Poor Little Narcissist…

In March of 2012 I wrote a blog entry entitled “Empathetic Narcissist = Oxymoron.” In reviewing that post recently I came across this line: “Empathy is that quality that allows us to identify with the feelings of another…Narcissists don’t know how to do this—they don’t have the capacity and because of that, they find no value in it.”^[1]

In re-reading this line it occurred to me that some will read this and their own natural empathy may lead them to feeling sorry for the narcissist. After all, the narcissist is being deprived of something natural and fundamental and even essential to the building of character. That which most of us take for granted has been denied, either through trauma or the fickleness of nature, to narcissists and some of us are prompted not only feel sorry for them but find the fact of this privation sufficient to give them a pass on their behaviours. This may be our natural inclination but, believe me, to do so is a grave mistake.

While it is true that narcissists lack empathy—it is one of the defining features of narcissism, after all—it is not necessarily true that the narcissist experiences suffering as a result of this lack. Empathy is not part of our survival instinct, selfishness is, because selfishness helps us to hoard resources that guarantee our survival, even at the expense of others. If we had empathy and shared our resources, we might die.

Very young children are naturally very selfish and lacking in empathy. Your infant doesn’t care how sleep-deprived you are, he only cares that his discomfort is relieved. Empathy is supposed to evolve as the child matures and becomes more cognizant of others and more capable of fending for himself. Children are supposed to gradually outgrow this selfishness, to become increasingly aware not only of others but of the needs and feelings of others and eventually to respond to them with emotional resonance. By the time we reach adulthood, if our development has been on track we not only can read and write and have the basic skills necessary for autonomy, we have developed the empathy for others that allows us to function well socially.

Unfortunately not all of us develop that empathy—narcissists are chief among those who lack it. We who have grown up with an ingrained sense of empathy find it difficult to grasp that someone can be without one. It is further difficult to grasp that they don’t miss it at all.

How is this possible? Well, think of it this way: if you had never eaten jellied moose nose^[2], would you miss it? You might even think that it was an undesirable thing to eat and be glad you’ve never tasted it and have no wish to ever do so. And because you have never tasted it, you most definitely would not miss it, would you?

Well, narcissists lack empathy. They have never had it, they don’t recognize it when it is directed at them, and when they realize that it can make you very vulnerable, they don’t want it. They like to see it in others because it gives them a way to manipulate those others, which is precisely why they don’t want it for themselves. Narcissists do not miss being empathetic because they have never experienced it—they quite literally do not know what they are missing. But, like you and the jellied moose nose, they aren’t exactly eager to experience it.

So, ask yourself—should I feel sorry for you because you have never tasted jellied moose nose? Should I excuse bad table manners and look the other way when you eat your spaghetti with your hands—both hands—because you, poor thing, have never been able to eat jellied moose nose? If you don’t care about it, don’t want any for yourself, and don’t feel deprived by the lack, why should I feel bad for you because your life—and diet—has been deficient in the jellied remains of a moose’s nose? Wouldn’t I be guilty of wanting it for you more than you want it for yourself? What business, actually, is it of mine?

Is it any different with empathy? If the narcissist doesn’t miss it (because he never had it) and doesn’t want it (because he believes it leaves him open to manipulation), why feel bad for him? Don’t say “I know how I would feel…” because that doesn’t matter—what is germane here is how that narcissist feels. If you think he feels the way you would, that is projecting (which is a narcissistic trait—check yourself for fleas!) and it has absolutely nothing to do with how that narcissist feels.

So, because he lacks empathy, he doesn’t know any better and you should cut him some slack, right?

Nope. Unless he has been living under a rock in a cave in the bowels of an ancient volcano, he knows better because the clues are everywhere. Movies and TV shows often are no more than elaborate morality plays that effectively demonstrate that characters who lack empathy end up negatively. Books, news articles, overheard conversations—all contain the general consensus that people who lack empathy are assholes and idiots, disliked and disrespected.

That means that narcissists know what empathy is and they know that the society expects some degree of it from all of us. The narcissist also knows that he can use the vulnerabilities that empathy exposes to manipulate others—which means that if he develops empathy he will be vulnerable to people like himself. The narcissist well know what empathy is and she knows that it is a powerful means to manipulate and control others, either by manipulating their empathy or feigning her own.

The truth is, you cannot miss something you have never had. You can want it, you can yearn for it, but you can’t miss it. If you are inclined to feel sorry for a narcissist for his lack of empathy, imagine how you would feel if I were to feel sorry for you for your lack of jellied moose nose experience? You might appreciate that I was thinking of you, but if I offered to bring you a nice big plate of it, wouldn’t you quickly decline my offer?

