When I put up my website: www.jeanninemarieauthor.com to sell my first children’s book, LOOKING IN THE MIRROR, everyone special in my life congratulated me. My favorite expression of joy was “I’m so happy for you I could shit!” Everyone was filled with love and  just wanted to pour it all over me. Everyone but my mother. The one person I want love from is always the person I can never reach. Because I used the word abuse in my bio, instead of congratulations for my book, I received a phone call stating I might as well have put a gun to her head. After years of feeling not good enough, she was right there again to remind me that I’m not. After we agreed to disagree, I called her three weeks later since I hadn’t heard from her. I left a nice message, said,”I love you” and another three weeks have gone by and still no word.

Be there for your children. When you’ve done terrible things to them and they’ve forgiven you, be grateful. Allow them to heal and accept their need to help others by telling their story. Own your mistakes, just as you want your children to own theirs. It’s a shame, for the first time in my fifty-two years, I had started to feel I had a mother. It felt great. Less than a year of this new feeling and I’m again the focus of my mother’s pain. She blamed me her entire life for even looking like the father I never met. Now she blames me for starting to write about my past. The guilt should be hers and not mine.