that my brother or I might want to be buried somewhere near to you. You are abandoning us, even as you die, and after you do.
Let me reiterate that I love you and I forgive you. I need to say that, before it’s too late. I feel that my heart means it, even though it took a couple of hundred hours of therapy to get to this place. I am not sure that you know what real love means.
You love to make people believe that you are a good person. Even if that meant being truly horrid about me or your other son, Phil, or any of your friends. To my face you usually presented the divinity of Mary, but behind our backs, I always knew that you could be so cruel and vile about us. All your friends knew this, so I never had to protest.
When I was very young, as young as I can remember, I recall my childhood as one where you were absent, distant, preoccupied with your ego. You were born into a different age. One where no-one realised or suggested therapy to you. To be truthful, if they had, you would have ostracised them, as you so easily and readily did to Phil and me.
Do you remember when you phoned me a few months ago, while I was walking on the Heath and apologised for not showing your love, when we were so small, and could barely speak? That’s when the damage that you did started, when I was preverbal, but my body has kept the score. You screamed for decades at your various husbands, my stepfathers. You demonised my father, who was a beautiful soul. Luckily I made my peace with him and told him that I loved him, despite your anger at me for doing so, just before his death five years ago now, and my step-father Joseph two years before that.
The bizarre thing about my childhood traumas (all of them ‘thanks’ to you) is that you have no recollection of them. I would like to think it is because you genuinely don’t remember them and that you were unconscious in your actions. But I suspect, sadly, that it is just more subterfuge and manipulation, having allowed you to portray your mask of a loving mother to the ‘outside world’, while being utterly self-obsessed behind the closed doors of whatever new home we found ourselves in. The intergenerational trauma that you inherited stops with me. I will not pass it on, like some toxic pass-the-parcel. That is my greatest contribution to our family. I don’t want to play ‘musical chairs’ with your trauma any more. My childhood with you felt more like Russian Roulette rather than real love.
What am I to you? What was I? You made great demonstrations of your love in public, but behind the closed family door, I saw nothing of this. I was alone in the darkness, surrounded by ghosts, monsters, and invisible lions. You were the lion.
You ran away from your parents, but never explained why. Was it for the same reasons that I outline here? The ‘monster’ that you call your father was always a gentle, although firm, grandfather to me. You poisoned me against him. Did he deserve that? I will never know. You hated your older sister. But again, she was always delightful to me. I don’t understand the discrepancy and likely never will. You have left so little behind, apart from your hoarding, as yet another parting gift for me to sort out of the chaos that was your life, after you will die.
According to you, you walked on water, yet you sank under the weight of external validation. That was your ‘gift’ to my brother and me. That was what really messed us up, for a while, but thankfully I am over it now. I don’t think this is the case for my brother Phil: He has it all to come: The meltdown, the therapy, the days and weeks of soul-searching. I will be there for him when he needs me. Luckily, I have found my soul. I am so very angry at you: No, I am full of unbridled rage. But I buried the rage so deep it took three years of excavation by a team of therapists to get it all up and out. I have never shown my anger with you or anyone, as you didn’t allow us to. But that was not healthy.
You showered me with ‘imitation love’ on occasions as rare as Halley’s comet. I never expected it to come round again in this lifetime, and it didn’t. And it wasn't real love, anyway.
When you made me watch your two violent suicide attempts when I was seven years old, did you really mean to want to die, or were you seeking attention? That was too much for me to bear at that time.
I was able to find my anger these last few weeks, at last. Last week it turned into sadness when the doctors told us that your death was so imminent. Sadly, it doesn’t make me feel any differently towards you. It does make me sad that we were never able to have a real mother-son relationship or to really speak. I never saw you as I was growing up. When I got my ten A grade GCSE’s you were out having affairs so I never got to tell you. When I got my five A levels and went to Trinity College, Cambridge to study medicine, you were abroad and I didn’t even know which country you were in or which man you were with so that I could inform you. You abandoned me to live with an alcoholic man who was himself full of chagrin. Did you choose all your husbands for their biblical names: Christopher, David, John, and Joseph, whilst invalidating my childhood experience?
When I tried to speak to you about what my soul really wanted out of life, you turned on your new pair of heels and walked out of my life for a year, as it did not fit with the plans for approval that you had told your ‘friends.’ You wanted me to live out the life that you never had, not my own.
When I told you how you had humiliated me at school when I came last in a running race you laughed it off. That was not what I was hoping. You were cruel when you told me that you wanted to give me up for adoption.
I do not want to see you again. Even a few moments with you triggers the heck out of me. I have to say that I felt relief this week, when I heard of your imminent death. Relief for you as you are in so much pain from your brain cancers, and that at last you will be free to ‘start over again’ with a new family: To have another go at getting it right, if reincarnation is real.