And so it is with the narcissist and empathy—she doesn’t feel bad, she doesn’t suffer from her lack of empathy any more than you feel bad or suffer from your lack of acquaintance with the jellified moose snout. You might think the narcissist is missing out on something beautiful and necessary but the narcissist will have a very different—and quite valid—point of view.

Why is it valid? Because it never works to want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. Because, no matter how much we believe we are right, we don’t have the right to impose our wishes for someone onto them, not even narcissists. They have the same right of self-determination as you and I do, and it is just as sacrosanct, even if it is self-serving and counter-productive. Because we don’t have the right to try to change other adults to suit ourselves, no matter what. But most important, because that narcissist has a perfect right to be a narcissist, to continue being a narcissist, and to even enjoy being a narcissist. We do not have a right try to change them or even to expect them to change.

This can be difficult to accept because their lack of empathy can make life very difficult for us and when something is going wrong in our lives, we have a natural instinct to want to change it. If our narcissistic parent is wreaking havoc in our lives it is natural to wish for that parent to change and stop doing it. We impute the same emotional processes to the narcissist that we, ourselves, enjoy and so we believe that those things that motivate us will motivate them. But we are wrong. You cannot appeal to the empathy of a person who has none and you cannot give empathy to someone who doesn’t want it.

Most of all, you cannot empathize with a feeling that is not there. When you feel bad for the poor narcissist who is devoid of empathy you are not empathizing, you are projecting. You are assuming that the narcissist is feelings the same pangs you are feeling when, in fact, the person is not feeling bereft at all. That is how you believe you would feel if your empathy were to disappear tomorrow and you are projecting onto that narcissist—it is not at all the nothingness that the narcissist is feeling.

1.      Sweet Violet. “Empathetic Narcissist = Oxymoron.” The Narcissist’s Child. http://narcissistschild.blogspot.co.za/2012/03/empathetic-narcissist-non-sequitur.html (accessed January 19, 2018).

2.      Wisniewski, Laura. “Fresh Eyes: Jellied Moose Nose.” Bozeman Magazine. http://bozemanmagazine.com/articles/2014/02/27/22796_fresh_eyes_jellied_moose_nose (accessed January 19, 2018).

I don’t want a reconciliation…

It occurred to me, sitting here looking at a blank screen, that I don’t want a reconciliation or an apology or even an acknowledgement of her sins from my mother. I don’t want her to change or to morph into a good mother or ask my pardon…all of which is a good thing because this week, she has been dead 19 years.

But when you realize what you don’t want, it starts to frame and clarify what you do. And I find myself pondering what, if my mother was still alive, would I be wanting from—or for—her at this point in my life.

I turned 70 in March and my mother would have been 88 in June. I am married to a younger man, am semi-retired, and I live overseas, half a world away from the American West Coast were I was born and raised. My life is busy and it is full. Much of my downtime is spent reading, researching, and thinking. At my age, we ponder our mortality and review the lives we have lived, the mistakes we have made, and how we might have chosen differently.

One of the things my mental meanderings keep coming back to are those mistakes. Real life doesn’t have any do-overs and all too often wisdom comes far too late to make any difference. The best we can do in situations like that is to review those mistakes, try to understand what was driving us at the time, and try to determine if a different choice would have made any difference. The big surprise to me is the realization that, for the most part, another choice would have made little difference because changing my choices would not likely have had an effect on the other people in the equation. It is humbling to realize that the bad choices I made in my past were not the defining act in the event because the others involved in the event had their own agendas and my choices were only a small part of what ultimately transpired.

I grounded my daughter for cutting school and she jumped out a second story window and ran away to a friend’s house. Below the window she jumped from is a sticker bush (planted there to deter would-be housebreakers) and when she showed up at her friend’s house she told her friend’s mother that her bruises and scratches were from a beating I had given her—and no mention of cutting school was made. Outraged, the mother took my daughter in and for a few weeks she felt properly self-righteous about it—until she discovered that my daughter had led hers into cutting school for days on end.

Reviewing that scene, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t grounded my daughter? What if I had given her extra chores? What if I had made her attend Saturday detention for the rest of the school year to make up the days lost? What if I had said nothing except “Go back to school—you have a lot of missed work to make up”? Would any of those change my daughter into a different person? Or would she still be a girl who was willing to jump out of a second story window into a vicious bramble bush, lie about her mother to the mother of a friend, and then show her gratitude for being taken in by corrupting the daughter of her benefactor? No choice I could have made in that circumstance would have changed my daughter, her ethics, or her sense of entitlement. For all these years I have beat myself up about making a bad choice and suddenly it occurs to me that I had much less power than I believed myself to have and there was no choice I could have made that would have made my daughter anything other than who she really was on that day: a girl who so believed she was entitled to do whatever she wanted, regardless of the law or parental edict, she was willing to risk injury, then lie (a lie that had the potential to see me jailed!) to and con the mother of a friend and, on top of it all, induce that friend to defy both the law and her own mother. She was that kind of person, no matter what I chose to do.

