Once she shared this belief with me we began to develop a more honest relationship. I told her at the time that I needed her to tell me more often that she loved me…which she did. And I told her that it was okay if she really didn’t like me...which, for me, it really wasn’t. But we carried on with somewhat more acceptance of each other.

I didn’t get married until I was one month shy of 33; my sisters all got married in their early 20’s. She didn’t think I would ever find a man. Forget that I was college-educated and a successful career woman. This just didn’t matter to her. She told me how relieved she was when I got engaged because now there was someone else to take care of me in case I got a debilitating illness! Heavens forbid that her active life would have been disrupted by a sick single grown daughter! But I believed that she would have come through if the need was there. After all, she was my mother! But I learned the hard way that things aren’t always as we would like them to be. I had to rethink the belief that she would always be there if I needed her.

When our firstborn was a few months old, the baby, my husband and I were stricken with the flu. My husband and I were so sick that it was difficult for us to care for our son. I asked mom for help. “I don’t want to get the flu,” she said and turned down my request. My aunt came to the rescue.

With time, however, my mom got better. She became a fairly good grandmother to our three children and a more sensitive mother to me. I never moved up to one of her favorite children, but there was progress. One of the greatest compliments that she ever gave me—and she told me this often—was that I was the best mom ever! She told me this and she told my sisters that I was the best mom. (This, of course, made my sisters, who are also moms, feel slighted.)

How sad I was when my mother passed away in 2000. I felt gypped. I still needed time to get her to really like me. Now that time had run out! I would never know what could have been. One of my sisters, who knew that I was not quite in the loop in terms of my mother liking me, told me to “Get Over it!” She said that mom would never have accepted me totally and to cherish the relationship that we had had. “Don’t focus on the type of relationship you wished you could have had with mom,” she said. “Accept her for the type of person she was and not the type of person you wanted her to be!”

What a life lesson I learned from my sister’s words. They have been carried over to all my relationships. My memories of my mom now focus of the values, the beliefs and all the other things that helped to make me the woman I am today. And I like myself. Sure, some of the bad creeps in, but there is also a great deal of the good. Bless you, Mom!