Every mother has been a daughter and every daughter is likely to become a mother. According to Jung, every mother contains her daughter and every daughter contains her mother; every woman extends to the past through her mother and to the future through her daughter (Jung et al., 1969).
Please note that this is what I know, through research, about Mother Daughter Relationships. I was lucky to have had two mothers: A birth Mother who gave me (along with most of my 12 siblings) away/up/rejected/abandoned and a humble beautiful older mother who raised me. This may be a tough post for some to read. Mother Daughter Relationships can be so complex. Demeter is goddess of agriculture (grain) and her story is all about mother daughter relationships.
Demeter is a Sicilian goddess who first created grains and spread it to all of mankind. This included the making of bread. Something I learned from my mother who learned from her mother and I still make it just like they did, with recipes and cooking appliances changing, of course. Demeter is symbolic of mother-daughter relationships that still apply to today.
Demeter’s beloved daughter, Persephone was said to be abducted by Hades and taken, as wife, away from her mother. For nine days, Demeter was said to have searched the whole earth for her, as mother’s would and thus, her care for agriculture diminished and crops failed and famine enveloped the whole world because of this. The sungod, Helios finally told Demeter what had happened to her daughter and |eus had to intervene to get Persephone and Demeter together. It was then that Persephone told her mother that she loved her husband and wanted to stay with him. A bargain was made, eventually, and one third of the year, Persephone would stay with her husband and for 9 months, Persephone would stay with her mother. While Persephone was with her mother, the crops would thrive. For three months, the world would be desolate and set to fallow.
This myth has a great deal to say about mother daughter relationships. Emotional issues are passed down as well as all the positive ones. There many unresolved (unresolvable) issues between mothers and daughters. Family origins, since the beginning of time, have passed down relationships, intimacy issues, conflict resolutions, boundary issues, family patterns and challenges.
It is said, by professionals, that every woman carries desires, ideas, disappointments, struggles and resolutions from one generation to another, inside her psyche. Old teachings of every kind are passed down. We, women, are carriers of conditioning. And, yes, traumas are passed down as well.
A mother-daughter relationship is intense and often conflicting. I had never run into feeling such as what has happened with covid ideologies. My fear for my daughter and granddaughter led me to want her to believe as I do, about covid. Her fear for government control was great, as well. I had to learn to let her do what she felt important and that our ideologies would not mix. It could have caused a huge sense of rejection on my part and her need to be autonomous in her ideas were being threatened. We had to agree to disagree and I had to step down from my mothering and allow to happen what happens; no judgments, no disappointment, no fear because we both felt strongly and our relationship has been too perfect for this to cause negativity.
Any of us mothers, and/or daughters, can carry fear of abandonment/rejection, and choose not to acknowledge that we simply see things differently for different reasons. We could sweep things under the carpet in idealization, or we can accept that our daughters are going to be here long after us and the world is changing. Separating, emotionally, from our daughters can either make or break the relationship and projecting a problem beyond the two can give rise to more problems. Bottom line: I do not live my daughter’s future and she has not lived my past. For either of us to stop believing what we do is false living.
Every one of us women began life by searching
the eyes of our mother. What we saw
there is firmly imprinted on us. When
Demeter’s daughter was taken from her, Demeter felt rage and grief and stopped
being nurturing and earth was condemned to barrenness and loss.
Fraiberg (Fraiberg et al., 1975) points out that “in every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening”. These ghosts represent unresolved emotional issues from the parents’ past and get into the parent-child relationship. The child thus seems to be inhabited by an ancestor, like a castle haunted by a ghost, and cannot exist outside the parental projection.
It is a sobering reality that we try to keep our daughters from maturing beyond what they matured to.
“Of Woman Born”, Adrienne Rich claims “motherhood” is a social institution anchored in the nuclear heterosexual couple that separates women from one another. The term “mother” itself is, therefore, a problematic cultural construction that needs to be redefined according to women’s own understanding and experience. For Rich, a mother is “a woman who is devoted to other women.”
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” - Khalil Gibran
It is hard to be a mother and not push our agendas. We do not always know what is best. We should not judge others by our own ideas of mothering. We all need space, understanding, compassion.
Adrienne Rich: The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy, the loss of women to each other.
Have you had a woman who has nurtured you and allowed you to be who you want to be, encouraged you in a non-judgemental way, who has been your cheerleader; who might have been a surrogate ‘motherer’?
While we are celebrating harvests, do you have someone you see in a daughter-way? Now is the time to be grateful and appreciative.
https://www.health-foundations.com/blog/2015/8/3/10-common-myths-of-motherhood
©Carol Desjarlais 9.21.21
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