Yes, there was this woman who conceived, gestated and gave birth to me, and in the strictest relationship terms, she was my mother. But in the ways that count, I grew up without one.
What people often overlook—or even
dismiss—is the fact that the word “mother” can also be a verb. And while the
noun “mother” is an easily defined word—she who gave birth—the verb can be a
bit more tricky.
I searched both online
dictionaries and thesauruses and found that while the noun was expansively
represented, the verb suffered from a paucity of description. Webster’s, for
example, gave five variations on the definition of the noun and only three to
the verb, one of which was circular (used the word to define the word)1.
The fact of being a mother then, significantly outstrips the act of mothering,
if the scantiness of information in the dictionary is any guide.
Interestingly, the ability to be a mother is available to the vast
majority of sexually mature females, but the ability to mother does not
necessarily come with it. Even more interestingly, the ability to mother is not
confined to females who have given birth, it is not even confined to females or
to people who have achieved sexual maturity. It is a quality available to us
all, should we be so inclined.
That there is so little available
on the difference between being a mother and being able to mother came as a
surprise. One does not ordinarily expect an erudite definition of “mother”
contrasted with “to mother” to come from a feminist activist and icon,
either—but here you have it:
“Even if we are not mothers, the noun, we may
be mothering, the verb. Indeed, unless mothering is a verb,
it is a fact but not a truth, a state but not an action.
“To mother is to care about the welfare of
another person as much as one’s own.
“To mother depends on empathy and
thoughtfulness, noticing and caring.
“To mother is the only paradigm in which the
strong and the weak are perfectly matched in mutual interest…one may be forced
to be a mother, but one cannot be forced to mother.”2 ~ Gloria Steinem
“…unless
mothering is a verb, it is a fact but not a truth, a state but not
an action.” How true we ACoNs know this to be. And how representative of my
life, for I had a mother, the noun—the state—but received precious little
mothering—the act.
All parents leave their children a
legacy and this is the legacy of the child with a narcissistic parent. Yes,
even fathers, for fathers are capable of providing the same nurturing and
caring, the same empathy and noticing, the same thoughtfulness and
protectiveness we define as “mothering.” That a parent fails to provide these
essential forms of nurture is not a fact of gender as much as it is a fact of
personal character. Even people who do not feel an emotional bond with the
child can provide nurturance and empathy, can treat the child with respect, can
demonstrate concern for the child’s well-being. And yet, we still find the
world awash with those who grew up in a vacuum devoid of such crucial comforts.
I didn’t have a mother.
Occasionally I had a grandmother, for a time I had a step-mother, and while
they were better—much, much better—than having no mothering at all, they were
not my mother and even as a school-aged child, I knew and understood that. For
a few years we had Mexican ladies live in as housekeeper/nanny and they were
among the warmest mother-figures I had in my life, but when my little brother
started school full time, that was the end of that resource for me. From that
point forward, when it came to nurturing and mothering, I was pretty much on my
own.
When I was perhaps eight—maybe a
little older—I remember getting very upset with my mother over something and so
to punish her I decided I would withhold my customary goodnight kiss. When
bedtime rolled around I brushed my teeth and put on my pajamas and then went
straight to bed. I waited a long time for her to come to my door and claim her nightly
kiss but she never did. She didn’t notice. She didn’t miss it. And I began to
understand that although she called herself my mother, she was not a mother to
me.
It is significant to note that
when I was feeling put out at her, my mind went to punishment. It was what I
knew, it was what I experienced, it is what I understood. I knew nothing of a
mother coming to her child’s side and saying “You must be disappointed in that
“C” in math. What can Daddy and I do to help you?” I knew nothing of flinging
myself into my mother’s arms to cry out some hurt or disappointment, I knew to
stifle my sobs against my pillow and if I got caught with red eyes and a
sniffly nose to blame it on my allergies because crying about anything except
immediately after a beating was a punishable offense. I didn’t know about
talking out a situation, about coming to an understanding with another party, I
knew only about commands and pronouncements and third party intervention that,
if defied, warranted more punishment. I didn’t know about building a skill by
doing it over again, eliminating each error progressively and attaining
mastery: I knew do it right the first time or there was punishment.
The worst part of this was that
when I became a mother, this was what I knew. My grandparents and my father
might ask if I knew what was wrong and if I planned to repeat my mistake—a
contrite answer of “no” from me was all they required—but were neither critical
nor inclined to punish me for simple errors. My mother, however, was the one
who assigned chores and reviewed them, and it was my mother’s actions that I
absorbed as the norm.
When my first child was a baby a
telling event occurred. She was perhaps six months old and at the stage where
everything went in her mouth. I would remove anything she had managed to her
hands on that she shouldn’t, say “No no!” to her, then hand her a distracting
toy. My mother happened to be there one afternoon and she said to me “She’s too
young to know what “no” means. You’re wasting your breath” and I replied “But
if I don’t start now, how will she understand it when she is old enough to
understand?
