I’ve been watching a lot of films related to motherhood- Pablo Larrain’s Ema, Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. Also, the last film I mentioned on my blog is also about the actions of a mother which makes sense why I thought of it recently.
All of these films show a range of motherhood- the sincerity, the struggle, the failure. Most of these, especially Ema, The Lost Daughter, Nobody Knows also discuss abandonment. In our social narrative, mothers rarely abandon their children. Mothers also don’t necessarily get a wide range of permission to show or discuss what they truly feel regarding their children.
A book I read a few years ago called Mean Mothers which I’d highly recommend to women who are healing through their relationship with their mother that spoke about the taboo of mothers being represented as anything but kind, giving, nurturing. There’s a potential jealous side to a mom/daughter relationship, a destructive side, a cruel side. To not have much exposure to these sides makes it so that abuse within the mother/daughter dynamic is harder to see and therefore the impact is harder to heal.
As children, our moms are like deities. We accept everything they do without a second thought, until we later come to find how imperfect they were because they too are human. We come to realize that they have their own traumas, and that some of them were emotionally immature. As we heal our wounds, we realize that our scars are also their scars.
I used to be very scared of women in particular. Well men, too, for other more overt reasons due to parenting, but I never fully understood why I recoiled around some women and especially older women, I felt unsafe. I felt judged, criticized, surveilled, and I knew to always put myself down and minimize attention lest I seem “threatening” in the least. I didn’t understand why I attracted, and naturally let in women who were very jealous of me, tried to control me in overt and covert ways and tried to destroy me. I didn’t understand why I felt like I was my mother’s mother at times, how she seemed like she was my baby. It made no sense. And so as I peel back layers of this and start to see the true complexity of motherhood, it helps me to understand more of this narrative that has been silenced. But, what could be more dynamic than a mother/baby bond? It is our very first one, all of us have had one, and it is not an easy one.
I think about what my mother must’ve felt or thought when she abandoned me when I was very, very little. In my infancy. I’m lucky in that she did come back for me years later, but those years she wasn’t there for me when I truly needed her the most had a very big impact on my psyche. It had a big impact on my health as well, as babies do better when they get to nurse and also get to attune to their mothers emotionally and physically. When all your can encode in your consciousness when you have no pre-existing memories or thought processes as a baby except that your mom didn’t want you, that becomes the foundation. When the very next one you have with her is that she lost you in the international airport the first time she travelled with you to America when you were three, it raises some questions.
Obviously this is a much bigger topic, and much more complex one, but here are some of my thoughts and hopefully they can conjure up some of your own. It is absolutely essential to see our mothers as who they were, as human, instead of defaulting to the comforting narrative that they were perfect and did nothing wrong. The more we can accept their humanness, the more we can accept our own, and the more we can uncover the repressed emotions that we may have about their actions, their inactions, their mistakes and their effects. If we only accept that they were perfect, we cannot access those emotions and heal.
