Mother’s Day for the motherless
This one is for those of us for whom this day is a trigger
It’s almost a year since I went no contact. The last time I saw my mother, she was cruel to me in ways that brought me back to childhood. She was angry that I, a grown woman in her 40s, dared to contradict her and not do and behave the way she wanted me to. She glared at me with an intense hatred that would make little V curl into herself and whimper. I’d spend the next few days clawing for her love, scurrying around the house helping her clean, doing whatever it was she wanted.
When it happened a year ago, I felt my insides tremble & that familiar fear seized my throat. I shook it off quickly, realizing I’m not that little girl I was. (This is healing in action!) I am grown, decades out of her house, and I don’t have to tolerate that treatment. I am finally in a place where I know that I deserve better. I deserve a mother who is tender and kind and wants to work on having a loving relationship where we respect and honor one another. I have never had this relationship with her. She’s incapable of it. So I went no contact.
It doesn’t feel good writing this. I am not comforted by the decision and I don’t feel free. I have gone no contact numerous times. All those times, that lasted as long as a few weeks to over a year, I’d long for her and imagine the day when we’d reunite. She’d cry as she apologized, pleading for my forgiveness, and she’d promise to be a better mother, a loving, trustworthy one. We would collapse into one another, whispering “I miss you, I’m sorry” over and over. I have let go of these illusions.
I’ve been reading Stephanie Foo’s memoir What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, stopping often to process, scribble in my journal and cry. Recently, I read Chapter 33 in the middle of the night, while my wife snored lightly next to me. In the chapter, Foo writes about estrangement expert Kristina Scharp, a professor at the University of Washington. In an NPR interview, Scharp said: “I think that’s one of the myths of estrangement, that estrangement is a complete cutoff, or it’s final. Really, estrangement is more of a continuum, where you can either be more or less estranged, and actually people often go through multiple times of trying to create distance before they’re able to maintain a level of distance that’s right for them.”
Foo was introduced to Scharp’s work through her friend Catherine Saint Louis, “a brilliant reporter and editor” who has also done tons of research on the topic, fueled by her estrangement from her Haitian father who terrorized her during her childhood. Saint Louis interviewed 60+ people who were also estranged from their parents. When Foo asked whether estrangement had made these people freer or happier, Saint Louis responded: “I don’t think it brought anyone joy. It didn’t make people happy to have to do it. It was just necessary. I think you just have to figure out if it’s necessary for you. I can’t tell you if you should do it or shouldn’t. All I can say is that if you do do it, you’re not alone.”
Later, when Foo goes no contact with her dad, she writes: “Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did. The silence now is not so different from the lonely holidays I endured over the years, an extension of the months of silence we’d exchanged but more total. There is one major difference: I don’t have to work on earning his love anymore..”
I sobbed into my pillow when I finished the chapter. I felt seen and I felt crushed. In many ways I’d accepted that estrangement was necessary, but I realized that night that I’d kept a tiny flame of hope. Like a pilot light in a gas oven, it was small but it was there, ready to roar if my mother gave any indication of wanting to reconnect. I knew I had to extinguish that flame because holding on to hope wasn’t/still isn’t healthy for me.
I had to let go and doing that was devastating. Still is sometimes.
Recently my aunt invited me to her house for St Patrick’s Day dinner, a ritual my grandmother started decades ago when she worked with Irish people and discovered that corned beef was unusually inexpensive around that time. It’s a custom my aunt took over years ago, when grandma grew too old to keep it going.
I was getting dressed to head over (my aunt moved to the same town a year after we did), when she texted to tell me my mother had shown up to surprise her. (Bless my titi for being a surrogate mother and knowing she had to warn me.) I decided not to attend, texting my aunt: “she’s just not a safe person for me.” I cried for most of the day, and was distraught for days.
Still, I know I made the right decision. And I’m working on being more tender with myself when I’m feeling raw about the estrangement. This is an ongoing process. I don’t know if there will ever come a time where I won’t be triggered by her. And I don’t know if I’ll ever come to terms. But I do know now not to expect to feel free or joyful. I know that this is something I have to navigate. And I know that every time I’m confronted by the possibility of being around her, I will have to be gentle with myself and I will always err on the side of taking care of myself first and foremost.
I can’t consider her feelings about it. I will not sacrifice myself at her feet. I deserve better. Period.
I had a huge epiphany on the page recently. My mother went back to being a Jehovah’s Witness when my second mom Millie died. They had excommunicated her when they found out she was with a woman. Punishment entailed denying her of their love and community. To get back into their graces, over thirty years later, she had to prove herself worthy and dedicated to living her life the way they deem correct and worthy of their forgiveness.
That cult speaks my mother’s love language.
