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by Karin Mackay Feb 2008
“Any woman who does not have their mothers support during the crucial transitional stage of becoming a mother is bound to feel vulnerable, insecure and have a sensation of missing out on something whether it be real or imagined. They do not have the benefit of experiencing first hand the ancient wisdom that is surreptitiously stored in their mother’s actions, verbalizations or body language that has been passed down from thousands of generations before.
If the link to the birth mother is broken, a woman can feel a profound sense of loss, loneliness and isolation particularly when they experience any major life events such as marriage, the birth of their first child, their first child stating school or any other time when sharing joy and pain intimately is needed. Motherless daughters just don’t have that someone who supposedly loves them unconditionally that they can lean on. Even if the daughter has a surrogate mother who loves them dearly it is not the same as the bond between blood mother and daughter. The new mother will find her way but this is often at great personal cost as she may also be left with feelings of not being good enough, low self esteem, being over motherly and feeling overwhelmed when she has no back up support that many other mothers may take for granted.
One characteristic is that unmothered mothers are often very independent and have difficulty asking for help as help has possibly never been there for them in any reliable way. They may display outward strength but you can bet that inside they are very soft and vulnerable
The unmothered mother cannot intimately watch and know from one who has “done it before” even if she would have wanted to birth and mother very differently “her way” and change it all anyway. She still doesn’t have that knowing which is not spoken of or taught or read about in books but is absorbed through watching, feeling and sensing. She feels she has missed out on crucial information, even if she hasn’t, and will attempt to make up for it by wishing to be the perfect mother………., all loving, kind, caring, the cleanest, the best cook, and produce children that prove that she is doing all the right things or by reading everything she can get her hands on about “how to mother” and so on and so forth…….. She may even seek out other mothers, grandmothers, aunts of blood or in name only, to help her with her task. And she will find answers, and she will be able to be the almost perfect mother for a while but there will be a gap, a missing piece to the puzzle, a hole in her heart. She may feel “if a mother can’t love me then who can?”
She will want to be the perfect mother so she does not repeat the same mistakes with her own children, hoping desperately to break the cycle but there is an innate danger to her personal wellbeing because she carries the burden of the generation before her and the one that is to follow. She trying to be the bridge that closes the gap and creates connections and this may prove to be an arduous journey. In her perfect mother quest she is doomed to fail as she can never live up to her own expectations.
One day she may wake up and realize that to make up for her own lack of mothering she is mothering everyone else – her husband, her friends, her children and even acquaintances but she is not mothering herself. She has tried to gain love through mothering but cannot find it until she learns to mother herself. This can be an extremely painful realization because no matter which way she looks whether it is up the line to her elders or down the line to her children and grandchildren she has been the mother. This may be especially so if her mother was there physically but unable to be there emotionally, a double blow really because she is playing the mother but is really the daughter and may have had this relationship with her mother from a very young age.
The unmothered mother needs to accept that there is no such thing as the perfect mother, that she is loveable and worthwhile and deserves to be mothered herself, to be respected. She needs to find a way to heal the pain and the grief so that she can find within herself the nurturance to love herself, give time to herself and follow her own passions. She can do this by seeking other understanding women to share her story with respectfully, who will listen to and acknowledge her challenges without judgment. She needs to find another way to access her stored memory of the grandmother and mother memory through other mothers or older women to learn that they are probably not doing such a bad job of mothering their children after all and to just relax a little.
She needs to learn to give herself time to grieve every so often the loss of never having a mother, for the pain will never go away completely; but she also needs to learn that there is no need to carry your pain like a flag that identifies you. It may be time to move on from that so you can experience life more fully wholly and to allow yourself guiltless pleasure in filling your own cup to the brim with the amazing love and acceptance that you have been giving to others but now need to give to yourself.
And finally to appreciate your women friends that truly accept you as you really are as they are precious indeed.”
Toni Morrison, in an interview [with Bill Moyers in 1989]:
“There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. . . . Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other.’ The children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humor. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. . . . Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me -– whatever that was -– but somebody actually needed me to be that. . . . If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
othersThere is a core aspect of a woman’s psyche called the Mother Complex. This complex includes the Ambivilent Mother, Collapsed Mother, and the Unmothered Mother. They represent the internalized versions of our own mother and the cultural ideas of motherhood. We each have an unbroken chain of what it means to be a mother/woman within us. Part of our process as women is to identify, embrace, and claim our own individual female nature.
Feelings when your needs are satisfied
AFFECTIONATE compassionate friendly loving open hearted sympathetic tender warm CONFIDENT empowered open proud safe secure ENGAGED INSPIRED
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EXCITED amazed animated ardent aroused astonished dazzled eager energetic enthusiastic giddy invigorated lively passionate surprised vibrant EXHILARATED GRATEFUL |
JOYFUL amused delighted glad happy jubilant pleased tickled PEACEFUL REFRESHED
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Feelings when your needs are not satisfied
AFRAID apprehensive dread foreboding frightened mistrustful panicked petrified scared suspicious terrified wary worried ANNOYED AVERSION CONFUSED
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DISCONNECTED DISQUIET EMBARRASSED FATIGUE
alienated aloof apathetic bored cold detached distant distracted indifferent numb removed uninterested withdrawn |
PAIN agony anguished bereaved devastated grief heartbroken hurt lonely miserable regretful remorseful SAD TENSE VULNERABLE YEARNING |
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I’ve created a new category for posts with some connection to Asperger’s. I wanted to include this unusual article from the Guardian G2 today, which takes Asperger’s Girls as its subject.
