To the Mothers that used to hurt

The mother figure has incredibly deep roots into a woman's psyche. The maternal presence is a creative force, the one that starts our identity as women and it is the first proof of life that we meet.

What mothers represent for us, women, is difficult to describe; they start as the single-focused, unique system of support for us. Then, they become a gravitational presence, always there and always ready to display reward or punishment throughout different sets of behaviors.
Later during life, they become something distanced, yet we know that, regardless of physical distance, mother presence is always there, either watching, holding or suffocating us through various emotions we associate this presence with.

Mothers can be kind and gentle. They can be distant nonetheless.
Mothers can be overly protective and suffocating. Or aggressive, violent, abusive.
They can also be too distant, too absent, too withdrawn, too indifferent.
Those of use who have been injured by mothers, we know...that Mothers have the power to love or to destroy. They can grow a seed or they can starve it. They can let their offspring flourish or they can choke their children’s vitality with their own inabilities to simply do better.

No mother is evil or harmful by emotional consent.

That is not a statement by which I condone the totality of harm Mothers exert all over the world. In no way.
That is a statement to strip away all the condemnation we, injured women, use and throw it against the Mothers.
They are not evil by choice. They don’t get abusive because they truly want to. They don’t get indifferent because they expected they would. They don’t shout, yell, withdrawn or criticize because that’s what they pictured they’d be once they become Mothers.
No.

They don’t resort to alcohol or substance abuse, they don’t stay in violent marriages, they don’t act in a denigratory way in front of their children because they are emotionally healthy and conscious.
They do so because they are limited and they’ve been too hurt, too long ago and too repressed to even try to understand whom they’ve become.
They greet their offsprings with pain that was already there and they never knew or had the means to deal with (that pain) prior to becoming Mothers.

And we, as injured women, of injured Mothers, we already know better by looking for answers and wondering and trying to understand our own pain better. We already are better by doing so.
And it’s through that rationale that emotional healing starts.
And before you expect it, just when you might think you’re no better than what Mother was, then and there you get the glimpse of her pain; through your own inner monologue and inner turmoil, telling to yourself how much you do of the things she did, you see: the self-judgement, the self-obsessions, the narcissistic anguish and urgency to fix it, to make it go away through erratic behavior, you see it for what it truly is: her behavior, her blindspots, resonating within you.

It is through this realisation that you see why she was so harmful to you in the first place. You understand her, on a deep emotional level. You're not only rationalising her behavior, but you can feel it in yourself. This is the starting point for you to heal; seeing her, in you, seeing you in her and at the same time, being aware of all of this, while she wasn't. Being in charge of it, while she wasn't. Observing it all, the patterns, the triggers, the tendencies, while she...wasn't.

Heal. Love. Understand.
And move on.