Mother Five-Me, collage by Licia Berry, 2008
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. ~Spanish Proverb
I thought I might open the window into my process a bit today by sharing with you my recognition that I needed a Mother in my life, and how that led me to the Sacred Feminine.
My biological mother was a physically beautiful, petite, perceptive woman with sharp eyes. My early memories of her indicate a very young person who didn’t really know quite how to be a mother, as she was just a child herself (she was 18 when I was born). She did what I suppose she thought she should do; her own relationship with her mother was not an easy one, and so mothering did not come so naturally. When I try to feel her in my early life, I don’t feel much there. There are shadows, a presence around a corner or in the other room. It is as if there was an empty space where she should be.
I do remember some times when she would sit and color with me, which I enjoyed. It made me feel closer to her, and I felt the presence of her own inner little girl sitting with me at the table as we chose our crayons. There was some innocence still in her. We were equals, two young girls at play.
But I don’t remember feeling the safety of a loving wise elder, a guiding hand. I don’t remember feeling loved in the sense of being seen and accepted for who I was. My mother speaks of loving me in the same breath as cherishing me like a doll that she dressed up in special clothes.
As I came into my 5th year, I think I started to understand how warped things were in my family; my kindergarten picture shows a jaded and angry exterior. But I still hoped for her to see me, to love me. I watched her beauty and wanted to be like her, although I never was. Her thin, dark allure matched the image that was on the tv and in the magazines. So this was how to be a woman.
Things got crazier in my house when we moved to a rural house in the country outside of Goldsboro. I think that’s when the drinking started to get out of hand. Perhaps there wasn’t much else to do there. My father would go to work each day, and my mother would put her long tresses in pigtails and work on the garden, deepening her already nut brown skin. As she tended the squash, cucumbers and tomatoes, my sister and I would play outside with the neighbor girls, chasing their chickens or running in the tobacco field behind the house. Perhaps the drinking was to fill a loneliness, or to assuage her fears that my father might be sleeping with other women (if my information is correct, this is indeed when he started to dally outside of the marriage). Whatever the reason, this is when I remember having a conscious sense of losing my mother.
I was 7. I remember having a vision of her, the sweet if unskilled mother in her pigtails, being seized by some aliens (I must have seen some sci-fi movie on the telly). Her face is frightened; she is being taken away against her will. She is then shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll, and flushed down the toilet in my parent’s bathroom. In her place, an evil alien with a carefully arranged face of my mother steps in to our family.
This is where I start to feel my mother is my enemy. She was judging and critical of my body, my thoughts, my mind. I remember feeling afraid of her barbs, stepping delicately around her anger (until I was much older and able to argue with her). My parents would drink to excess, almost every if not every night. When I had to get ready for school in the morning, she would sometimes still be passed out in the bed. Sometimes this worked out in my favor; once I wore a slinky dress I’d found that was inappropriate for my age (I was 9), but made me feel like those playboy girls in my father’s magazines. When the bus dropped me off at home that day, she was livid when she saw what I was wearing. I don’t believe I ever wore that dress again.
Mother Three-Sheila, collage by Licia Berry 2006
Time went on; it became apparent that I was the reason for all of my mother’s anger because it was always me that got the blame. Not one to step into her own inner wisdom, as she continued to stay with this man who sexually abused me, her and other women, she lashed out at me in her own frustration and despair. Alternately pulling the “I’m the mother, I don’t owe you an explanation” with crying desperately and asking me for advice (“Licia, You’re so wise), I was a very confused adult child. Needless to say, all of the surviving I did until I left home to go to school got in the way of cultivating peace within myself, and recognition of my own inner feminine.
Years of therapy, inner work and education helped me to see that what happened to me as a child was not my fault, that there were familial patterns my mother played out, and for whatever reasons, she did not have the strength that I had to break those cycles and claim her life as her own. Years before I had children, I decided that I would choose not to have any rather than pass on the sickness that was passed on to me. Being awake in the face of folks who don’t want to be is a hard choice; there are consequences, such as being rejected and losing folks you very much want to have in your life. To this day, she cannot go there with me.