My mother didn’t get it. The idea
of teaching a child to not pick up the screwdriver Daddy left on the floor was
just beyond her ken. Instead, her way was to smack—to punish—when the child
innocently did the wrong thing because, in her words, that will teach them a
lesson they will never forget. And I, being naïve and still wanting my mother’s
love and approbation, gave up my efforts to teach my child what she could and
could not play with, settling with smacking her hand when she grabbed something
inappropriate.
It took many years and many
mistakes for me to learn about mothering. I had the most obvious aspects down
pat: hug my kids, cuddle them, do things with them, tell them that I loved
them. But the rages I directed at them were the same rages my mother directed
at me, and for infringements of the rules as petty as making noise and waking
me up too early (I worked nights). I saw nothing wrong with those rages, even
while my heart hurt at the signs of fear and alarm on their little faces.
In so many ways, lacking mothering
myself, I did not know how to mother. The funny thing was, my stepmother was
very good at nurturing and mothering her children and the year I spent in the
home she and my father established was a time of great learning—but learning at
a distance. In retrospect I can see that she was trying to nurture and mother
me but two things stood between us: she did not know how to provide nurturing
to a teen-aged girl and I did not know how to accept it—not having had
consistent real mothering in my life, I didn’t know what it was, what to do
with it, how to recognize or deal with it. So accustomed to was I to being
commanded, with threats for noncompliance tacked on, I did not recognize less
harsh and direct forms of communication. So desperate was I to be liked by my
stepmother so that I would continue to be welcome in her home, I would do my
chores and then retreat to my room with a book, spending little or no time with
the family after meals—because this was how my mother defined “being good”—out
of sight so she could forget that I existed. And, of course, my own definitions
of such things as good and bad, acceptable and not acceptable, right or wrong,
were shaped by the malignant narcissist I have lived with most of my life.
But Patsy interpreted it differently.
She saw it as me isolating myself because I didn’t like her or I resented her
having taken my mother’s place in my father’s life. Nothing could have been
further from the truth! I was glad he had married her because I knew first-hand
what a hurtful bitch my mother was and I truly wanted my father to be happy—I
knew how much happier I was when I didn’t have to live with her and couldn’t
imagine he felt any different. But I didn’t know how to be an integrated part
of a family. With my grandparents, we ate supper, cleaned up, then sat outside
in front of the patio fireplace until bedtime—I would often go to my room and read,
not because they wanted me out of sight, but because my mind was much more
active and needed feeding while they were content to sit quietly, nurse a cup
of coffee, and stare into the fire. I didn’t know that Patsy expected more or
different of me and she didn’t know that I didn’t know.
I appreciated anything she did for
me but again, I had no idea how to adequately communicate that. A few years
later, when I was a new mother with a military husband overseas, Patsy
anticipated my needs and showed up at my house with a bag full of groceries. I
think she had come to understand that I would not ask for help if I was on
fire—although I am not so sure she understood why.
My mother didn’t want me to have
my first child—I was 17 and unmarried and she wanted me to have an abortion
(which was illegal in 1964). Next she tried to force me into a home for unwed
mothers with the objective of adopting the baby out. Eventually she backed me
so deeply into a corner that I took an overdose of sleeping pills. Once out of
the hospital, I wanted to get married—which was the norm for girls in my
situation back then—but she refused to consent. Not once during this entire
ordeal did she show me the smallest amount of compassion or caring. It never
occurred to her that I might be scared or hurt or worried about labour and
birth and providing for my child. All that came to her mind was what she
wanted—for the stigma to go away and to force me to “knuckle under” to her.
When my father did an end run around her and helped me get a judge to authorize
my marriage, my mother was livid.
“Do not come to me when times get
tough,” she told me. “You made your bed, now you lie in it!”
My father had a wife who did not
work outside the home and by this time, five kids at home. My brother Pete was
living there because once I left my mother’s home, he became the target of her
nasty mouth and temperament—he went to live with Dad and stayed there until he graduated
from high school. And they had another baby just six months after my child was
born—their plate was full and the dollars were tightly stretched. In good
conscience, I could not ask them because I knew they would help and stretch
their situation even tighter. And I didn’t dare ask my mother because she had
already told me she wouldn’t help. All I would get from her was mocking “I told
you so’s” coupled with whatever cruel barbs she could come up with at the time.
I grew up with the woman—I knew that asking her for help would only put me in a
vulnerable position that she simply could not resist exploiting.
You could almost excuse my mother
with the fact that in the early 60s, having a baby out of wedlock shamed the
entire family. But when you realize that “doing the right thing” (marrying the
girl off) pretty much neutralized that shame, the fact that my mother withheld
her permission for me to marry effectively revealed her agenda, which had
nothing to do with me or my feelings or even my child and had everything to do
with her being obeyed. I had “defied” her by refusing an abortion and she was
going to pay me back for that.
