Mother Anger
You lose your mother twice : the first time when you are born, the second when she dies.
“As the daughter of a narcissistic mother, I barely survived – I mean psychologically.”
This is the first sentence of a text I wrote in my journal, more than 20 years ago. As I revive it here to open this piece about my mother, I recall the pain in each of the words. But there is also something more. I cannot but feel the cruelty and the brutality of the message they want to deliver. What do they really mean ? Is this statement still alive in me ? If not, am I ready to forget about them, erase them and deny the power of the experience they hold ? These were the words of the young woman I was. These are the words of a person trapped inside the enmeshment and the narrative of a toxic mother lineage. They are part of a poignant stacks of sepia-toned photos that could be lying in an antique shop: signifiers with lost significance.
Over the last years, specially here on Medicine of the Soul, I have rendered quite openly, sometimes brutally, some of the stories (and the myths) that I was born into. I have also tried, to analyse to the best of my ability, how psychological deprivations and different types of abuse, specially incest, can affect the body, the mind, and the soul, generation after generation. How physical, mental, psychological injuries invade and pervert the whole family system, beyond ourselves, beyond time and space. How our whole universe can be contaminated by non-integrated, still very active, powerful energies.
I used to blame my mother. To be honest, I still do sometimes… Even if I try hard not to, truth is we don't come from nowhere. At times, I hated her. I know better now; by hating her, the energy created by that sentiment, only bonded me harder to her. I was not letting go. As I consequence, I only hated myself.
Often, when with her, even on the phone, at one point, I still need to disconnect. Like an electrical appliance, I am shutting down on OFF. I recognise the emergency - the urge - to get out of my body. You see, for long, my body was not a safe place to be in. My mother has this atrocious capacity of invading, disowning, possessing everything and everyone that goes close to her. If you don't not watch out, and it is very easy to do so because she is so charming, she will get in your head and soon after, eat your brain. One night, I had a terrible dream. She had shape-shifted into a leech: a huge warm worm sucking on something or was it someone, thirsty not for blood, but for love and attention.
The only way to save a few crumbs of sanity has always been to extract myself mentally and also physically from her grasp. Unfortunately, it was only to land into more crazy and more dangerous situations. I understood much later that even by cutting off or by extracting myself, I was collaborating with the perverted system I was born in and raised into, preserving it, only to repeat. I was merely operating inside the status-quo, feeding the Monster.
As the author and therapist Kelly McDaniel describes in her eye-opening book “Mother Hunger”1, (you know now where I got the inspiration for the title of this piece), if for whatever reason your mother was not ready to be a mother, you will always carry the ambivalence, the fear, and the anger that she felt. Her response to your needs and her physical and mental presence have probably been very inadequate. Maybe you don’t have a clear memory of that past time, but your body knows. The body is good in remembering things. If this is what happened to you, as it happened to me, if essential elements of maternal care were not there, you have an attachment injury. While reading the book, I had on several occasions to take a deep breath - it was powerful and hard to recognize oneself in it. But I have a solid and open heart and I know now how to take care of myself. For my own sake and sanity, I have integrated the idea that whatever happened to me does not define me. My mother may have done things that harmed me, but she could not do better. She was desperate. She was in pain. A person carrying such a heavy burden cannot do good. A person with unfinished business, of anger and abuse, frustration and loss, cannot act freely, in harmony or with love. Sometimes, I pitied her - but it is such a horrible thing to feel pity for someone. No, what I needed to do, was to give her back what is hers. I needed to acknowledge the wrong without blame. Not to punish her— that is someone else’s job. Not to forgive her, this is also someone else’s job. Acknowledge what happened, in order to render my own justice and restore my own balance.
For many years, I could not really understand what was the matter with my mother. Why she was always angry ? Why was she unable to see me ? Would she ever be able to look into my eyes with care, love or tenderness ? You see, a mother's gaze is the ultimate sign of affection, a child's first mirror. It is through the mother’s eyes that a child suddenly becomes aware of their own existence. Her eyes on me would have allowed me to carry out such wonders and the first of them all: to love myself. It would also have persuaded me that I could be loved. Well loved. Like stars in the sky, like lighthouses in the ocean, the eyes of my mother would have enlightened my explorations, they would have directed me towards truly loving beings and protected me from toxic stories and tyrants. But how can I blame her, for not having laid her beautiful green eyes on me more often ? Today, even at 78, she is still devastated by the fear of abandonment.
I always thought I was the daughter of a narcissistic mother. I am not.
I always thought I was the daughter of a mother who was narcissistic. She is not.
That changes everything.
Of course, she has what is commonly called a personality with narcissistic disorder(s), a form of grandiosity, constant self-centred ideas, an over-inflated ego….but isn’t this the modern diagnosis of pain ? She is the result of a very troubled line of (recent) ancestors. Women who abandoned their children. Men who abused their children. Women who were humiliated. Mothers who in their turn humiliated their children. Aggressive, omnipotent, violent fathers. War. Poverty. Patriarchy. Misogyny. Violence. Incest… On top of it all, as if this was not enough (but probably this explains that) in my family tree, men have the curious tendency to disappear. They vanish in thin air: we lose track of them. They die young. They leave. They are killed. They migrate. They are not born.
