Healing Motherhood

July 10, 2014

I have been thinking a lot about the logo my 13 year old goddaughter made me for this project.  I told her I wanted it to have something to do with healing, but I left her to her own imagination.  What she designed is a symbol for healing motherhood.

 

 

 



 

In my situation healing began with the process of healing my relationship with my mother.  Sometimes I can recognize the hard work it took on both our parts and other times I wonder if it was just age, maturity.  But I know better, I know too many women who are still confused by their negative feelings: betrayal, the sense of not being seen nor nurtured by the one person whose job it was.  And then these same women went off and had children of their own and had no idea how to nurture. Yet, so many of them did it and raised strong wise women and men.    Why do mothers get such bad raps?  Why is motherhood criticized so terribly?  And why does society blame mothers for so much wrong in the world?  Did you know that the educational level of the mother is a strong predictor for the economic success of the child?  This is a commonly used indicator in global policy making and resource sharing. I’m not going to answer these questions or describe how awful I believe this thinking is, I’ll save it for another day, but it is a strong indication on how much society places on the shoulders of mothers.

Our society sets up women to fail.  Women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  A woman can’t get welfare help if she has children and goes back to school, but it is her educational level that indicates the economic success of those children.  But if she doesn’t go to school and is collecting welfare she has to attend some program, not college, for 20 hours a week and put 2 year olds into day care.

My mother raised seven children with an alcoholic husband who died when she was 52 and 5 of those children were teenagers.  She was an extremely smart woman and a valued professional flutist.  So how was she supposed to nurture all of us alone?  I forgive her.  I forgive her for not supporting me to draw upon my natural abilities to love and nurture and to raise my own child. I forgive her for giving into societal pressures and forcing my hand into giving my baby up.  I do.  And I believe that forgiveness is the first step to healing motherhood.  We need to accept what is and forgive.  And we need to accept the fact that forgiving does not mean forgetting or not feeling.   We have to name the losses and betrayal.  We need to express the feelings and to forgive.

I believe telling our stories in creative ways is a form processing and healing.  It is a way of naming our feelings, naming our truths and finding our way through them, not held trapped by them.  And it provides us with ways to share with others who have experienced similar things, who may have found healthy strategies for living with pain and challenges, or who can just understand.  Telling stories of motherhood, declaring the societal contradictions, the no win situations, and the lows and the highs helps everyone to make peace with motherhood; to heal motherhood.

Thus, my project is an opportunity to allow women to tell their stories, to give voice to the truths about being an original mother.  It is place to continue the healing process, to begin to forgive, to begin to educate the public, and to reclaim our motherhood.