My mother doesn't love me

I'm almost 40 years old and it's taken me this long to realise and accept that my mother doesn't love me. I need to keep repeating it in my head, and I need to write it down, like a mantra that I might eventually be able to say out loud with detachment and no tears, in order to somehow make peace with the cold, brutal fact that my mother doesn't love me. She has never loved me, and never will love me. She's incapable of loving me.

I need to understand that it isn't because I'm unloveable. I know that I am loveable, and worthy. I'm a decent human being with many talents and virtues, none of which she has ever cared enough to take the time to see and appreciate. Or rather: she sees them alright, and she despises and resents them rather than cherishes and encourages them. I need to understand that she doesn't love her own daughter because she never even bothered getting to know me, and because she is sick and broken and mentally maladjusted. Because she is emotionally crippled. I need to understand that there's nothing I can do to make her love me. I am as powerless now as an adult as I was a child (in fact even more so), and I have now, finally, stopped trying to make her love me. Love should never be forced or coerced, and the love a parent has for a child should always be instinctive, abundant and unconditional. But I will never get anything like that from my mother. I need to find the strength to not allow this lack of love to define me, because if I did, it would destroy me.

It's not easy, this acceptance of maternal rejection. It hurts like hell, and right now I cannot envisage a time when it will stop hurting. I still occasionally have days where I might catch myself thinking wistfully "Maybe, after all this time, she's finally realised what she's lost" (she never saw herself as 'having' anything to lose, and my absence from her life is inconsequential to her, other than how it is judged by others). Or "I still have it in my heart to forgive her; all she needs to do is say sorry and we can take it from there" (our relationship isn't just rotten or fractured any more, it's dead. In fact it never actually really existed... And as for holding out any hope of an acknowledgment or apology... I know it won't ever happen. I have at least unquestioningly accepted that much).

What makes this even harder is other peoples' reactions:

"But she's your mother."
"Surely she wants you to be happy."
"Don't let your pride get in the way."
"When she dies, it will be too late and you'll have so much regret."

I covered some of these thoughtless, prosaic remarks in my early blog post Responses and Rebuttals to the Flying Monkeys. Although I am sick and tired of trying to justify myself and my decisions to other people, I have been trained to within an inch of my life (by Mummy, of course) to invest far too much of my precious time and energy into being preoccupied with what other people think of me. Perhaps it's time I grew up and stopped giving a fuck about such humdrum, trivial, glaringly misinformed and trite opinions.

"But she's your mother."
Indeed she is. She conceived and birthed me, and therefore, as much as it pains me to acknowledge it, I am composed of half her DNA. The thought repulses and astonishes me. My birth is doubtless one of her biggest regrets. And while I'm now glad and thankful that I exist, for much of my childhood and the entirety of my teens I wished I had never been born. Now I just wish I hadn't been born to her - someone so innately ill-equipped to be a mother that I will never understand why she decided to have children at all. So yes, she's my mother and I am her daughter. And yet - and yet. Where's the connection? Where's the love, the affection? The loyalty? The warmth, the affinity? Can you show me? Because I've been searching desperately for it for virtually my entire life, and I've come up with sweet FA. Worse: I feel THE OPPOSITE. She loathes me.

"Surely she wants you to be happy."
Yeah, surely! Right? Wrong. On the rare occasions my mother has actually had an awareness of my mental and emotional state, she has only ever seemed grimly satisfied or perversely interested when I have been sad, desolate, desperate, hurt or lonely. I realise this sounds insane to anyone with a normal, decent mother. It sounds insane to anyone with any goodness and compassion in their heart. But she has always enjoyed my suffering. That's the truth, and if you cannot bear to believe it then frankly you've got no business judging me for excluding such a sadistic piece of shit from my life for good.

"Don't let your pride get in the way."
PRIDE? Are you fucking kidding me?! What pride? That woman made damn sure I HAD NO PRIDE. What I do have is some vestiges of self-preservation (although even that hung by a precarious thread for years). That self-preservation is what made me finally look into my mother's intense cold grey-green eyes one day (it was in August 2013, and the moment will be forever ingrained in my memory) and realise, with a blinding, lightning-bolt epiphany, that the only purpose I served for her was as a thing to be manipulated and used. That has literally all I have ever been to her. And so yeah, I do have just about enough pride to demand a little more than that from my so-called mother. And "... get in the way" of what, exactly? Get in the way of continuing to 'put up and shut up' with a sick joke of a relationship which leaves me feeling bruised, emotionally depleted, terrified, ashamed, confused and worthless?

"When she dies, it'll be too late and you'll have so much regret."
When my mother dies, assuming she doesn't outlive me, I will be devastated. By the time she shuffles off this mortal coil, antiquated, doubtless still seething with the same pointless, pitiless defiance and inappropriate self-righteousness that has always clouded her shackled psyche, and shrivelled with bitterness and her own formidable burden of gnawing regret, I expect to be well in my fifties and possibly a grandmother myself. By that time I will not have clapped eyes on my mother, nor heard her grating, critical voice for two decades. My only regret will be that she forced me into this decision, thereby depriving herself of what could and should have been beautiful, life-affirming relationships not just with me but with her grandsons.
I will never, ever regret going No Contact.