A mother’s love – part 2

So, last month it felt like I left you very abruptly.

I want to apologise if this caused you any discomfort or frustration.  It was not my intention to end in what felt like the middle of my story, and neither was it my design to leave you on a cliff hanger.

What I realised though, as I was writing and writing, and writing some more and the word count just kept climbing, was that I seemed to have opened up a bit of a flood gate and that the words were pouring out of me at a rate which might end up as a whole book if I didn’t find a place to stop and take a pause.

My intention in this writing has always been to do it in bitesize chunks, and I was starting to feel like I was starting with a chunk so big that it would be unchewable, let alone digestible. So rather than outface myself and you, I decided the best course of action would be to pause and let what I had already written settle, before serving up the next course.

And so here I am today, to pick up where we left off.

Now, let me see… Ahh, yes…  That’s where we were – My husband was just about to tell me exactly what he thought of me for having been such a neglectful wife and daughter, all the reasons that I should be hanging my head in shame, and all my failings that I somehow had to make up for…

“Your mum was really chatty on the way home” he said, seemingly quite light-heartedly.

Okay, so this wasn’t what I was expecting. Had she said something which had really offended him?  Or could it be that my mum had revealed some deep dark secret that I had long since buried in the past and left behind me? Oh f*ck! This could be even worse than I had imagined.

Isn’t it amazing how many thoughts can pass through your mind in a fraction of a second!

“Yeah?” I responded casually, trying not to give the game away that I was actually really quite worried. Lord knows what she had said.  It can’t have been good, but I knew very well how to play this easy-going communication game.  With my conflict radar turned up to full and my nerve endings humming with the tension of the conversation, I prompted “What did she have to say?”

“Mostly she was talking about the wedding and how much she’d enjoyed it, but then she said a couple of weird things.” He paused again, waiting for me to counter.

This was all starting to feel a bit drawn out, why was this revelation taking so long?  Were we in some kind of game where he was waiting for me to trip myself up?  Did he think I knew something that I blatantly didn’t?

“Okay?..”

“Yeah, at first she was talking about me and ****** (our eldest child, who shall remain anonymous).  Apparently she didn’t realise that we could get on so well.  And then she moved on to you…”

He paused.  I gave him an inquisitive look.

“Erm, well yeah… She said that she’d enjoyed watching the two of you having fun together too, and that she didn’t know you could both dance so well.  Apparently she didn’t know that you two get on as well as you do either.  And then she said something really weird.”

God this was like pulling teeth.  I just wanted him to get to the punch line.  I was aware it wasn’t going to be a funny one.  I was braced, I could take it!

“Erm, yeah, I mean, what she actually said was…” another pause.

“Get to the point man!” my taught jaw muscles were screaming inwardly, under the strain of keeping my mouth shut.

“She said, I guess that’s because I don’t really know my daughter.  I never really wanted to.  I had wished she’d be still-born.”

Now, I have told this part of my story to a number of people, and virtually all of them have been horrified to hear the words that came out of my mother’s mouth.  Without exception, they have expected me to have been absolutely blown apart by this little revelation.

I can’t say I blame people for expecting this, to be honest; we are told after all, that our mothers are supposed to be the people who love us the most.  So, for many people this news might shake the very foundations on which they had built their whole life, if it were to come their way.

I don’t want to rush past the potential impact that reading this might have had on you, particularly if it has been a negative one.  I’d like, for the record, to acknowledge that what I have just said is truly shocking.  If you find yourself reeling a little upon seeing it, please do take a moment to look after yourself.  Give yourself a minute, take a break from reading, breathe, remind yourself of where you are by having a quick look around your surroundings, and reassure yourself that what was said, was not said to you.

You see, humans have this amazing set of apparatus inside their computational hardware, called mirror neurons.  When we see someone else, or hear of someone else having a particular experience, our neurological hardware is capable of making us feel something of what we might feel, as if the experience had happened directly to us.  This system supports us to smoothly navigate relational connection.  It helps us generate empathy for the other, and encourages us to offer compassion and support to others when they are in need.

If I rush on with the rest of the story immediately, I might be in danger of leaving you with a bunch of feelings that you don’t have chance to process.  Perhaps you cannot imagine your mother ever saying something like this about you, or perhaps my experience gets close to something you yourself could imagine happening.  Either way, it can be quite disquieting to hear such things.  So, check in with yourself right now.  What are you feeling?  Give yourself a moment to acknowledge this; just make a mental note and be curious about it, without developing it into a whole story…

My ex-husband is one of the people who couldn’t quite imagine what it might be like to be in my shoes, so he was projecting all sorts of stuff onto me, and was not expecting what came next at all.  No wonder he was so tied up in knots about how to deliver the information.

“Yeah, that sounds about right!” I returned.

I must admit that, with hindsight, and viewing this conversation through the lens of other people that I know, this reaction does seem a little unusual. But, when I heard what he had to say, my initial felt response was one of relief.  The tension in my jaw unlocked, my forehead uncreased, my heart rate and breathing rate slowed, and I felt a little laugh bubbling up from my tummy.  If I were to put words to this feeling, they would be “Is that all?”.  I remember having the sense that a part of me had immediately become more solid and grounded; a part, that I hadn’t realised was experiencing turmoil to start off with.  It was a bit weird.

He looked perplexed.

It can be hard, when you have experienced trauma, or been the recipient of abuse or emotional neglect (repeatedly not having your emotional needs met in childhood), for people to get inside of your experience. I was no stranger to this.  So many times, I have been asked to explain myself, when my response or my behaviour has not been what people expect.

