I just discovered “the Mother wound”. All children of mothers have them, and all mothers of children inflict them.
Some are worse than others, and there’s “the Father wound, too”, but given that the relationship with the mother is the keystone relationship, the Mother wound is particularly significant.
The Mother Wound is the pain of being a woman passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures. And it includes the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are used to process that pain.
– Bethany Webster in Mother Wound Healing: Why It’s Crucial for Women
I think about my own Mother wound, of course. But the fact that mine resulted mostly from the death of my mother before I formed strong memories of her, I have only sympathy and rosy, golden feelings, since I have no memories of conflict with my mother. She didn’t live long enough to hurt me like she did my sisters. In particular, my oldest one. She didn’t live long enough for me to rebel or talk back or break curfew or runaway. But I often wonder how much different I would be had she lived until I became an adult. And I wonder if I wouldn’t understand my daughter more.
Reading about this theory, what’s more compelling to me, or maybe horrifying, actually, is how my Mother wound has been passed down to my children, my daughter in particular. Again, Bethany Webster:
Mothers may unconsciously project deep rage towards their children in subtle ways. However, the rage really isn’t towards the children. The rage is towards the patriarchal society that requires women to sacrifice and utterly deplete themselves in order to mother a child.
and in another article on the subject:
The mother wound has been around for thousands of years—we see it in ancient stories through the trials of figures like Persephone and Inanna—but it has changed greatly over time. The four fundamental functions of mothering are: to nurture, to protect, to empower, and to initiate. In the ancient legends, archetypal stories show daughters that have been nurtured, protected, and empowered, but denied their initiation or final transformation into womanhood—by their mother or a person representing the mother figure. Think the stepmother in Cinderella, or the queen in Snow White.
– Dr. Oscar Serrallach in Healing the Mother Wound
Anyway, it’s Halloween and the trick or treaters are coming soon and I simply don’t have the headspace right now to write in depth about Mother wound issues with my daughter, how I have absolutely filled the role of stepmother and queen in her life, and how all of those stories flow into the undercurrents feeding the waters of my book.
On a writing mechanics note, I read The Depletion Prompts this morning, a beautiful piece in the New Yorker. David Means starts each paragraph with “Write about…” and then proceeds to write about many things in nuance, but in aggregation, his paragraphs are about his mentally ill sister:
Write about a mother—your mother!—who is so grief-stricken, so in denial, that she sneaks off to the state mental hospital at night to pay your sister a visit.
Sounds like he, too, writes to process his Mother wound.
Tomorrow is November and November means NaNoWriMo and guess what? I just signed up for it. 50,000 words in a month! These posts are about to get a lot more interesting….
Hoping.
Things That Nourished My Writing: October 19 - 31.
FOOD
Serious Pie Vanilla Soft Serve Ice Cream.
FILM
Homeland. I think Claire Danes is great.
LITERARY
The Depletion Prompts by David Means
Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan by Harry S. Ashmore
PLACES
The KEXP Gathering Space. Open, once again.
The Corona Lofts in Pioneer Square. Where we may stay next year when we renovate our house.