Mother I

“If you want me to accept you for being you,” she tells Penelope, “you have to accept me for being me.” - One Day at a Time, Season 3, Episode 8 , Mami Dearest

We ache for our mothers.  Here we are, grandmothers and still aching, like a child, for those women who were our all.  I have a baby picture of me, after three months of having a mother ( given away by birth mother in the first few months of life with her).  It is so dear.  Mother said she was standing just off camera and I was watching her.  Look at that look.  Is that not adoration?  And then, there is the ache for my birthmother for nearly 60 years.  It was always there.  My soul knew that loss as much as any loss.  Imagine what it did to that tiny baby who ended up weighing 11 pounds at six months, who had a flat head from laying in a crib in a foundling home, who had rickets from cow's milk, who was wasting away in want of a mother.  And then, consider this, my adoptive mother lived to be 94 years old.  My birth mother got to know me before she slipped into two years of memory loss.  But, she held my face in her hands and looked closely in my eyes and said, "I thought you had died.  I did not think I would ever see you again.  Where did you get those green eyes?"  And, I laughed and said ( because I am the only one of thirteen who has green eyes), "Yes, mother, where DID I get them?  lol  We laughed and loved.  How fortunate I am to have had two mothers.  How I long for more time with both of them.



Did my adoptive mother and I butt heads?  Of course.  Did I feel like I could never do enough for her?  Of course!  Did she snap at me?  Of course!  Did I snap at her?  Yes.  And she would cry if I showed any intonation of sharpness and the guilt was huge.  I do not get how anyone can hate their mothers, even long into elderly life.  I just cannot imagine not loving my mother(s).  My birth mother threw me away and yet I had no animosity towards her.  Perhaps it is because my adoptive mother was simply the most loving, loyal, awesome mother ever.  And, I never ever had any doubt she loved me.  She was the gift my birth mother gave to me by casting me aside.  Not:  I am the first baby she totally gave away.  I am not sorry for it nor ever have been.
Do I miss the things they are missing in my life?  Of course! Our mothers can be our greatest cheerleaders on this mine field of life.  Our mothers, full of perfection and flaws, were the womb of all of our deepest longings and continue to be as long as we live.  That first life-giver, our entrance to this world, our eternal connection to God.  We value our fathers, yes, but they are extemporaneous to that holiest connection.  We had to work harder to get our father's acceptance and approval and sometimes we spend a lifetime of trying, and, sometimes, failing.  Our connection to them seems to me more earthly.   Of course, they had to earn our respect, our loyalty, our connections to them, or not.  But, mother, it is a spiritual connection like no other.  
  
No matter how flawed, we owe our mothers our very breath. They are the vessels in the act of sacrifice beyond all sacrifices.  I do not understand how earthly matters can keep anyone from that holy honoring of her.  So much is written about mother-daughter relationships and the struggles that that relationship can have.  One can be so flawed when it comes to honoring our Creative Vessel.  When we deny, rebuke, abandon that connection, we are abandoning the gift that Creator made for us.  It is so easy to do so, for so many.  For so many, it is evident how we are our mothers in so many ways.  Sometimes the ones we are most like are the ones we can not see past flaws to accept that they, in their walk on life, have reasons to be flawed.  We cannot know their lives any more than we can know a strangers, until we mature and see how actions and reactions they had to life, to us, were imprinted from something they had to, or did, conquer or not.  

