I am my mother's legacy
and all that that means--
I read a quote today in Ruby Warrington’s book about childless women that gave me pause. It is as follows:
“I saw how broken my mother was, and I didn’t agree with her assertion that her personal sacrifice should be seen as a gift/blessing to me. That rationale didn’t make sense. I didn’t want that ‘gift’. It creates an unwanted expectation that I should meet her needs. I would have preferred for her to find fulfillment through personal exploration and growth.”
~anonymous, age forty one, single.
This quote settles in me, deep within my bones, penetrating to my soul.
And I think about my mother: My beautifully altruistic, self-less, self-abandoning mother.
Can you abandon your self when you’re taught not to have one? When there is no established self?
I think about this, as I speak with a friend who realizes that she never was taught to have a sense of self, worth giving love and praise to, exploring and nurturing. She is starting a healing journey to rectify that in middle age. To finally heal.
This was also my mother—the child of abuse and abandonment and trauma.
She was taught this, from the adults, the parents, in her life who were supposed to love her.
She learned it very well. So that, years later, she would marry young and stay with a husband who didn’t provide, emotionally or financially, for her. She would make her children her world, because it gave her a sense of purpose.
She was never taught that she was worth it, but she knew that others were, her husband and children, because they were still there. They didn’t abandon her.
I remember once—though I don’t understand the rest of the context of the conversation—my mother telling me:
“Don’t you think that I also once had dreams?” She meant that she wished her life didn’t turn out this way. She had hoped for more, for better, when she was young, like I was, at that time.
I do believe she didn’t want her life to be as it turned out, but I also believe she didn’t know how to advocate for herself. She was never taught how to do so.
That is a dangerous place for a woman to be. Because she learns that her position in life is constant service to others, always self-sacrifice, self-abandonment, and praised for that, how much she disappears into others.
My mother was a force, to have withstood all she went to and to still have heart and generosity and the love that she had, for her kids, her students, her friends.
Still, my mother’s story to me is heart-breaking, because she was so traumatized and hurt, damaged by life, and yet was never able to personally explore and grow. Always burying herself in service to others.
It gave her purpose. I was also like this for many years, absorbed those lessons and her example well.
Women too often are taught that—divorced from relationships or service to others—we have no purpose.
I both look back on my mother’s amazing and altruistic maternal love as one in which I reaped the blessings of, and also—
I know that I also feel that this is-in part-why I have paused at the idea of having my own children. I don’t know if I could/would want to give of myself that completely, so my self disappeared. I disappeared into other relationships and service to others in the past, so easily and all-consumingly, even without kids. how much more with them?
Too often women have kids because we then have a purpose, as we are taught in this culture. Someone who will love us, whom we can love, a reason for being and existing, when our own autonomous living is not enough for us.
I loved my mother, deeply. I miss her so.
And still, though I benefitted immensely from the amazingly rich maternal love, I also felt guilty for growing up, being autonomous, moving away to college, getting married, moving across the world.
Because I wasn’t sure if she would be okay. I felt responsible for her.
We had a co-dependent relationship but I also think that even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, earlier in life, I knew-I knew- that I was her reason for being. And when I was removed from her life, I wondered how her mental and emotional health would be affected. With a verbally abusive, distant, emotionally absent alcoholic father, I wondered what joy would remain in her life, when I was gone.
I understand this. I understood it then.
And still, it’s a hell of a lot of pressure.
I felt guilty to grow up and to become autonomous in any way. She did her best not to put that on me, but still, I knew, I knew, she would not be okay. Not really.
Because as the quote above suggests, disappearing so completely into devoted service into your family, a spouse or children, makes it so when they are no longer in your life, you don’t know what to do, or how to function.
I so wished that after my father passed, my mother would be able to get the mental health help that she needed, to heal, to finally focus on herself.
She was not able to do so. She didn’t know how. I think she didn’t know how to focus on herself and her healing. She didn’t think herself worth it; she had a lifetime of others who reaffirmed that inner notion, an immense wounded inner child. And, of course, she was traumatized…from many different events in her life, the latter of which—my father’s suicide—being the final big blow.
If women were not like this, and instead taught this way, to focus on self, I often wonder what would we could be/do in this world.
Beauvior’s ‘The Second Sex’ argument is still valid: in our patriarchal society, women are taught to serve others and disappear into that. Men as the subject, women as the object to follow.
I am glad that this is changing. I see amazing progress in the younger generation.
And yet, there are so many of us—myself included—that have so much un-learning to do, of what we witnessed and absorbed from the women models in our lives. All the emotional inheritance and the intergenerational trauma.
I realize that I am my mother’s legacy. And it’s not because I have achieved all that I have—a terminal degree, becoming a doctor/a professor, world traveler, living and serving in a different culture, but—
I am my mother’s legacy because I was able to do what she wanted so much for me to be able to do, that she could not to, which I had to learn to do (and unlearn from her example)—
To prioritize myself.
I am (finally) finding myself in the personal fulfillment and exploration of self and inner growth that she was never able to do.