This illustration is about the unresolved issues that the mothers and daughters in my family uploaded to each other over generations. I hope it’s not too disturbing! Definitely not a piece for kids lol. But I wanted to share this story because it’s meaningful to me, and also in case it makes a difference to anyone else.
The Mother Wound
We all have voices that aren't ours that we've internalized from those who came before us.
I come from a family of women who passed their unresolved upsets to their children.
The upsets took on different forms—mostly shame and criticism—but I think they all stemmed from a similar source—women who were stuck inside themselves, traumatized, overburdened, overwhelmed and unavailable.
I’d say my mother had the hardest life of them all.
Mostly because she, more than any of them, wanted to live differently—to leave behind the rules and regulations of her predecessors and be free to be herself, on her own terms.
Well this did not go well.
Not because she was unqualified to have the right to be herself, but because this society isn’t built for people to be themselves, unless they‘ve had the privilege of being raised by those who told them they could, or unless they didn’t get too damaged from being raised by people who insisted they couldn’t.
My mother tried so hard to live life on her own terms, but there was always a problem in her way.
And there’s only so many problems a person can confront before they start believing they deserve them all.
Yet because my mother still believed she was entitled to live her best life, she coped with the feeling of defeat a bit differently.
She assumed all those toxic voices she’d inherited from her predecessors must have been implanted there in her brain by the government. There was simply no other explanation she could think of—because in her heart, she knew that those inflexible, critical, demeaning voices couldn’t have been her own.
And though she wasn’t able to process it clearly, I believe I understand what was going on—my mother was shedding that collective criticism of all the women who had come before her, those women who had silenced their own voices after being told by other toxic people that their voices weren't viable enough to be heard, and who in turn silenced the voices of their offspring because the sound of their freedom brought too much resentment.
Throughout her life, my mother was deemed not much more than mentally ill by her family, by people unequipped to see life through the lens of one’s mythology—through the lens of one’s spiritual journey.
But even so, my mother never gave up on herself and she fought these voices to her death.
And I am grateful that I was able to understand what she was doing—that she was carving out a new chapter. My mother never got to live in that new chapter she worked so hard to create—but I feel lucky that I have been able to step into it, knowing all that went in to creating it.
I know now in my bones how important it is to stay true to what calls to my heart and soul. And I will never live a life that’s perpetually burdened by all those voices that keep us so small, so punished, and so privately miserable.
And I’m so proud of my warrior mother for finding so much courage in the face of generations of dysfunction, and for being so honest with me about every step of her journey.
I’m not saying it was easy growing up with my mother. It was very difficult.
But I’d rather have had that, than be like the women who came before her, whose fires burned a hole on their insides because they were too afraid to ever let it out.
—JLK
