Mothering is one of the few jobs we receive zero training for, and one that has the most impact on our family. There are so many ways we can get this wrong.
Mothering carries our nature, our nurture and all of our wounds - our unexpressed emotions and our unmet emotional needs from childhood.
Coming from a dysfunctional childhood, we are broken.
Mothering from broken is a mess, I am not even sure I can articulate.
Sadly I was 46 years old when I acknowledge my abuse.
That what I called love - was not love.
I didn't know who I was or my own worth.
I had been mothering on empty.
By that time, my youngest was 10.
Course correcting at time was/is to watch a broken women trying her best to heal her own heart, and to undo and re-do mothering in real time. There wasn't a do over - but I had to try a whole new way.
I began mothering me, so I could then mother them.
I had to learn how to love me, in order to love them.
I had to see me, in order to see them.
Mothering, I am learning, comes from how a woman sees herself.
A woman who is at peace with her own truths, knows her wounds and is caring for them, who has boundaries that match her worth, who can speak up and have difficult conversations, etc will be a better mom.
Mothering is more about the woman who is caring for her family, then her family.
A child's job is not to make you a better mother.
A child's job is to be a child.
The magnitude we are expecting from mothers who have come from abuse is monumental.
The hill seems too high and our skill sets way way too small.
We are trying to become that which we don't know.
My role model as a mother was abysmal at best.
The difficult things were the ones she sidestepped.
Seeing the broken was not her way.
I never saw how to deal with difficult things in a loving manner.
I really never saw an adult interaction that held the truth and resolution.
Instead the broken things were unspoken and life kept moving on.
The broken wasn't fixed, but left unhealed and unattended, and another day would dawn and life moved on.
I used to deal with problems this way too.
I would go silent for an amount of time, and enough days and life would fill over it.
The wound/fester/hurt was still there - and you could pretend to pretend it was okay.
Now I see this as denying what is.
You certainly can deny facts and realities; but they don't magically disappear.
You can't cover up pain with normal life and expect it to go away.
The pain is there, just buried.
One of my intentions was to be different than my mother.
To mother looking at what was wrong, broken and to inform, and speak about the difficult things.
I wasn't going to focus on the good in the pile of abuse.
For you can.
You can look at what she baked, how she did this or that.
But, the moments in time where a mother would have protected her child - she did not.
So, how did I try and do this differently.
I have been doing the opposite. I speak about the negatives, the places where a child is at risk. I challenge choices and actions that appear to not see the child.
Mothering from this prospective can feel, I am sure, as if I am questioning their choices.
However, what I am pointing out perhaps is a blindspot.
One of my mother's strongest character was her blindness. The ability to overlook and cover up the facts of her world.
Perhaps being outspoken and staring at reality - is mothering harshly.
I don't know how to do this with kid gloves or a soft footstep.
My brokenness awkwardly challenges anyone who can't see to a child's needs.
How to address both the parent and the child in ways that honors both is something I can work on.
However, a child in danger is typically on short notice.
Or, even after the fact - when I child was in a place where harm was a real potential.
I guess what I want to express here is that even a broken mom trying to protect a child feels better to me, in comparison of how my mother left her children without protection.
Maybe my children can parent in ways that are much better than I.
I wish I had a mother who would have stated how broken she was and how she didn't know what to do with an abuse. Instead abuse within our home was never talked about. No one spoke about the uncles who abused or the father. No one spoke about warning us not to go here or there. No one spoke about being abused - when so many were. Silence was the answer to abuse.
My mother came from a large family. She was the only girl who stayed in the family. She believed they were a good group and close knit. Yet in the mix were pedophiles. In the outcasts were sisters who didn't join in the family. Her failure to have boundaries endangered us kids. When I think of my Aunts and Uncles, I see them as harmless in my childhood. I remember they spoiled us and gave us things our family couldn't afford. Yet years later after discovering my father abused children, these same 'kind' uncles were just like him.
I wonder if her blindness also blinded us. I don't have a memory of being abused by uncles - but a brother does. So, what is the reality. Hers, mine or his?
And when you have a group of people who don't talk about abuse, abuse goes unchecked - but it doesn't disappear.
It is complicated to mother with a family of abuse. It is hard to make the tough calls and refrain from family functions. I thought that alone would be a signal. That IF I felt it was unsafe, others too would feel the same. That IF I spoke about the abuse within the family tree, others would follow suit.
Speaking out perhaps hasn't changed others.
Yet speaking out has changed me.
And, as they say, I want to be standing on the right side of history.
When a child comes forth asking about the abuse in our family tree, and they want to know what I did.
I can say I spoke out.
I tried to warn.
I stayed away.
Mothering in the broken mess of abuse - will be to point out the things that are wrong.
Otherwise you are complying with denial.
My mothering is as imperfect as I am.
Speaking up imperfectly is still a long shot better than silence.
I am sorry for the hurt I have caused.
I speak from love.
Love isn't silent.
Love speaks up and shines her light into the brokenness.