For the person who has been on the receiving end of these experiences, they can be left with the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, and people’s reactions to what they think is odd behaviour, tend to reinforce this belief.

I knew the drill! And therefore a lengthy discussion ensued as I tried to explain my position.

The still-born thing was not a totally new revelation for me.  As I was growing up, I was told the story (probably a little too young) that my mother had birthed a child many years before my arrival on this planet, in a pregnancy which had continued to full term.  This child – my brother – did not make it through the birth.  He was still-born.

Being a mum myself, I imagine this was a horrendous experience for my mother.  To add to that, this was in the 1960’s, a time where it was common for women to be expected to suck up this kind of experience, and get on with life.  She had three other children to look after, and no-one who wanted to offer her support, kindness, compassion, or a space to grieve. She was also told at this time, that she would never be able to carry a child alive to full-term, if she were ever to get pregnant again. This was due to a clash in blood types between the growing child and her, which led her body to defend itself as if the growing child were a foreign invader. It’s a relatively common issue, which these days has a very simple intervention to prevent the death of the child, but back then, this was not the case.

Fast forward quite a number of years to 1978, and at the ripe old age of forty-six, she fell pregnant with me.  I was told, that she went through the whole duration of my gestation believing that I would be born dead, despite any signs that I might actually be alive and literally kicking.

My birth was a traumatic one, ending with an emergency caesarean-section. And the days, weeks and months that followed were really tricky for both of us too.

I was desperately ill, and had to undergo a really invasive procedure at the tiny age of six-weeks old, which ultimately saved my life, but left me with a severely compromised immune system. And my mother was psychologically scarred from her previous experiences and found herself unable or unwilling to offer me care. She couldn’t bond with me.

As I grew old enough to understand all of these experiences, my mirror-neurons got to firing and I was left with feelings of total empathy for her.  How horrendous must it have been to go through all of that, I could totally understand why she found things so difficult when I first came along.

But, unfortunately that is not the entirety of the story.  Things didn’t get better as the world kept on turning and time passed.  It is a total myth that time is a healer.

Throughout my whole life, me and my mother had, at best, what could be described as a relationship of necessity.  I was told by the world that mothers love their children unconditionally, a fact which I never questioned. I just thought that love was something really difficult and often painful to experience.

We had an air of business-like civility between us for the vast majority of the time.  She fed, washed and clothed me, and I kept out of her way as much as I could for the rest of the time.  I was always Rachel – no pet names for me.  And she was Mother.  The lack of warmth in my chosen form of address for her, was something which endlessly brought me criticism from the adults surrounding us.

The air that surrounded us as we travelled through life together was filled with punctuation marks.  Our communication wasn’t exactly hostile, but most people decided it would be best not to be caught in the middle of it.

No-one could understand why it was that our relationship was so challenging and often, the blame for this would be laid at my door.  I was a ‘difficult child’, often referred to as strong-willed, precocious, defiant, old beyond my years, and I didn’t suffer fools gladly.

I had spent the whole thirty-five years that I had been walking around on this planet, believing that I was the reason our relationship was so gnarly and grizzled, filled with sharp edges that no-one wanted to get close to.  There was something in the very fabric of my being that made me unlikeable to my own mother; the one person who was supposed to love me unconditionally.  I spent my whole life believing that something was fundamentally wrong with me and that my entire experience of the world was off kilter somehow.

So, when I heard that my mother had used the captive audience in the car on the long journey back to Yorkshire to make this confession, it didn’t actually come as a surprise to me.

The impact was something quite different altogether.  I felt as if a jigsaw piece, which I had been staring directly at for so many years in the jumble of an unfinished puzzle, simply lifted itself out of the chaos and slotted into its rightful place.  My body knew in that moment (my head took a while longer to catch up), that the off kilter feeling I had grown so accustomed to was because of the slanted view of our relationship that I had been given by other people.  Whilst neither one of us could hold full responsibility for how bad things were, only one of us ever did. And now, all of a sudden, the other party was holding up their hand and telling a more rounded version of the story.

I felt my whole system realign itself in that micro-moment, things just felt right all of a sudden.  It would take me quite some time to process all of this, and work out what was happening, but in that moment, I felt more solid and somewhat liberated.

If this is not how you were expecting things to go, you would not be on your own.  What for me feels like a simple matter of facts being imparted, lacking any significant negative emotional intensity, might to some people be earth shattering news that left them feeling totally overwhelmed.

And this, dear reader, demonstrates some of the limitations in our neurological systems.

As a therapist, I have learned that it can be problematic in relationship when we rely solely on our own internal experience as a guide to what is happening.  Just look how incorrectly I was reading my husband’s behaviour, and he was totally off the mark too.

That’s not to say that our internal guidance systems should be totally ignored, but getting curious and talking openly about what is happening for each of you in situations like this, can be much more helpful.

I remember the first time I spoke to a therapist about this experience, and I was moved to tears by the curiosity they extended to me.  They owned the fact that they imagined they would have a totally different response to mine and really wanted to understand how this had impacted me.  I felt seen, understood and not judged, for what I now think was the first time ever.

So please dear reader, if you take anything from reading this instalment of my story, let it be this.  It is infinitely more helpful in relationship to be curious about each other, rather than to think we know what is happening when viewing things through the lens of our own experience.

Thank you for walking with me again today.  If you feel moved to, please do let me know how you found the experience.

And if you feel compelled to join me again on the next leg of this journey, I will see you again next month.

** If you find yourself resonating with any of the content here, and would like some support to work out how you can walk towards a more whole and fulfilled version of life, get in touch.  Email me at rachel@ramblingpsychotherapist.co.uk to book in a discovery call, and let’s see if working together could be supportive for you.