Mother's Day always comes with a cocktail of emotions. I feel the estrangement to my own mother and the void of being an adult child outside of that relationship, with the juxtaposition of being in changing relationships with my children. Mother's day for moms with moms, is multi-layered, especially when the relationships are the complete opposite.
IF I hadn't separated myself from my relationship with my mother, there is a very good chance, that the relationship between my children and I would be very different, let alone the relationship between me and myself.
Alice Miller is an author who writes about children and parents, but mothers mostly....and how we see or don't see our true mothers.
"I use the word "unconscious" exclusively to refer to repressed, denied, or disassociated content (memories, emotions, needs). For me, a person's unconscious is nothing other than his/her biography, a life story that, although stored in the body in its entirety, is accessible to our consciousness only in a highly fragmentary form. Accordingly, I never use the word "truth" in a metaphysical sense. The meaning I give it is invariably that of a subjective entity, related to the actual life of the individual concerned. This is why I frequently speak of "his" or "her" truth, meaning the true story of the person in question, as evidenced by and reflected in his/her emotions. In my terminology, emotion is a more or less unconscious, but at the same time vitally important physical response to internal or external events - such things as fear of thunderstorms, rage at having been deceived, or pleasure that results from a present we really desire. By contrast, the word "feeling" designates a conscious perception of an emotion. Emotional Blindness, then, is usually a (self-) destructive luxury that we indulge in at our cost."
"MY MAIN CONCERN in this present book is with the effects the denial of our true and strong emotions have on our bodies. Such denial is demanded of us not least by morality and religion. On the basis of what I know about psychotherapy, both from personal experience and from accounts I have been given by very many people, I have come to the conclusion that individuals abused in childhood can attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment only by recourse to a massive repression and detachment of their true emotions. They cannot love and honor their parents because unconsciously they still fear them. However, much they may want to, they cannot build up a relaxed and trusting relationship."
"Instead, what usually materializes is a pathological attachment, a mixture of fear and dutiful obedience that hardly deserves the name of love in the genuine sense of the word. I call this a sham, a facade. In addition, people abused in childhood frequently hope all their lives that someday they will experience the love they have been denied. These expectations reinforce their attachment to their parents, an attachment that religious creeds refer to as love and praise as a virtue. Unfortunately, the same thing happens in most therapies, as most people are still dominated by traditional morality. There is a price to be paid for this morality, a price paid by the body."
"Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill, unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves." Alice Miller
In feeling emotions that were not easy for me to admit or feel about my mother, fear, rage, resentment, her lack of care...etc. I spared my children, and myself, a relationship that they carried what I could not....I gave them years worth of rage and resentment....that needed to be directed upward at my mother. Once I was able to feel the true story of my childhood, my children didn't have to feel what I couldn't feel.
I know there are vivid memories of me being totally out of control enraged...and at pretty minor incidences with my children. What I didn't know is that these emotions were traveling in the wrong direction. My unconsciousness, my denial of my true childhood story, was spilling forth in my nowaday world, I just didn't know it. Like a child, a very angry child I mothered.
So, as I sit here on Mother's day, I am fully understanding how leaving my mother saved my relationships with my children, in that I didn't give them what I couldn't hold.
It isn't that I am still in rage towards my mother. Rage served its purpose. It was the exact emotions a child should feel in the midst of sexual abuse being so very young and helpless and having a mother refuse to change her ways. All the bundles of emotions that go with sexual abuse were felt by me, so that I did not deliver them to my children, unfelt.
What is between my children and I is the present.
My past is with my mother.
I am so grateful that I was able to turn and face my mother with the truth of me, so that I can experience mothering without spewing forth emotions I didn't want to feel. In feeling the worst emotions a child fears, I spared my children a very angry mother.
What I know to be true...is that my mother didn't mean to be angry at us, she just didn't know how to turn around and face her own truth.