Our mothers are the key to our identity.  If we do not find that in them, we are abandoning more than just the woman.  She is the DNA marking of our very generational history and the history of every generation of ours that follows.  Even if we were abandoned, adopted, given away; even if we do not know our birth mothers; we are them.  Our actions and reactions are theirs. Our belief structures are theirs.   Our feelings of loss and loss evolve from our relationship with our birth mothers.  Unrelated to how 'good' our next mother is, replacement babies, replacement mothers, will never heal the primal wound of not having the soul vessel.  Our feelings of guilt are imprinted by our birth mothers.  Losing her in any way leaves us with feelings of not being good enough.  It does not matter if you were minutes, hours, months old, the psyche is wounded.  to not know one's birthmother is to have a huge gap in identity.  Ergo, to abandon ones mother carries that same huge gap.  Everything is flawed.  Everything is merely an imitation and in that imitation is great great psyche turmoil whether we deny it or not.  Our soul will long for that DNA connection forever, sometimes.  Even if we deny our birth mother, there is still psyche damage that we may or may not avoid, deny or resent.  If we chose to abandon our birth mother, we will always, always, always need and spend a lifetime of trying to fill that need with alternate people, places and things.  Refusing our birth mother, refusing to understand our birth mother, will always lead to anxiety, depression, and all the things that go with it.  In fact, we may tell the story of WHY she is not worthy, and, spiritually, it may be absolutely NOT the reason we, ourselves, are flawed.  The cyclical ways of things will usually mean, how our mother nurtured us, or not,, will be how she was nurtured.  How broken we are, she was, because of our relationship.  By abandoning her, we abandon ourselves.  It is our choice, not hers, to walk away from her.  We can pretend she is not hurt, or that we are not, but, spiritually, it is a huge wound.  She offered to give up her life in order for you to be born, the same as you, if you birthed children, would give up your life to have a child.  Even mothers who throw away their children went through it and it is why there is such brokenness when the relationship is allowed to go sour.  Yes, mother was the adult, but, how broken was she already?  If she was broken, we are broken.  If we hurt her, we are hurt.  The easiest person to hurt, is mother.  Hurt mothers hurt daughters in some way.  Hurt daughters hurt mother, in some way.  It is symbiotic.  

Only healing relationships with a birth mother, will ever give us a chance to heal ourselves.  There is the rub for those who do not ever get to know their birth mothers.  Maturation of the soul means we, who do not know them, have come to some soulful relationship with the unknown.  Maturation of a daughter who does know her mother is the only way to have spiritual balance.  Only doing the courageous hard work can a daughter find ways to forgive a mother for what we do not know.  

Being 'found' meant that I was given a later opportunity to know my birth mother.  I already had a story about my birth mother:  I had long forgiven her for abandoning me because my adoptive mother was an angel, seriously, in that broken world of mine.  I knew she had given me a gift.  When we met, there was no grievance towards her.  So, when we met, I got to know her story, as much as one can, and I saw in her ME.  The similarities were huge.  In those few months of gestation were the imprints.  I was her.  She was me.  Knowing this, I sunk into her arms and heard that heartbeat that was the last memories of her before memory.  

And so it goes.  If we had daughters, they are us and we are them.  Understanding ourselves is to understand our daughters.  I, along with many women I know, have been abandoned by our own daughters/children.  Knowing the imprinting, we know that there are reasons.  Even though two of my daughters are adopted, I have to know that they were imprinted by their own mothers.  I see it.  I know it.  I can only do what a mother can do.  The same as with any daughter of any mother, if we cannot know the imprint, it will become evident later no matter how beloved they are.  We are flawed.  They are flawed.  In that is the crux of it.  Sometimes we have to forgive for what we do not know.  

Our stories of ourselves, the stories we have of our mothers, are as unknown as the place we came from before we were born.  All we can know is that we were imprinted as they were before us.  All we can do is whatever we can do to try to contemplate the why of things and heal that in ourselves.

God bless the mothers and the daughters, one of the most chaotic, difficult relationships we may ever encounter.  Creator bless us if they were wounded, for surely, in some way, we were.  Creator bless our children who we, in all our imperfections, we tried to mother.  Creator give us the capacity to delve into that great Mother-Love, and understand and love in spite of all our flaws... and theirs. Sometimes it might take more courage than anyone feels we have, but it will take that same kind of courage we had on the birthing table.  Sometimes its means that we must stand to the side and let them work through their own healing so we can have ours.

©Carol Desjarlais 5.7.19