This forced me to look elsewhere for mothering. Sometimes in the form of women who wanted my power, sometimes in the form of women who just gravitated towards me, sometimes in the form of women who projected their own mother issues onto me. And I projected my share of mother issues, too. Some very messy relationships with women ensued over my years. I realized I didn’t know how to be in healthy relationships with women; my mother was my model, and she was distant, manipulative, angry and unconscious, all with a pretty face. I did not want to play that out any longer in my life. Finally, desperate for a mother, I turned inward.
(to be continued)
Thanks for sharing this, Licia. I can relate a lot!
Wow … I think you and I signed up for the same “school of hard knocks” courses in the afterlife. I was going to point you to a blogpost I wrote a few years ago to share my experience, but I re-read it and realized it’s *crap*. A bunch of New Age mumbo jumbo rationalizing what I felt, when I could’ve put it forth succinctly instead. I’m much clearer on my experience now and less wary of it. But, needless to say, I share(d) your desire for mothering, and too, spent time projecting my needs on others, and consequently having others project their needs on me. I was a magnet for dysfunction.
Most of my earlier friendships and some relationships were based on that need, and so consequently I became like an “emotional begger” always scrabbling for the tiny scraps of attention left by others, small morsels of often spoiled emotional loam left aside or dropped unintentionally. I often wonder if I ended up with the life I got because it was my time to realize the Goddess, or did I realize the Goddess because of my life, you know? What came first? And I am only too accutely aware that the tiniest difference in my decisions could’ve led to a life that was very much like my mother’s –> I could’ve become her.
One thing she did give me is a set of brass ones, if you know what I mean. And so I’ve never lacked for nerve in reaching for what I want, which ironically, led me to the Goddess also, and led me to my life as it is now, which fits me much better than the one my mother led in her day. I went through a period of shedding old relationships that no longer fit, like skin, and because I was deeply invested in them emotionally, the shedding was painful and long.
Subsequently, however, and like you, I don’t have much room for my biological mother in my heart. It’s like she is a stranger or someone who was mean to me when I was little, someone who left me unprotected and exposed to great dangers again and again. As I grew, I had to turn away from her because she knew no other way, and I grew into my worthiness and found self-respect. It makes me sad, but mostly because she’s getting old quickly (concrete around the heart will do that), and I worry about who will be there for her when she is infirm. I spent a lot of time in a convalescent home with my grandmother, and if my mother ends up in one, she’ll want friends, for certain.
Yes, it’s like we signed up for the same course, isn’t it?
Love,
D~
Oh Donna, it sure has felt like we were cut from similar cloth! I treasure you and your regard for yourself…your seeking and honesty are such valued traits to me.
I hear you about your mom…my mother is still an active alcoholic (and chose to remarry my father after 25 or so years divorced). SO the door to relationship with her was slammed in my face, despite years of trying to work with her to heal, to get her to listen, to get her to therapy. She doesn’t want to go there with me.
I feel sad, too…and I know there is a part of me that is missing. I do the best I can with Great Mother (which I will write some more about here); I feel that there may not be a physical woman in this world that can mother me the way I need to be mothered…but I could be projecting.
Hello again … the closest I have come to finding what I want on this planet is when I go to see the Holy Mothers, Ammachi (Mata Amritanandamayi Ma, the Hugging Saint) and Amma (Sri Karunamayi, Mother of Compassion). They are fully realized in the goddess, realize it in themselves, and quite literally take the job of world motherhood very seriously.
When you come face to face with Amma, even just for those few moments in an individual blessing, she is completely focused on you. You bring her your problems, whatever it takes. She’s mothered me spiritually, but also surprisingly literally and in the pragmatic realm. She’s never let me down, and so I will always consider myself a daughter of the Goddess incarnate in She.
There is a level of spiritual *healing* in her touch, as well, that goes beyond the obvious, and is a big part of why I’m able to navigate this world, this city, this job, my life.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve no plans to don a Sari and go scampering into the Eastern World. I am very anchored here in the West, and couldn’t bear giving up television …
But still, when we take what we want from the experience, and leave the rest for those who prefer it, it is quite rewarding, healing, and cleansing.