Applying this newfound knowledge to other situations, I have discovered that my sense of guilt or responsibility about them is largely misplaced because other autonomous individuals played a part, a part over which I had no influence or control. When my NexH decided to cheat, what kind of reaction would have changed his mind or his behaviour? He had already shown himself to believe it was ok for him to cheat, so much so that he actually put the hotel room on his American Express card, a bill I paid every month. Would having a hissy fit at him rather than pretending I didn’t see that charge on the statement have changed his belief that he was entitled to do this? I had a friend who found out about her husband’s mistress when she was paying the credit card bills and found a charge for a ruby pendant. It was almost Valentine’s Day and she waited—in vain, it turned out—for the diamond and ruby trinket to be handed to her. When confronted, he not only admitted to the mistress and the jewellery, he was very clear that he felt entitled to have both a wife and a mistress and wasn’t going to give either of them up. Nothing she could have said or done would have changed that sense of entitlement and he was genuinely surprised when she moved out of the house and started divorce proceedings.

I have rifled through the vaults of my memory, extracting events here and there, wondering how a different choice on my part would have changed the outcome. In particular I have pulled out memories regarding mistakes I believed I made with my children, poor choices, unthinking decisions, harsh words or punishments and, for the most part, have come to the conclusion that my part in these events wasn’t as big or as decisive or as significant as I initially believed. I was a player in a drama, a drama with other players, each with his or her own agenda and script and we each played our own parts, seeking our own ends, despite being in proximity to and nominally interacting with others. Too many times my words and deeds, which I once believed to be pivotal have, on brutally honest review, been ineffective spouting off, words on the wind that were heeded little or not at all. Their paths were set, their objectives were goads, and I was merely an opposition to be overcome or ignored.

Several years ago I read a sobering article about the influence we have on our children and how, once they reach the age to be relatively independent (once they have started school) how their peers actually have an increasingly greater influence on them than we, the parents and family have. The older they get the more children seek the approval and acceptance of their peers over and above our approval. We have much less power and influence than we think we have.

And so I began thinking about my mother and realized how right that was. Despite her brutal and controlling ways, I was more interested in the approbation of my peers than hers. My boyfriend’s approval meant more than hers. I rejected her tastes, her politics, her beliefs, and much of her values. I was too afraid of her to be outwardly rebellious, but there was nothing she could have said or done that would bring me to share an outlook I found repugnant. Yes, I wanted her approval and love but I didn’t want them at the cost of being untrue to myself, even at that young age. I wanted her to approve of me and who I was, rather than approve of how good I was at pretending to be the person she wanted me to be. I wanted her to love me, the essential person, not the child star or academic powerhouse or teen beauty queen. And so I realized that the direct power and control my mother had over me was fleeting, lasting only as long as I allowed it.

I began to wonder what, then, would I want from my mother if I could see her again. Would I want an apology for the cruelties and indignities she had heaped on me over the years? Would I want contrition, enlightenment such that she knew she was wrong? Would I want her wallowing in guilt for her years of brutality and neglect? Begging forgiveness? Declarations of love and devotion and respect? A heartfelt, tear-stained reconciliation? As I envisioned each of these scenarios I soon came to realize that not one of these were within the realm of possibility, even if she were still alive today. Because, regardless of my wants and needs, she would still remain herself, ploughing forward on her own set of tracks, bound for her own destination, regardless of what I brought to the table.

It was then that I realized what I wanted was not something from her but something for her. I wanted her to drink from the cup prepared by her own hand, to experience that which she created and set in motion. Not the events themselves, mind you—I would not wish those events on anyone, not even her—but the emotions, the feelings, the fears and the despair, the pain and the sense of futility and hopelessness, the narrow focus and gut-wrenching grit needed to climb out of the pit of depression she had cast me into and the dogged determination of therapy, reliving every horrifying moment in detail, complete with the mindless pain of loss after loss after contrived and carefully orchestrated loss.

I would want for her an abundance of empathy, enough to last her for eternity.

What is it you would want?

I didn’t have a mother

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.

¹ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mother

² Steinem, Gloria. http://www.womensmediacenter.com/feature/entry/mother-as-a-verb