My Mother Wound

I feared my biological mother. That sentence was something I had rejected for years though my body would always reveal the truth. No major memories surface of any harm. I was not abused. In fact many of my memories are sweet and endearing. But memories have a way of morphing to the sweeter moments over time, especially given the fact that she died when I was very young. I held my biological mother in high regard, as a goddess as most children do. Her sudden death at a time when I still needed her meant that my emotional processing of her stopped and I could not comprehend her as the woman and person that she was. I could only see her through the eyes of my seven year old self. To even consider that I felt scared of her felt blasphemous. So to have my nervous system tell me something that felt counter to what I desired to uphold felt like a bodily betrayal.

Mothers hold a high place in our hearts. We revere them, even when they hurt and harm us. Fortunately for me I was given a different upbringing. My MOM, mom, the woman who raised me, loved me, poured into me and held space for me never considered that her baby sister could be harsh to me. When my aunt moved away to a whole new state before the death of my bio mom I stood outside with such deep heavy sadness because my safe person was now gone. My mother recalls that moment and wasn’t sure why I looked so sad. I was too young and unable to articulate that I felt afraid. My mom had never seen anger from her sister, my bio mom, only deep abiding love. But just because she didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

I was raised in the time right before the shift to gentle parenting. A time when spankings, verbal abuse and neglect were the norm. Why complain to anyone else about how your mother was treating you when the world would always take her side? Act out in public, you could be certain that a perfect stranger was standing near by and saying, either with their words or their eyes, You betta beat that child. A child was not considered to be a person with feelings, thoughts and emotions that should have any sort of consideration to the adults in their lives. Children were beaten into submission, whether physically, spiritually, emotionally or psychologically. As a child you were to be seen and not heard. That statement alone meant that no matter what you were going through you had to stuff down your feelings and never speak on them. Ever.

I have to admit that when I became a parent for the first time at the age of 19 I adopted many of these beliefs and projected them on to my daughter. I upheld the motto that my child would have a “healthy fear of me”. Why was that a statement that I was proud to assert? By the time my daughter had entered into elementary school any time she would share something with me that felt too tender for me to deal with or address for myself, my breathing would quicken and she could sense my whole demeanor change. I could see her begin to shrink herself and say “ok mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad”.

Each and every time she said that I couldn’t help but feel like some looming ogre who scared the hell out of her. I wanted my daughter to feel comfortable talking to me, to share what her inner world was like without fear of me snapping and loosing control of my anger. When I would snap I often felt confused because this was never what I experienced in the large part of my upbringing with my mom. But with my bio mom I knew that there was this underbelly of fear and anxiety that ran right alongside my love and adoration for her.

My daughter was six years old when I made the conscious decision to change my parenting style. I no longer gave spankings. I did my best to not raise my voice and made space for her to talk. I apologized when I slipped out of myself and got angry. I apologized for past behaviors that I knew had an impact on her. I continued to apologize (and still do to this day) when I am reminded of something that I did that may have caused harm. I check in with her. I have been making amends with my daughter because I did not want the same patterns to flow down to her. While I have been actively better as a parent I am now acknowledging that I need to parent myself differently. The same care, grace and patience that I give my daughters (now I have two) is the same that I need to give to my younger self.

I need to believe her when she reveals her anxiety. I need to listen and not judge or condemn when she opens up about her fear. I have been in therapy working on healing the trauma around my bio mother’s death but only scratched the surface when it comes to healing the overall relationship that I had with her when she was alive. Since so much time has passed and I have recreated my memories to fit a more loving and enjoyable early childhood, I often wonder if I’m making this frightening part up. I like hard core proof of something to know that it is real and that it happened. Call it a trauma response. But I have often felt the need to lean on forensic data while neglecting the very real data of the trauma that has been stored in my body for years. These feelings didn’t come out of nowhere, they had an origin.

And as we all know the body keeps the score.