Like pieces of a puzzle, bricks of a wall, twigs of a nest, our life is interpreted as a whole that we all aspire to achieve by finding the parts, just like the pieces to a puzzle. Abraham Maslow saw life as a hierarchy of needs, wherein humans have the intrinsic motivation to fulfill certain needs to reach the ultimate goal of self satisfaction. These needs can be seen as the parts that come together to form the whole - self satisfaction. With the utmost important needs starting from the bottom to the lesser needs leading up to summit of self actualization. Intimate relationships are one of the many categories in the pyramid of needs, which when not fulfilled leads to a sense of incompleteness just like a missing part of the whole.
Intimacy is born out of time and dedication, love and understanding. When I lost a relationship that I grew up with, insufficiency creeped in, leaving me no longer longing for the person but the feeling, the feeling of being able to be complete with someone that I love. However, clarity followed insufficiency, offering me the vision to see beyond just the one intimate relationship I had, but to be able to recognize and build up on the already present relationships that should have been my definition of intimacy in the first place.
I had a place to escape to when the faults in the ones around me became overwhelming, but now I had no choice but to live with it. Toleration slowly turned into realization, realization turned into understanding, understanding turned into forgiveness and forgiveness finally transformed into beautiful intimate relationships.
Mother, is the very first form of intimacy that we encounter, our first love, first friend, first mentor, our first part. I can spend my entire life collecting the fragments to feel fulfilled, but unless the most valuable piece of it all is not present, the picture cannot be complete. I have almost attained it. My inability to be completely be myself in the face of love, has been holding me back, not allowing me to acquire that final piece, my relationship with someone I hold most dear, my mother.
Words fail when faced with the feelings I hold towards my mother. However, our relationship has not been a classic one, where the mother embodies softness or lack of sternness. I feared her more than the monsters under my bed as a kid and more than the public stage performances as a teen.
Her austerity along with my fear, built a wall between us preventing intimacy to blossom and so it remained that way until recently. When I moved to the other side of the world and when I let go of the one relationship I had successfully completely built, everything else in my life surprisingly started falling into place, started forming a new picture and my mother was slowly becoming an integral part for the final completion.
Her voice is softer now, more longing than concerning. Our time apart and the distance between us brought us together in a way, where we evolved into our better selves together. However, a small BUT keeps preventing me from successfully attaining this last part, the part that I care about the most. We all have our personal differences in every relationship and finding middle ground is always the recommended way out.
However, sometimes our differences are a little too different to find a middle ground. Now that I'm home, I wonder how it would be different in a different setting, in a setting where I would have to completely expose myself to my mother. Acceptance is not an option I would consider in a situation similar to the one I am picturing, and that hurts. It hurts that although I am close, I am not even close to completion.
My first and last piece is my mother and I was struggling to make it fit into my idea of 'whole' and maybe that is the problem, maybe my idea of whole is not how it's supposed to be. Maybe the idea of picturing life as a whole is a false one in the first place. Maybe Maslow's pyramid does not have to define my or anyone else's life. Maybe Life is how we want it to be, maybe it is meant to have holes.
We all spend so much time trying to make everything resemble perfection that most of us forget the progress we have all made in all aspects of our lives. In my case it is my relationship with my mother.