I always thought I was the daughter of a narcissistic mother; I am just the descendant of violence. Condemned to look, yet at the same time deprived of sight, I lived in a complex pitiless trap, that looked like a double golden cage. Generation after generation, women have sacrificed the well-being of their children while tending to their male partners. Patriarchy induces systemic misogyny. Misogyny overrides the protective maternal instinct. It is a merry-go-round of its own kind. Women compensate by behaving like those in power, they offend the more vulnerable.
Am I still injured ? Am I still infected with Mother Anger?
“We carry one another’s pain so deeply, the women in my family. It is like an extra organ, a broken chamber of our hearts that none of us knows how to make work, blocking the normal things that other people’s hearts do.” Lisa Donovan
My mother always camouflaged behind a radiant and beautiful face; she was the Greek version of the Italian Bella figura2. She had something of a heroine. She was enduring events and challenges, seizing all problems and events, as shields. Trapped in her early childhood trauma, she was the victim of a mother who was unable to love. History repeating itself. My mother was abandoned. Her mother was abandoned. The mother of the mother of the mother, like the babushka dolls, have done the same. Indefinitely. In many ways, I was abandoned to. The legacy of abandonment has been transmitted generation after generation. It has left us hungry for love. Needy people who most of the time behave like vampires. My mother was longing for the love she never received during her early years. So did I. I was deprived of the basic maternal warmth and care I needed to grow a healthy body. I made sense of it, when I became a mother myself. Motherhood made me feel a ferocious pain growling inside my heart. I cannot prevent myself thinking that one day, my daughter will write something like this - about her own mother - about me! After all, I am made of all this too. With my own shortages, my own disabilities, my own lacks and my mistakes. As I am trying to do better, I carry a lot of shame and guilt. Even working on that, almost every day, I still feel it. It is really hard sometimes.
Resonance of toxicity has paved my way and though I am now quite awake and aware of the mechanisms, I also know it is under my skin. Like a devastating, deadly infection…
I am, like many others, raised by a mother who was unable to provide security or protection. Gabor Mate3 repeats it over and over again: if essential elements of maternal nurturance and protection were missing, as a child, you cannot just stop loving your mother or cut the bond to her. This is not the first thing you chose to do, specially when you are small and vulnerable. It is too dangerous. Without a home, without a mother, even a dysfunctional one, you die. What you do instead is that you attend to her. You try to make her love you. Even as an infant, you know what is best: you need to preserve the relationship. It is engrained in you; it is a matter of life and death at this point. And just like that, you think you are unlovable. Just like that you learn other skills. And just like that, you abandon yourself. You don’t learn to love yourself. History repeated itself…
We are made of so many vibrant beautiful threads weaving into each other to make a gigantic piece of art. Often, the pattern goes into hypnotic spirals. Sometimes, it is more linear. But when you turn the piece upside down and look the work from the other side, it is a real mess! Chaos. Entanglement is the very fabric of our beings, of our lineages, of our environments. Transgenerational work, this incessant obsession of mine, the work I am relentlessly committed to do, for myself and for others, asks me to walk down the spirals (or the lineages or whatever we want to call it), and slowly, let go of things: unburden. There was a time when I thought the work was to untie the knots. I was wrong. It is not. The work is to look at them, and detach yourself from them. Let go of them. Yes, it is difficult. Yes, it is demanding. I must admit : I am still not there! I am trying. It requires to find inside of myself an incredible stillness. It requires from me to be able - at last - to express my gratitude to the source. To the Mother. To the one who channelled my soul down here. It requires an endless descent, deeper and deeper. It never stops. Brace myself to face more, endure the darkness, the fog, the shit - eventually I will be able to feel more and more the touch of light, the source of love…and be who I am meant to be, who we are all meant to be: Alchemists.
Eventually, I will change the relational field with my mother. Eventually, Love will make my life bigger.
https://kellymcdanieltherapy.com/a-short-description-of-mother-hunger/
https://www.lagazzettaitaliana.com/history-culture/9151-la-bella-figura-the-italian-way
https://drgabormate.com
Oh Sage! Again such beautiful writing and I will respond with a longer writing. My body & soul~self resonates on a very deep level. Thank you for this soulful birthday present. mO
Sage, all your articles express and carry such deep healing, but this one resonated even more deeply. I felt layers of wounds come clear. What you said about the ambivalence and the anger of the mother not on board with having a child. What you said about the loving gaze, or the lack of it. Yes, 100%. I finally could feel that.
On another note, I feel like I just received an initiation into the Aries-Libra nodal shift washed in by the Cancer New Moon. What you wrote felt like it's song.