Mick Hunt shares how he learned to separate his mother's illness from who she was, and chose forgiveness over resentment. A midnight drive to leave her a rose, her question "How can you love me?", and his decision to break the cycle of family trauma by being better, not bitter.
Chapters
And my psychology classes were mainly for me, not to learn it, but trying to figure out what the heck happened to me, what the heck happened to my family. And it really taught me to separate the illness from the person I love, the person I can help her with the illness. And that was my mom for me. And so I remember one day driving through the middle of the night before classes. It was like 3 o' clock in the morning, and I'm driving back to San Antonio from Abilene, Texas, and I want to get to her house before she leaves for work. And I leave her a rose on her car with the note. I turn around and I'm driving back to campus when my phone rings and I look at it and it's my mom. And I answer it, and she can barely speak because she's crying and she's crying and she's crying, and she says, how? She says, how can you love me? She said, after everything I have done to you, how do you love me? And I said, mom, you're my mom. You will always be my mom. See, life gets better if we choose to be the change. So when I'm graduating college, this is my thought process now of I want to be better and not bitter. You know, I want to show my siblings that there's a better way that we can undo some of the lessons we learned in our childhood and not pass them on to the next generation.