What a wonderful string, Licia. We should talk on the phone, don’t you think?
Love,
D~
Licia, thank you so much for sharing your path. I certainly believe it is through sharing like this, we can transform everything and make changes happen.
I choose these words
…
“the strength to break unwanted cycles and claim our life as our own.”
Licia, thank you for sharing something so personal. This is an amazing blog. I followed your link from Facebook.
I decided to cut ties with my mother(?)some years ago. She was abusive towards me both emotinally and physically. Even to this day, she has never apologised for the way she treated me, and more or less told me to get over it.
I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but I will give a little background information about my relationship with her.
I am the eldest of eight, and was treated as a proxy adult. From a VERY young age I had to take on the tasks and responsabilities she should have automatically as a parent and adult, and my mostly absent father. I was never shown/given any love or affection from her unless when in company. At the age of nine when I asked her why she kept having more children when my father was hardly ever around, I was slapped hard across the face, so hard infact, I couldn’t hear for a couple of hours afterwards -I still have hearing problems in one ear- and was called a trouble making bitch! She screamed this in my face!
Years on, she started to criticize me in front of my daughter, or would make unpleasant comments about me when she was around and I decided enough was enough!
I do not want my daughter thinking you put up with that type of behaviour from people, just because you happen to be related to them. I make sure that every single day and several times a day, she hears me say the three most important words a mother can say, and mean, to her child….I LOVE YOU….
It wasn’t easy at first, to walk away, but I had to. Now, three years later, despite still feeling hurt from time to time, I find it aches it a little less. I can go for longer without thinking about her and her abuse. The feelings and memories of course will never go away. But I feel a sense of relief and as if a weight has been lifted.
My family continue to be dysfunctional, squabbling and game playing amongst themselves. I am the only one that has had a child, and who is in a long term relationship. I have one sister, who like me broke away from home in her early teens, who is close to me and who I have regular contact with. She is now leaving the country as she knows I plan to. But through her, I know that my mother(?) still plays games with people and I am so pleased I walked away!
Siân.x
I was recently listening to an audio program by Robert Ohotto who set me CLEAR on one thing. How do you know when your Soul Contract with someone is done? Basically he said when the other person can’t or doesn’t want to heal then it isn’t their time to do so. It isn’t in their Soul Contract or it just isn’t the right time.
What I think we need to realize is that it isn’t our job to heal these crazed women. (Sorry for the judgment!) We are so accustomed to want to ‘fix it all’, from our dysfunctional backgrounds that we have a hard time recognizing that it isn’t our responsibility to heal these women. That has been a huge empowerment piece for me this year.
They may choose. So do I!! I’m getting clearer, healthier and more empowered by the day!! GODDESS, it feel FANTASTIC to nurture and accept myself, giving myself as much love as I can!!!!!!!!
THANK YOU DE~LICIA AND FRIENDS!
BLESSINGS,
Gina
Licia. My maternal heart wraps around your inner child and squeezes her tightly. What an open and vulnerable revelation you have shared here. Thank you so much for this. My mother was just here for a month, and all of my mother issues with her were right there. It’s interesting after two years of not seeing her. I’m lucky with her because we can talk about things, and process things. But I have still had mother issues with friends, what an interesting insight you have provided here about that. I completely relate.
Thinking very much about where to go with Claire and the Dark Mother after my latest post. I’m starting to have her visions, and so will write them. Oh I love you Licia, sweet inspiration with a darkened breath has come from you. I revel in it.
Dear Lisa, Donna, Maru, Sian, Gina, Catherine…thank you SO much for commenting. It is always a heart-expander to hear other women’s journeys about their mothers, and the other mothers in their lives.
I wonder sometimes…Will we ever feel that ease and comfort with other women when we have been so hurt by the one from whence we came? Can we find a way to make peace with her flawed nature as we do our own (but not feel we must save her, or sacrifice our own well being in order to be in relationship)? Will we heal ourselves and find our way authentically in the world of women? It is an ongoing process for me.