As I have come through this and realized how twisted and wrong everything was, what I believe is that each of the children was scooped out in a way, and reformed in the image of the thing my mother needed to see reflected back to her. I always sound so awful when I post about my mom. In many ways, she was a loving mother.
I think that I think about it in this way: I am still who I always was. That is the genetic piece, I suppose. But for me, the question is one of having been hurt often enough, or betrayed often enough, into sifting every experience and every response through a filter comprised of a set of beliefs having something to do with a feeling from my mother of contempt, or of intense hate, and with rage, and self-centeredness and the will to power. A will to dominate, and a kind of blindness. No concept that the living child was not a doll, and should not be thrown to the floor or kicked or made to cry. I post again and again about my mother (maybe) having reflected to her children negative, and not the positive, grandiosity most mothers reflect to their newborns and to their children throughout their lives.
It has to do with a story someone told me once about a mother who told her child she stiffened up when she held her, so she propped her bottle and didn't hold her. It has to do with the way that same mother behaved when the daughter had her first child. It has to do with the way Copa describes her mother condemning Copa's son because Copa fell while running after him. It has something to do with celebration of female rites when a daughter gives birth, or adopts a child and is raising him and the celebration and warmth and support just isn't there.
My mother did not, was not able to, celebrate those rites with me, either.
In her defense, I will readily admit that I was never comfortable with my mother, even as an adult. It may be that I am not easy to be close to. I do not trust. There is a barrier, especially where my mother is concerned, and that is all there is to it. It isn't that I don't love her. I do actually, very much. I have learned never to trust her. What a rotten thing to say, I know.
But that is the feel of it.
It has to do with how a child would have been raised, by a mother who felt in such a way that her children are uncomfortable with her to that degree, as adults. Maybe, our mothers were poorly mothered, themselves. I think it is more than that, though. I was loved, but I was hurt and objectified, too. The other wounds, the wounds surrounding the births of my children, those happened from one adult woman to another. That sacred space that should exist between the mother...I don't know. Between the mother, truly celebrating what it is to hold and cherish and raise your baby and the promise in all of it, and her daughter as she prepares to give birth and become a mother, herself ~ for me, that was empty. It was D H mom who taught me to hold and celebrate my babies, and who celebrated those mother to daughter rites with me. The grieving that seems so normal in healthy families was all twisted in the most incredible ways in my family of origin, when my father died. My mother's glee at being the only one left to tell the story, once the last cousin had died...does this stuff even happen anywhere else?!?
That breakage, that place, that emptiness that displays itself so blatantly once we are adults and continues to color our relationships to our mothers for all of our lives, that is what the difference was, between our mothers and healthy mothers, I think. It is as though they had nothing to pattern on, nothing to give us.
So, the answer would be that the interests we might all have pursued had our families of origin been healthier have been devoted instead to trying to make sense of why no one seems to honestly love us. I think this is true for all the sibs. We are like interchangeable pieces, in a way. Bargaining chips almost, in a game of the mother's devising that we just don't get the rules for.
Each of us is forever off balance.
The mother, from what I've read online, seems determined to prevent the sibs ever coming together, fomenting jealousy where and as she can even after the children are adults.
On Monday, I read this during my zipping around trying to learn more about what actually did happen to us: Our neural networks will have been developed to focus on survival. Hypervigilence, an empathy so intense it's spooky rather than an awareness of our own feelings, a belief that we don't think or talk or reason well, a perfect inability to trust.
Limiting beliefs regarding our current abilities and potential.
That is the killing thing.
Think how harmfilled a thing it is not to be able to believe we can and not to be able to believe we are entitled to try with our whole hearts.
Think what these mindsets will have meant in our lives.
There are children raised to believe: "Let me win. If I cannot win, let me be brave."
We were raised not to try for ourselves; not to take ourselves or our activities or our hopes seriously. The serious thing in our lives then, as now, was Mother. (Or, whoever our abuser was.) Our sibs picked up on that, of course but so did we, each of us believing the worst about ourselves and each other at the Mother's behest.
To this, I would add a tendency to denigrate past accomplishments. I am forever surprised at how well I have done something. That is a mother-engendered belief system.
That is what I see in my family of origin today, those dirty rotten shunners.
Oh, wait.
I meant pass the salt.
:O)
Cedar