Here’s a small piece of the article, about the experience of Robyn Steward, one young woman with Asperger’s:
“Steward, though, is full of hope for the future. She understands her condition and is adamant that it gives her some advantages. Some women, she says, are just too focused on contact with other people and on the ins and outs of human relationships. “Relationships are important, but to be a really self-reliant individual you need to be the sort of person who can cope alone. I think autism gives you that self-reliance, and I think it makes me strong – it helps you know your own limits.””
“Some women, she says, are just too focused on contact with other people and on the ins and outs of human relationships” … Mmm. I think I know what she means… I wish I didn’t sometimes.
Oh dear. I’m not looking forward to collecting Lola B from school and telling her that the Tawny Owl chick that she had insisted we name “Twiglet” has died. I expect wails of grief. The Wildlife Centre rang to tell me. His body condition was very poor, apparently. On a scale of 1-10, it was only 1. Indicative of not being fed for a while, suggesting that either his parents had stopped feeding him days ago and were concentrating on other chicks, or that he had fallen out of the nest days earlier and we had not been there to spot him. Perhaps we should have left him where he was, and let Nature take its ugly course.
I’ve been impressed recently by Lola B’s ability to find creative ways of dealing with difficult things. Next to our little nuclear family and Wolf, the most important thing in her life is Diamond, her pony. Lola B is, despite her best efforts, growing out of Diamond and, sooner, rather than later, she will have to give Diamond up to a smaller rider. The mere mention of Life-after-Diamond used to reduce her to tears, but after a recent episode, we made some progress. She wanted me to name a date, insisting that it would make it easier for her. I understood that it made everything more certain: it was a known horror that had to be faced rather than an uncertain, unimaginable happening that might creep up at any moment. The known rather than the unknown.
Then, only hours later, she came down stairs, having talked to a friend on Messenger. She looked much happier, composed. She had worked out a solution. Her friend also has a pony, and is also growing taller. They agreed that they would both move on together so that they could share their grief …
Just one of the many times when I’ve looked at my children in amazement and wondered how they seem to be about thirty years ahead of me.
There it was, sitting as still as a statue on a woodpile. I whispered to myself. It’s an owl. And, slowly, slowly I edged closer to the bundle of fluff. A bundle of fluff about the same size and shape as a hairy coconut, but lighter. Any moment I expected it to fly away, so I took photographs with every cautious step, but it let me get closer and closer until I was less than a metre away.
It was a baby owl, its beak tucked forlornly into the soft young feathers on its chest. Only around the end of its hunched up wings were there any adult feathers at all. Perched on top of the logs it was a sitting duck, if ever there was such a thing. Wolf had been hot on my heels and was inquisitively sniffing around, wondering what had caught my attention.
I ran back to the house, dragging Wolf with me, hearing my husband’s car on the gravel, and together we returned to look at the owl baby again. It hadn’t moved. Occasionally it opened its circles of eyes, but mostly it kept them tightly scrunched closed as if it wanted this nightmare to go away.
We ransacked our bird books, looking for pictures of baby owls, and thought it most likely to be a baby tawny owl or perhaps a small owl. Both were likely to be found in our neck of the woods. I rang the RSPCA for some advice. They said that we should try to return the chick to its nest. Impossible because the only potential nesting place we could see was a natural hollow directly above the woodpile in the candle-covered chestnut tree, and impossible to reach. We were advised to “contain” the bird so that one of their collection officers could take it to their wild life sanctuary in the next county. Together we returned to the bird, my husband holding a wicker basket he had found.
The bird stayed still, like a Furbie with flat batteries. With a beating heart, I closed both hands around the bird. It struggled, but only half heartedly, and seemed to fall over when I placed it in a corner of the basket. We retreated out of the sun to the cool of a shed, optimistically left the owl with a small bowl of water, and covered him with a dark tea towel and sought more advice.
This time, the bird safely contained, we were asked if we could take it to a local RSPCA office about half an hour’s drive away. By now the baby owl had placed its bottom over the bowl of water, but otherwise was much as before. With the basket on my husband’s lap, and Wolf constrained by his lead in the boot of the car, we drove to the centre which houses all the abandoned dogs and cats that the RSPCA is seeking to re-home.
Tom, the bird man, took our owl away to a chilled room where he prised the young bird’s talons off the wicker basket and, wrapped in a towel, placed the bird in a plastic basket, the sort in which you transport small cats and dogs. With a syringe he fed the grateful bird drops of water. The beak opened and I saw the strange angular folded tongue before the beak closed and the water was swallowed. Later it would be offered small dead rodents to tempt it to eat. If the bird survived the night it will be taken tomorrow to the wild life centre from where it will, when it has grown adult feathers, be released into the wild.
Owl babies are pushed out of the nest when the mother and father cannot manage to feed them all. It was probably Nature’s way that this baby owl should die, leaving fewer mouths to feed. There are about 600 pairs of tawny owls in our county, a small enough number for it to make it worth while trying to save this baby.
Our daughters are away this weekend, staying with their grandparents. They wanted to know all about the owl and are anxious to know whether it will survive. We remembered how both of them had grown up on the story of Owl Babies, of three baby owls whose mother has left them. The two younger owls, Percy and Bill, are very anxious that she may never come back, repeating over and over again “I want my Mummy”. Sarah, the oldest owl, seeks to reassure them that Mummies always come back. It was a favourite book, with beautiful illustrations. This Mummy Owl came back, of course. The ending was different for our real little owl. When his Mummy came back it was more of as case of “Percy, you’re one mouth too many too feed. I cannot be doing with catching mice and birds for you any more,” and a big push out of the hollow in the tree. All his inadequate wings could do was to break his fall.
Tawny Owl Chicks
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