Hart A Mother Apart

How to let go of guilt and find hapiness living apart from your child
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84590-470-8
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 242 Seiten

A Mother Apart has been written to relieve the isolation of the many women separated from their child who say, 'I thought I was the only one'. Moving beyond the stereotype of mothers who leave, A Mother Apart provides insight and practical support for women struggling with their feelings as they adjust and come to terms with living life apart from their children.

As a qualified and experienced counsellor, Sarah has worked with women dealing with gender-specific issues connected to finding personal and professional fulfilment, work/life balance and living apart from their children, for over ten years. She has a Masters Degree in Policy Studies, focusing on working women, motherhood and social policy. Drawing on her professional studies and her own personal experience of living apart from her child she offers a unique and pragmatic approach to supporting women who find themselves, for whatever reason, living apart from their children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hart, Sarah

Leseproben

Foreword – Penny Cross

Chair of the charity MATCH (Mothers Apart from their Children)

This is a book for women with deep, hidden scars who may have been searching, intentionally or unconsciously, for help in healing them. This is also a book for therapists, counsellors, general practitioners, health practitioners and others looking to help such women. Look no further. You’ll find it within this compellingly written self-help book underpinned by a profound compassion for, and deep understanding of, all mothers apart from their children across a wide range of circumstances. The impetus for this book came about because of Sarah Hart’s own painfully acquired personal experience as a mother apart which later impelled her to acquire impressive professional and academic qualifications.

Sarah’s eminently practical, therapeutic advice reflects an astonishing depth of feeling for mothers apart. Her deeply loving, tender approach will help to begin a journey back to happiness and one that people might not believe could ever take place. It will not be easy but it will not be lonely with Sarah to guide you each step of the way. If you ever doubted you’d ‘find happiness living apart from your child’, read Sarah’s dynamic and positive approach to re-evaluating and re-thinking your life.

I wish I’d had this book in 1996 when, as a newly divorced, newly apart mother of four children, my then twelve-year-old daughter asked of a court welfare officer, ‘Can I divorce her, too?’ Searching through my doctor, initially, for individuals or organisations who might offer help, advice or consolation through shared experiences, I found nothing and no one.

Crushed and isolated in the long, harrowing days ahead, with physical and emotional energies becoming diluted by fighting a losing battle in the courts as well as with my ex for the right to remain in my children’s lives, I became convinced I was ‘the only one’, the only mother in the world not living with her children and whose children had rejected her.

Since those far off isolated days, through life-changing, life-affirming experiences, but still apart from my children twelve years later, I’ve finally found that longed-for peace and unexpected happiness deep within myself. But, oh, how I wish I’d had Sarah’s book then to give me hope, inspiration and strength when my motherhood was discredited. It would have made my own healing journey so much easier, perhaps even shorter.

If you’re newly apart or have been apart for a long time after family breakdown, whether your child or children have been adopted or fostered, whether your child has been abducted abroad or whether your adult child has rejected you after a family row, you’ll find tender understanding, practical help and insightful advice from Sarah. Her compassionate tutoring will help ease your sorrow, enabling you to finally reach that place of peaceful harmony within yourself. With Sarah’s help, if you want to, you’ll acquire the skills and knowledge needed to find that happiness you richly deserve.

In my newly apart days when the internet was still relatively in its infancy, one had to be tenacious in searching for help from professionals, self-help groups or through books. Like Sarah, it was through a happy chance I found MATCH (through Families Need Fathers), eventually discovering other mothers apart, and finding that each one of us had been convinced we’d been ‘the only one’, each one was eager to pass on anything that might ease our newly apart pain or the anguish of those who’d been apart for one or more decades.

We were astounded to find books had been written about ‘us’ and that we were not, as we thought, three-headed monsters: Helen Franks’s Mummy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Rosie Jackson’s Mothers Who Leave were passed around and devoured. Since then, with the supersonic growth of the web and unprecedented internet activity, one can more easily access help or advice at a very early stage of being apart. More and more mothers apart, counsellors, therapists, self-help groups, mental health and legal professionals are finding and contacting MATCH fairly easily. However, without exception each new MATCH member is still astonished to find (a) that MATCH exists and (b) that they’re ‘not the only ones’. At early MATCH annual general meetings several years ago we used to end our meetings with a cup of tea and a slice of cake, iced with the words, ‘Not the only one’.

