Selfish is one thing my mother never was. Beyond belief, she was not selfish! I never saw her put herself first, never heard her say, “This is what I want” or “What about me?” Everything revolved first around our father, and then around us, the kids, from where we lived to how each hour of the day was spent.
God, she was hard to live up to! When I first got married, at twenty-two, I didn’t even realize that my stomach ulcer was caused, in part, by trying to balance my emotional, rebellious nature with the image of total selflessness I had grown up with. Any selfish act, which included the merely self-oriented, caused waves of guilt to ripple through me like a brackish tide. The reason I even married in the first place was to please virtually everyone but myself.
