– to all the bautiful women out there, mothers or not: happy mother’s day – I love you –
When I was looking for my dad, I tried to find out who my mum’s friends used to be before she died and I managed to contact a few of them: I love you because you helped me get to know my mum when I didn’t have the chance to anymore. You helped me piece together the picture of a woman with a heart and a soul, and you showed me her shiny parts – her fun, and loving, and loyal parts. Sure, she must have carried some amount of darkness too. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have ended up in a relationship with a guy beating the shit out of her or turning to alcohol towards the end of her life. That’s part of being human.
Mum, I don’t think any less of you for being this human. I don’t know which experiences you must have had to endure to view those choices as your only way out. I do know, however, that life itself isn’t that harsh, life is always striving for growth, expansion, beauty, and love. It’s our own man-made, and mind-made demons and fears and irrational anxieties and fake standards that slap us around and that make us crumble from the inside. I learned that you hated your job. You hated working in an office, but it was a well-paid, sought-after job, so you stayed. As we so often do. One day, we say, one day,… and that day never comes, and along the way, we lose ourselves. I recently read an excellent blog post by a stage four ovarian cancer patient, which I am fortunate enough to have met at the writers’ workshop in Birmingham last fall: Fi Munro. If anyone can put “I’ll do this later” into perspective, then it’s her:
‘I realised I hadn’t been living at all’ How ovarian cancer taught one woman to totally transform her life
A few weeks ago, I was talking to Debra Kilby. She helps mothers deal with baby loss and how to welcome in new babies into this world. We were talking about what the term “mother-wound” actually means. Suffering from a mother wound at first level seems to suggest that we lost our mothers when we were very young, or that our mothers physically or emotionally abused us or that they neglected or left us. So, on a first level, suffering from the mother-wound indicates trauma that was caused and inflicted on us by our mothers or because of them.
However, on another level, suffering from a mother-wound means that we are living our mothers’ lives. In this case, we are self-inflicting the mother-wound to our selves. In this scenario, we are striving to accomplish what our mothers couldn’t, trying to make them proud or happy by fulfilling their wishes and dreams and “being good girls”. When this happens, we forget about or reject our own plans or visions for our future, and we “die, so that our mothers can live.” This development and adaptation often happen unconsciously, and that is the real tragedy of the mother-wound. We cannot make other people happy and take on the choices that they didn’t make. We can just make ourselves comfortable and lead by example, allowing others to leave miserable situations instead of staying stuck until it is too late. My mother’s wounds were so deep that looking at them allowed me to choose differently for myself. I chose to be in relationships with respectful people, I chose to pursue a job that makes me happy and that allows me to be all of me, I chose to share my strife, instead of suffering in silence.
Mum, I don’t know which battles you were fighting in and outside of yourself, but mum, what I know is that you had and have beautiful, kind, and loyal friends with fierce hearts who respect you and me enough to share your most significant memories with me and to keep your light shining and who don’t allow your darkness to prevail. I’m so grateful you made those secure connections when you were still so very young because this tribe of women is still carrying me through more than over thirty years later, just because I am your daughter.
I feel fortunate because those women are role models for me, and I get to identify and pick their best character traits to strive towards. So in a way, I feel that I was and am being raised by a whole bunch of mothers, instead of just you mum. This community of women means a whole lot to me, and it says and reveals a lot about the person and friend you used to be.
Mum, some of your friends have lost children of their own by now, some have been afflicted by and dealt with cancer, and some have gone through an ugly divorce, but mum, all of them have found it within them to reach out to me and to support me in my darkest and saddest hours when they had to go through so much grief of their own. You picked your friends well, mum, and I’m super grateful for that and proud of you.
I hope that all of us find those beautiful people- this tribe of ours- in our lives. People who carry the torch of our light and hand it over to future generations; those friends who speak of our kindness, of our generous deeds, of our love for our children and of our passion for life;- friends who have seen our darkest hours, our unfair breakups, our hangovers, our cheating, our bitching, and who choose to see all of this for what it is: dark moments, human moments, which don’t define us, but which make us human and very common. Our suffering on some level is the same suffering for all of us. What sets us apart from each other are our skills and talents and our abilities that we use to lovingly contribute to the planet, to support the people surrounding us and to relentlessly, courageously and mercilessly confront our own demons and turn our flaws into virtues, allowing us to build strong and lasting relationships and friendships; – our ability to keep loving and forgiving even in the face of all the wrongs that there might have been and be; – our ability to generate a loving and lasting tribe of like-minded people, even beyond our death that is what reveals our true essence.
My mum and grandad have this in common – they left me a legacy of loving, caring, and loyal people that are still here and support me beyond their deaths, not because they are family and feel obliged to, but because they choose to honour the contribution, minuscule or mighty, that you made to their lives in the past.
Recently I watched an interview between Russell Brand and Amanda Palmer and the topic was death and loss. Amanda said that there are two deaths we as humans undergo: our first death is when we leave our physical bodies behind and our second death occurs when the last person stops talking about us. That’s it. Your actions and the memory of you here on earth are finite. Let us ask ourselves: what is the sum of all my actions, of all the memories I created for myself and for others? What will I be remembered for? I so want the people I love to remember my love for them, this overflowing feeling that gathers in the pit of my tummy. I wish people to feel and soak in and radiate this intense, honest love. I hope that I’ll manage to gather a circle of genuinely loyal and loving people around me who cherish my light despite my humanness and I hope this for you too, whoever you are, because all of us need to have someone shine our light and keep the memory of it alive here on earth when we are already long gone. Receive the light and be the light for someone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkIfy8ZI5U4
Worth reading:
Bruce Feiler: The Secrets of Happy Families – improve your mornings, tell your family history, fight smarter, go out and play and much more.
- Christiane Northrup, M.D.: Mother-Daughter Wisdom – creating a legacy of physical and emotional health.
- Shefali Tsabary, PhD: The Awakened Family – how to raise empowered, resilient, and conscious children.
Websites to have a look at: - Fi Munro: https://fkmunro.com/events/
- Debra Kilby: https://debrakilby.com
- Movies to watch:
- Rise of the Guardians. (one of my all-time-favourites)
love, Linda.