My Mother/Myself

 

 

 

I wish my mother were alive so that I could tell her I am sorry for not meeting her emotional needs.  I had not looked so in-depth to the Mother/Daughter relationship as I have these weeks. I knew all about my Primal Wound, what I had not really looked at was my mother’s unmet needs.

Sometimes I wish I could do the Mother/Mothering thing all over again, of course, like most of us.  But I have my adult children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to think of now I know more.  I must make a gentle journey into this.    

Through Dana Da Ponte, I read this:

“.. at any moment a mother can be a woman who has met her emotional needs and therefore able to extend love or she can be a mother who is reacting from unmet emotional needs and subsequently her behavior, words and actions are rooted in FEAR (my caps) and she is seeking love.”

There I am.  I sought love and acceptance.  This is a huge part of the Primal Wound and leaves one with a type of emotional emptiness where we look to something or someone else to try to fill.  We become emotionally triggered at the perceived sign of rejection of any sort.    Such as me, project that fear.  As I have blogged from before, I have found that I made most decisions from a place of FEAR. 

If we as daughters and mothers do not have these things clouding our emotional lives, we can respond, emotionally, in full loving and calm ways.  Part of my legacy is growing up with parents who were generations above me, they were older/midlife, when they adopted me.  The legacy of feminine oppression was large and yet, mother had stood out in that she taught school (for 43 years), and I had one of the few working mothers in our town.    I am aware, now, she found ways to fulfill her emotional needs and I think I was one of the two children she had to fill that space.  (My father had 13, 10 from a previous marriage and he was older than mother).  She had, in her own life, learned to silence her own needs, and in turn, I was taught to silence my own mothering needs. 

A quick quiz soon began to unravel some of what I did not know, could not have known, but know now.  I have mothering, grand mothering, great-grand mothering to do.  Goddess help me. 

©Carol Desjarlais 12.13.22