The Magic of Repairing Your Relationship with Mother
THIS IS PART OF May’s “OUR PUBLIC MEMORY” PIES spiritual PRACTICE ON sharing our stories. IF YOU MISSED THIS NEWSLETTER, READ IT HERE.
No matter what your relationship to the word “mother” is, we want to hear from you. Share your stories about mothering and you’ll be entered into a random drawing to win some Lovegoodness soap. Plus, your story could be shared on our social media during the month of May. Feel free to remain anonymous if you choose. For some inspiration, some of our staff and leadership team shared their stories.
Read Emily’s and Williesha’s stories also.
If your mother doesn’t love you, no one else will,” is the way I always understood that adage, and it has been the basic understanding that has guided much of my life, relationships and healing journey. You see, my mother didn’t raise me. I felt the reality of that in so many ways growing up. Mother’s Day was always a painful holiday/observance, especially as a young person, which I never felt like I could talk much about, even as an adult. With an overwhelming number of people HAVING mothers in their lives, coupled with the extensive lengths that I know many mothers go to care for their families, I truly understood the basic need to honor mothers. But for me, it was a constant reminder of my otherness. As a tall girl my gender identity was constantly under attack. Without a mother in my life, many of the lies I got told about my gender identity felt true.
For those of us who did not have mothers in our lives growing up – either due to abandonment or death – we struggle with the ubiquitous nature of “The Mother” archetype in every part of our societies. It’s easy to tell yourself stories of brokenness and insufficiency when you are without either of your parents. But in this case, what it means to grow up without a mother isn’t something that everyone has to think about. I struggled most of my life with feeling abandoned, trying to avoid being abandoned, abandoning people in an effort to not be abandoned, etc. I spent much of my young adulthood resenting my mother or ignoring her existence.
I began repairing our relationship after taking a communications course where we had to make different lists of people in our lives based upon our level of communication with them. It took some healing work, but I got clear that what I needed from my mother when I was a child is very different from what I needed from my mother as an adult. Furthermore, because I had spent SO much of my time being in reaction to early abandonment, I had NO IDEA what I needed from my mother as an adult! What I began to understand was that this was a GOOD thing. Not knowing what I needed or wanted from my mother as an adult gave me the freedom to inquire and explore our relationship to better understand it.
Initiating a new relationship with my mother gave me one of my first lessons about repair work: it becomes necessary when you become clear that the relationship you needed in the past is not necessarily the relationship you need and/or can have in the present. Understanding that is only one part of the journey. Discovering what you need in the present and ASKING for it (where it can BEST be provided), are some of the other parts.
My second major lesson regarding repair work came on my 39th birthday. A Turkish friend of mine once told me that she gives her mother a present on her own birthday because her mother did all of the work to birth her, so her mother should be the one who’s celebrated. I found that idea intriguing and decided on my 39th birthday to call my mother and thank her.
It was a pleasant conversation to start. She was grateful and surprised that I thought of her on my birthday. I ended up asking her to tell me what she remembered about my birth. She told me that she was knocked out for most of it because mine was a cesarean birth. She told me that when she came out of the anesthesia and saw her doctor for the first time, she noticed that he had a bruise under his eye. She asked him what had happened to him and he told her that I had punched him when I was born. My mother and I laughed in unison at the thought and the accurate portrayal of me in general.
“And just as our laughter died down, and we both did that sigh thing people do after they’ve laughed heartily, my mother said lightly, as if it were no big deal, ‘I really wish I could have kept you.’”
I was stunned both silent and motionless. I wasn’t sure that I had heard correctly. I was in a state of shock because her words were so contrary to the story that I had been telling myself about her and me for my WHOLE LIFE. The story was simple: my mother didn’t want me. Or, my mother couldn’t take care of me AND my younger sister, so I was sacrificed. Huge, burdensome stories that suddenly and for the first time EVER, got completely called into question with one, off-the-cuff statement: “I really wish I could have kept you.”
My mind reeled for months over that exchange with my mother. I had to go through many memories and experiences and completely rewire them because one of their basic premises was my lack of lovability. It is a reeling, to be completely honest, which continues to this day. You really never know what’s on the other side of relationship repair work, which makes sense, when you think about it. With a powerful archetype like “The Mother” and so many other feminine archetypes directing our relationality to that energy, what gets “repaired” is complex and includes a lot of variables.
And my repair work continues. It’s not a straight shot in one particular direction, either. It’s a lot of back and forth. Some days I’m clear about my relationship to my mother; some days I want to go back to the time when I pretended that I sprouted out of a fluffy cloud. Some days – like many days in the month of May – I feel deep grief and loss. And some days – like many days in the month of May – I am grateful for the journey and for the resilience that I get from balancing between the internal healing and the external relatedness, as well as from the past repair and the present relationship. If I’ve learned anything from this healing journey it’s that there are a lot of “both/and’s” involved and being prepared to ride the wave of paradox and gray space IS the journey.