Whether newly apart or experienced veterans of several decades, mothers apart have two understandable obsessions: reunion and justice for their children. Such obsessions, if fulfilled, will meet one overriding and overwhelming need: to return to motherhood, which may have been so senselessly and, in some cases, viciously broken. But unfulfilled obsessions, however, after long periods of dwelling on them, have a tendency to make some of us solitary, secretive, hermit-like creatures reluctant to speak about unresolved pain, seemingly unable to find the right place or the right time to do so.

If this sounds like you, or someone you know, and you needing coaxing from your self-imposed bunker, if you’re always wondering who or what you should be without your children, or what lies ahead in a supposedly motherless future, you’ll find Sarah’s practical advice, based, on her long professionalism, invaluable. If you need a friend, a guiding light, trust Sarah to help you to forgive yourself and to take you further than you thought you would go towards that healing place you long to be.

If, despite your sorrows, you’ve blossomed into a fiercely spirited Boudicca-type warrior with a powerful undiminished outrage, determined to return to mothering your children, you may be relentlessly busy educating and informing yourself on the best means to achieve justice for your children as well as for yourself.

As a battling mother fighting for your own rights, too, to continue to be part of a nurturing, loving family network, no matter where or with whom each family member is living, you may have achieved some success but still may be apart from some or all of your children.

You may have been brought up not to question authority, to trust in ‘the law’ to deliver justice. You might have offered yourself up for interrogation by legal and court professionals—and, much later, journalists. You may have been submissive, as a newly apart mother, in an attempt to achieve justice for your children’s best short-term interests and long-term secure future.

Failure to achieve justice, despite a long, hard committed fight, results in two kinds of brave, courageous mothers apart: those who daily battle melancholy, depression, perhaps debilitating physical or emotional ill-health; and those who fight onwards and upwards towards victory over pain. One member, successful in overturning years of deep hurt, said: ‘I reached a very low point after many years of trying to achieve change in my ex and my children when it occurred to me that, if I couldn’t change them, I could change myself and my attitudes towards them.’

Perhaps you’re still struggling to reach that place. If you’re not there yet but want to be, Sarah’s practical exercises, deeply rooted in her innate humanitarianism and wisdom, will help you in your own ‘journey from despair to peace of mind and happiness’ [see her Introduction].

In MATCH there are many stories, told and untold, of courageous battles for justice for children, stories we want to tell widely but have no means to do so. We want to shout from the rooftops, but refrain from doing so that no further damage is inflicted on our children. We keep silent until the press suddenly declare an interest in us, albeit a self-interested, topical one. If we’ve been refused a fair hearing of our case, either by our children or the courts, there is a compulsive need to speak to the media to get the truth out even if it sometimes turns into an unprepared cascading torrent of self-justification.

Sometimes motherhood has been deliberately destroyed by vindictive family members, sometimes through a court or legal professional’s thoughtless negligence or unpreparedness due to heavy caseloads.

However it happens, with the printing of a few hundred words in sometimes trivial publications, the public can make simple judgements on our complex lives, on our fitness to be mothers, before moving on quickly to the next human interest story. As Sarah says in her Introduction, ‘There is so much pressure on women to be supermothers, but I believe it’s much more healthy and constructive for ourselves and our children when we aim to be good enough, when we aspire to live truthfully, to be who we are instead of trying to live up to someone else’s ideal.’

Media interrogations exert a heavy, intensely emotional toll on those who have already undergone lengthy self-interrogation. Stories are retold in our heads so many times as we relive, requestion behaviours or attitudes of everyone involved in our family tragedy to see what could have or might have been done differently to have changed that final, terrible outcome. ‘Could have’, ‘should have’, ‘would have’ frequently occur in MATCH stories.

But when we speak to the media what we’re really doing is speaking to our children because we want our children to know, even if we don’t see them or hear from them, that we love them unconditionally. We also need them to hear ‘our version’ of the...