Letter №01 — On the mother story

Letter №01 — On the mother story.

Dear reader,

There is a particular kind of tired that does not come from doing too much. It comes from carrying something that was never yours to carry, and being told from a young age that this is what love is.

If you grew up in a home where someone — usually a parent, often a mother — was less held than you were old enough to know, you may recognize this tired. It is the tired of having been the small one who had to be big.

In depth psychology there is an old word for what happens then. Parentification. A reversal of who holds whom. The child becomes attuned, perceptive, useful — and learns, without ever being told, that her own need is a problem to be solved quietly.

What this is not.

It is not blame. The mother who could not hold you was almost certainly held badly herself. The line goes back further than either of you can see. Hellinger called it the order of love — that what cannot be metabolized in one generation tries to find a body in the next.

It is not a story to escape. The point is not to leave her behind. The point is to put down what was hers to carry, and to begin to know what is actually yours.

What it asks of you.

The first work is recognition. You cannot mourn what you do not yet see. So we begin slowly: what did you learn to do early, that other children did not have to learn? What feeling did you learn not to feel, because the room could not hold it?

The second work is grief. Not for what she did — for what she could not. Grief is the door. Without it, the body holds what the mind has put away.

The third work — which is the work of years, not weeks — is differentiation. You begin to know what is yours. You begin to choose, on purpose, what you carry forward and what you put down.

Why I am writing this.

Because this work is hard to do alone. Because the mother wound is often the wound that the wound-tender carries — and the women who are most drawn to depth work are often the women who carried the most early. Because the work of recognizing yourself in this letter is already the work beginning.

If anything in this lands, I would say: notice where it landed in the body. That is the place where the work wants to begin.

With care,

Deborah

The good mother is not the one who never failed. She is the one who, after failing, could be reached again. — D.W. Winnicott (paraphrased)