All my life my mother has punished me when I don’t live my life or behave the way she wants, by denying me her love.
I’ve written at length about my lifelong antagonistic relationship with my mother. When I left her house at 13, never to return, I did it to save my own life. I didn’t have the language or emotional maturity to know that then, but I am certain of it now, 34 years after I escaped.
My memoir is about how being unmothered has shaped every relationship I’ve had, especially the one I have with myself. I’ve treated myself terribly over the years and broke my own heart so many times and in so many ways, by repeating that “love me please love me” cycle I learned from that my mother.
I acted out the trauma I was experiencing by becoming violent starting in first grade. No one bothered to ask me what happened to you? This still confuses me. How did no one think to investigate why I was fighting several times a week? I was only six, seven, eight years old!
My book starts with a letter addressed to her, Peleona, the little girl I was who took her rage and grief out on the world. You didn’t have to do much to spark my wrath. A side eye, a giggle or comment under the breath, made me clench my jaw and ball my hands into fists so tight, they left crescent moons on my palm for days. A rapid punching, hair pulling, biting whatever made contact with my mouth, throw down fight followed not long after.
I’ve been really hard on that little girl. It’s through this healing work I’ve done, including therapy and writing into the wound, that I’ve started to be more gentle with her. She was just a nena who learned early that she had to fight to survive.
I know now that it was her who ultimately saved me.
Dear Peleona,
Round 1
When I imagine you, you are five, up in the plum tree in the backyard. Your legs are scratched up & bruised from climbing that tree. You pick at a scab and watch as ma tends to her garden. The sunflowers grow so tall and heavy, she has to tie them to the gate to keep them upright.
Ma treats her plants with a tenderness you envy. You grab a still green plum off a branch and bite into it. You let the bitterness sting your tongue.
For years I’ve been writing essays around Mother’s Day for those of us who are unmothered, under-mothered and somehow triggered by this day. I posted the essay “Unmothered on this Mother’s Day” on my blog back in 2015, & it was later picked up by Raising Mothers.
I’ve long made an effort to make something beautiful of this ache. I launched the Writing the Mother Wound Movement back in 2018, and have partnered with Longreads and NYU’s Latinx Project to publish mother wound essays.
I can’t count the times strangers have told me this work is a lighthouse for them. Just this past weekend, at a writing conference at Rutgers University, where I facilitated a master craft talk/class on essay writing, a young writer said: “Your essay in Longreads saved my life.”
This year feels different. I feel solid in my decision to go no contact. I have done a lot of work on healing, and have been working hard on the epistle to my mother called In Search of My Mother’s Garden. This work has made me discover a few things:
1. I was trying to write a story I hadn’t processed or healed enough to write. In other words, I was skipping some steps/was trying to do the impossible.
2. Healing this wound doesn’t mean I will be unaffected. It does not mean I will one day wake up completely free. I won’t wake up one day, all sunshine and rainbows. Healing isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. As Foo writes: “Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
So on days when I’m feeling sad or lonely or acutely aware of this hole in my life where my mother should be, I will remind myself that this is what healing looks like. I will be especially kind. I will put my hands in the earth, walk under the trees, I will tell my wife to hold me.
I’m putting all of the pain, rage, frustration and angst into my epistolary memoir. I am also putting all the love, so much real, gentle, fierce love.
“Over and over, the answer is the same, isn’t it? Love, love, love. The salve and the cure. In order to become a better person, I had to do something utterly unintuitive. I had to reject the idea that punishing myself would solve the problem. I had to find the love.” ~Stephanie Foo
I’m continuing to grow as a mother, knowing that breaking the cycle didn’t stop when my daughter turned 18 & went to college. Keeping that cycle broken will last a lifetime. And I’m okay with that. I am rewarded by a beautiful relationship with my daughter where she knows I have her back always, and I know she has mine.
And I will continue to do this writing the mother wound work. I will edit and publish an anthology. Watch me!
And on June 3rd I am facilitating a donation-based one-day, online Writing the Mother Wound Intensive from 12pm-3pm ET. (West Coast people: I chose this time with you in mind!)
For more info or to register, email writingourlivesworkshop@gmail.com. The suggested donation is $75. You can pay more or less. I won’t turn anyone away.
(If you’re interested in sponsoring and/or somehow supporting this work, email writingourlivesworkshop@gmail.com)
Until then, be good to yourselves. Remember: you are loved, lovable and worthy of good things.
And if you need support or resources in your journey, I gotchu.
I love you. Hold fast.
Vanessa
All of this.
This was beautiful and a bit healing. My wound originates from a different direction. I am asking some big questions and reading other people’s experiences with pain and grief is helpful. I send my love to you. You stay teaching us. Abrazo amiga.