So goodbye, good luck with the next round, and yes I do love you and I forgive you, even if that means nothing to you. I need to set my Self free from you. I pray that my brother will be able to do the same. I hope that he will be able to process all those times that you locked him in the dark cellar under the stairs when he was only a little boy. Sadly, I think that his breakdown is just commencing, but I will be there for him. You have always been so horrid to him and about all your acquaintances and 'friends' behind their backs. I am sure that you kept some of that hate back for me. You chose to die abroad, far from me, in the same way that you lived your life. But it’s ok, I have broken the chain of inheritance. I won’t be passing on your trauma. I am sorry for you that you never realised or sought help for your mental illness issues. Maybe you really didn’t know the carnage that you left behind in your not so magnificent wake. Yes, I will most likely cry at your funeral, but it will be tears from what might have been, rather than how things were growing up.
I know that you are hurting, but that hurting started long before you had children. You didn't have the awareness or access that we now have for mental health support. I understand what happened and why. I understand that life was hard for you as it was for me. I'm sorry you never moved beyond that. You tried your best in your limited way, but our relationship was unsustainable for both of us. These last four years I couldn't take it anymore. My idea of family has changed. I need to surround myself with people who validate my experiences and support my life direction.
I feel that you hurt me so deeply. Your refusal to acknowledge the pain I went through or your faults as a mother make repairing our relationship impossible. I spent my childhood taking care of you, although I know you don't see it that way. I feel like we spent our whole relationship with you trying to change me. It was my job to keep you happy after all your numerous divorces. I spent my childhood as your emotional caretaker.
When I first moved away from home, I realised that I didn’t have or own my own identity. There was no me that I could remember behind the mask that you made me wear. It was so wrapped up in who you needed me to be. I have my own life and I am my own person now. My whole being rejects the beliefs that you taught me, and that you couldn't let me go. I had to choose between what is right for the world and what is right for you. If I hadn't met my wife and experienced unconditional love for the first time, you and I would still be in this cycle. I realise now that although we are technically mother and son, you have never been a real mother to me and I don't owe you more of my life.
I forgive you for the mother wound that you gave me. I wish I could share this growth with you so that you could heal from your own traumas. I love you. I pray that you will find peace in the next life. If my happiness is what you want, know that I've found it, but I suspect that you are not even thinking about anyone else other than your self. I am putting my family first, something that you never did. I am not going to send you or read you this letter, as I don’t need any more denial or invalidation from you. I don't feel that failure to live up to anyone's expectations any more. You tried to assign me a certain role and identity, but I have found my own purpose. I have found my Self.
I had to estrange you to protect my Self and my family. I did not have to try very hard as you had already estranged me. You should not have abused your own children and you preferred to create an illusion where you are wonderful, showing a fake mask to the world. You lived in a fantasy bubble of your own making. Perhaps in the end it was good that it never popped and that you remained asleep to what you were doing, for your sake. I remain unbroken by your actions, despite your best attempts, and with you claiming that they did not happen. I have been able to validate my own experience. I have learned to listen to my body, which you had left so dysregulated as a result of the consequences of trauma during my early childhood.
I know that you won't change in this life, and didn’t have the tools to, and that you will continue to believe whatever is most comfortable for you. It is hard to see our parents refusing to acknowledge the pain that we experienced when we were supposed to be protected by them. Every child deserves unconditional love from the parents that brought them into the world and to be protected from harm. That was your only job. I realise that there's nothing that I could have done to be loved by you: That is both heartbreaking and liberating. It is so sad that you hated everyone in your life, including your self. You broke my heart, but now it is healed.
A friend once told me that anger and disappointment were two sides of the same coin - she said that anger was disappointment in disguise. Anger is bigger and louder: A force that pushes outward. Disappointment runs deeper, closer to collapse, to the parts of us that are soft and vulnerable.
As Carl Gustav Jung wrote in ‘Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus’ “I speak against the mother who bore me. I separate myself from the bearing womb. I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life.” As Dr Gabor Maté wrote: “We shall be saved by an ocean of tears.” After accepting a toxic childhood I have learned to let it go and surrender it.
Good luck in your next life. I hope that your last few days are pain free and swift, for your sake. Forgive me for opening my heart today, my therapist suggested it. But I am glad that I finally am able to live whole-heartedly and open-heartedly. Thank you for allowing me to feel relief, at least, even if I never felt your unconditional love. You just didn’t know how. The final phase of my healing can start soon as you will be out of my life, and I will be able to close the door to the childhood traumas that you gave me. You never saw, heard, or valued me. It has taken me a lot of courage to break the cycle of abuse that you passed down to my brother and me without thinking. I have never tried to change what you think. I wish you had done the same for us. I have learned to parent my inner child, and I will guide my brother to doing the same, when he is ready to crack open his shell. I have found great catharsis in writing my blog and this letter. I wish you had been able to read it when you were 20 years old. I am able to hold the emotions of anger, sadness and love simultaneously now. Grief is love with nowhere to go. I will leave you now, as I have much work to do to pursue my true purpose. One thing I know about grief is that it comes in waves. One thing I know about waves is that they pass. As John Spalding wrote that with "Every forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind." I hope that you can leave all your phantoms behind and start anew.
Soon, you will be able to rest in peace. Take care. Goodbye.
I love you,
Your son,
Olivier x
'Mother' by John Lennon: ‘Mother’ “You had me, but I never had you... You didn’t want me. So I just gotta tell you. Goodbye, goodbye.”
This Be The Verse
Poem by PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.