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Finally understanding my mother, she sent me away when I was 5 to go live in a country thousands of kilometres away with someone I'd never met and for the majority of my early life and teenage years I resented her greatly for it and didn't understand why she had to give me up to live with my grandmother. There would have been no opportunities of a career, education or even citizenship under that political system of apartheid and even less of a chance to actually grow up comparatively well adjusted.
So, when I gave up my career at the time which was going well to look after her dying I finally got to meet her for more than a few weeks at a time and there wasn't anyone else to do it. She wasn't nearly as bad a person as I had perceived her to be up until that point and realised that if nothing else she'd given me a mix of self reliance, independence and practical ability to judge things for my own benefit.
There's been times where things where fairly grim, losing her farm in Zimbabwe, a failed marriage, risking all I owned to make money, most of my immediate family and close relatives are dead, numerous other setbacks I've seen lay out the supposedly 'clever and stronger' people than myself into complete ruin.
And somehow, it doesn't seem to phase me and I end up on my feet or a few steps better off in life than I was before.
There's certain parts of her personality I don't have, charity, compassion and sense of adventure just for the sake of doing it so the world is a better place. I often derided her over wasting a career as a surgeon fixing up sick people in backwater countries for chump change for a few months a year, but it's probably something I shouldn't see as a professional failing. Indeed, my aggression, cold hearted and conservative way of living was sometimes to spite her in a lot of ways as being her diametric opposite.
Somehow I doubt I'll ever really change as a 'better' person out of guilt but it's made me in a lot of ways who I am and I don't see them as personal failings, just an aspect of how I ended up how I am.
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