I entered motherhood, then, with
this for my role model. I remember sometimes being baffled with a situation
having to do with my kids—or sometimes automatically reverting to some unloving
behaviour I had learned from my mother but stopping myself—and asking myself
“What would Patsy do?” I would try to imagine how Patsy would handle a similar
situation, knowing that brutality was not part of her repertoire, and then try
to apply that myself. Too often, however, my own mother’s behaviour would leap
to the fore and before my brain could shift into “What would Patsy do?” gear, I
would be screaming at my children and scaring them with the intensity of the
rage that would boil out of me.
I would say that I “lost my way”
except that I didn’t have a way to lose. I didn’t have a mother to nurture and
correct me, I was not mothered, I didn’t know what it felt like and I didn’t
know how to do it. My Patsy moments were imitations of what I observed or
imagined but not something that came from within me because that was what I had
experienced. As a kid I sometimes felt the only thing my mother did, with
respect to me and my brother, was to put food in the cupboards every weekend.
Most of the rest of the time we didn’t see her and if she was reading or
watching TV, woe betide the child who intruded to put forth a personal issue
that might interrupt Mickey Spillane or I Love Lucy.
Over time I learned to nurture
others. It was a hit or miss kind of thing, learning to rely on my gut
instincts for empathy and compassion and overriding the harsh backlash that I
learned at my mother’s knee. Often I faced conflicts between a compassionate
response and a punitive one because I didn’t know how to be effective and compassionate at the same time,
while fully grasping the deterrent effect of punishment. But what I missed was that my
kids weren’t terrified of me the way I was of my mother, so her methods didn’t
work well for me because my children weren’t sufficiently terrified of me so as
to be deterred.
But mothering was something alien
to me, for all that I felt the feelings, but I did not know how to act on them. By
recalling Patsy with her children, by imagining what she would do in the same
situation, I learned it was ok to play with then, to tell them I loved them, to
hold them when they were hurt and to respect their individual tastes—to mother
them. But my instinct, my initial emotional response, was to scream and hit and
punish, just as my mother had done to me.
It takes a long time—and a lot of
mistakes—to overcome that kind of bred-in-the-bone response. It takes a
knowledge of—or willingness to seek out and learn—what the “right thing” is
before you can implement it. It takes a lot of backbone to stand up to the training
received through experience, to step out into the unknown before you even have
faith in yourself that what you are doing is right. It takes repeated failures,
analyses of the failures, and infinitely renewed efforts. You have to mother
yourself, even though you were never given the tools, even though you don’t
even know how you are supposed to feel.
Often I see ACoNs cry out that
they want their mothers when, in fact, they do not want the unloving women who
gave birth to them—what they want is mothering. They instinctively want the
nurturing and compassion and unconditional love that is mothering, which they
never received. They want mothering, which they can get from any sufficiently
compassionate person—even from themselves.
It is important that we learn to
differentiate “being a mother” from “to mother” because they are planets apart:
a brain-dead woman in a coma can give birth and become a mother, but she can
never provide mothering to her child. We are those children, born to
emotionally sterile women who can never provide mothering to us and when we
pine for it from them, we are seeking to squeeze blood from a stone. We each
need to learn the art of mothering and to give it not only to our children but to
ourselves as well. It is the only way we will ever get a real mother. It is how I finally got one.
This touched on my mother wound today. Being our own mother, learning our own path to nurturing. The legacy of narcissism that we carry with us because it was forced on us.
ReplyDeleteThis entry resonates with me deeply (as many do). Becoming a mother was when everything went completely haywire for me. When I was a child, I had to draw a picture that was stuck on the fridge, re-drawing it if the picture got a little tattered. The picture began with a circle that I traced very carefully around a dinner plate - if there was a gap or wobble, I had to start again. Around the circle, I drew tongues of fire. Inside the circle were all the other members of my family; my mother, my father, my brother and my sister. On the outside, was me. My mother kept it up on the fridge to remind me of where I fit in the family. To remind me of who I was. It didn't just remind me, of course. It reminded everyone in the family. Everyone knew that I was nothing - that I was filth - that I didn't belong. This feeling was so ingrained that I became nothing - I became filth - and I was without belonging - without identity. I was rage. Then I had children. Fortunately, these children had a great dad, and I, a supportive and loving husband, who protected the children and stuck with me through a very rocky ride. He had so much faith in me, that now, after loads of counselling, I can reflect on my own mothering with a small degree of pride. I'm doing OK. My children are loved, and they're safe. I have extricated myself from my own family and we're going to be just fine.
ReplyDeleteI began making this differentiation when I stopped calling my mother Mum. To me, Mum is for those who mother, while mother is for the act of giving birth.
ReplyDeleteMy mother had the money to provide but was emotionally negligent. Not once did she support my passions. She chose my GCSE exams for me, and more besides.
I was suicidal on and off for seven years before she found out and she was dismissive. I dropped it on her in a fight because she told me I should be more grateful than I was.
I now live with my boyfriend and hardly talk to her.