Mother's talk

"If there's one thing I can share with you before you board that plane next week, it's this: make sure you love yourself more than you say you love him."

I was twenty-five when my mother gave me that advice. I thought I knew better. Don't we all when we're young? At the time, I was preparing to move to Sweden. I'd already ticked all the boxes on my to-do list: valid US passport? Check. Temporary Swedish work and residency permit? Check. Sold everything I owned? Check. One-way ticket to Stockholm and a Swedish boyfriend waiting there for me? Check.

I'd grown up in a two-parent household but sometimes it felt more like a single-parent one. My dad was a charismatic man who had issues -- he suffered from depression and refused to take medication for it, he also suffered from chronic pain due to a back injury and a botched spinal operation, he had abandonment issues from his own childhood, he was a serial philanderer and had children with other women while still married to my mother, he had a violent temper and we sometimes walked on eggshells around him... At one point, he decided that he didn't want financial responsibility of any of us--though he still wanted to be seen as the head of the household. He didn't move out of the house. He just stopped paying for anything that had to do with it and his family. And he left us, emotionally, though not physically.

My mother, who was determined to keep a roof over our heads and give us stability, shouldered it all. She did this all while working fulltime and going back to school in the evenings to acheieve her dream of getting a college degree, something she'd had to set aside when she got married and had children.

She very rarely complained about taking on the full responsibility of this burden. While my dad continued to charm everyone around us and have them believe we were living the perfect nuclear family dream, my mother was burning the candle at both ends trying to hold everything together. She didn't ask anyone for help. She was promoted at work, got a salary increase so she was making more money than my father -- which incensed him even though he bragged about it to his friends. And, watching this as a kid and then later as a teenager, I found myself resenting her at times for allowing my dad to perpetuate this facade. I used to yell at her for not making him leave. I used to ask myself what was the point in being married if it was just a sham? How was this a partnership?

Of course, a lot of why my mother continued to soldier on without asking for assistance or bursting the bubble of the fantasy my dad had created for everyone else was because my mom believed that love meant taking the good adn the bad of the person you married. But she kept telling me and my sister that when we eventually decided to marry, we ought to find someone who would always respect us, who would be our partners and not try to dim our light. I think that's what my father tried to do to my mom -- dim her light, make her feel that she was not worthy, that she was not worthy of his or anyone else's love.

So when I told her I was moving to Sweden, she initially tried to talk me out of it. It wasn't that she didn't like my Swedish boyfriend. She'd met him many times and knew that he was a good person. She was afraid though that at some point I might end up in the same situation she'd been in...but that I would be too far away for her to help me if I needed it.

We argued back and forth for months about my moving until finally she accepted that I was an adult, that this was my decision to make and not hers. So that July night, when we went out for a final mother-daughter dinner before I left for Sweden, she told me to love myself more than I loved the man I would eventually marry. I remember laughing adn saying, "I do love myself."

"Love yourself more," she urged me. "Don't stay if he doesn't love you the way you need to be loved. Don't stay if it's only about you making sure he feels loved and protected. Don't let him think for a second that you aren't worthy and don't ever let him make you feel that way."

I let her words sink in. I didn't try to make a snarky comeback or tell her that I knew what I was doing. I didn't. I was embarking on the great unknown for me.

But I listened to her. It's been twenty-six years since I left the US and moved to Sweden. I'm still with the same Swede. Soon we'll have been married for twenty-two years. And every day I follow my mother's advice.