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Chapter 5 Awakening

The image is vivid in my memory. My mother is standing in the front yard and she’s holding a letter in her hand—a letter she’s about to put in the mailbox.

She holds it up, and declares, “I’m divorcing my mother!”

I was in my early twenties and she was in her mid-forties. I certainly wasn’t surprised; it was no secret that she and my grandmother didn’t get along. My mother often said that she would never treat me the way her mother had treated her. I’d heard the stories and they made me hurt for my mother.

Like the time my grandmother said to my mother, who had been voted the “Prettiest Girl” in her high-school class, “If I’d had more money, I’d have gotten you plastic surgery to fix your face.” She told me that story several times and I know she was hurt by it.

My grandmother was a stunner. As was my mother. And like many, many women of their generation, their looks were everything. Their appearance and sex appeal (but not too much) was their currency. And deep down in the primal part of their brains, it was how they believed women survived.

I remember the first time I felt that there must be something wrong with my body. I was about eight or nine years old and had been to a pediatrician visit with my mother. When we got home, she said to my stepfather, “The doctor said she’s chunky.” I heard amusement, fear, and disgust all at the same time.

My mother put me on a diet when I was twelve. And when I reread the diary I kept during my high school years, it’s filled with pages where I write about feeling like a pig, about hating myself because I ate too much.

Both my mother and my grandmother were concerned about my weight, and when I look back at photos of myself then, all I can do is shake my head. I didn’t have a “weight problem.” What I believe now is that she was worried about two things, one consciously and one unconsciously. First, she was worried about what others would think about her if she had a fat daughter; secondly, she worried that if I had a fat body, then a man wouldn’t love me and take care of me.

* * *

As a young adult I believed my mother and I had “typical” mother-daughter conflict, but I also thought our relationship was different—better than the relationship she had with her mother. My mother often said that we were close—good friends, even. I know she wanted it to be different between us than it had been for her with her own mother.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my mother and I were not “close”—we were codependent and emotionally enmeshed. We were both single and we’d go out to nightclubs together and drink, flirt, and dance with men who would cleverly suggest we were sisters. She was involved in almost all aspects of my life and when I wanted to keep some things separate, she would be hurt and/or angry. And because I craved her attention and approval (unconsciously), I did as she wanted.

I didn’t understand how unhealthy our relationship was.

Fast-forward twenty-five years, at the end of 2010, and there I was, divorcing my mother, too. Instead of a letter in the mail, I sent her an email. Despite her (our?) desire for a different, healthier mother-daughter relationship, it appeared we couldn’t escape those etched-in-stone patterns. My mother had unconsciously passed down attitudes and behaviors, I unconsciously took them, and when I wanted to strike out on my own and have a life separate from my mother, our relationship suffered.

I will tell you about some of the things that led up to that moment—the things that I believed justified “divorcing” my mother—but what’s important is to know for now is that in that moment I felt like I had no other option. I believed that divorcing my mother—choosing to have no contact with her—would solve all my problems.

Instead, I found myself obsessing about our relationship. To anyone who would listen, I’d pour out my hurt and anger, sharing the details of how my mother had done me wrong. I was operating from an unhealthy, unconscious belief that I was my mother’s victim.

When I discovered the concept of victim consciousness, it all made sense. Up until that point, I resisted the idea that I might be a victim because in my family, “being a victim” was something to be ashamed of and to avoid at all costs. I highly recommend the work of Lynne Forrest and her book Beyond Victim Consciousness for fully understanding this concept, but let me lay out the basics here.

Imagine an inverted triangle. At the bottom of the triangle is the Victim, in the top-left corner is the Persecutor, and in the top-right corner is the Rescuer (note that both these roles are in the “one up” position from the Victim).

When we’re in victim consciousness, we’re playing one of those three roles, and it’s important to recognize that none of these roles is considered better than other (especially when everyone in the dynamic is an adult). The Rescuer is not the “good guy.” In fact, the Rescuer and the Persecutor are basically exaggerated versions of the Victim.

This dynamic plays out on a micro level in families, and we can also see it playing out in the world, on a macro level.

According to Forrest: “Victims think of themselves as weak and unable to take care of themselves, so they are constantly on the lookout for someone to rescue them. Rescuers tend to believe that their own needs are irrelevant. They believe that they matter only when they are taking care of others, and that means they constantly need someone to take care of. Persecutors believe the world is a generally unsafe and fearful place. They think of themselves as being in constant need of protection from a world that is out to get them, and so they get angry at others or at situations believing that they are only defending themselves.”

No matter where you start out on the triangle, you will eventually play the other two roles. If you’re the Victim, you start to feel resentment, and may even move into the Persecutor role in order to change the pattern, believing you are protecting yourself. Or, you may move into the Rescuer role in order to feel important because you’re taking care of the Victim.

In hindsight, I see that my mother and I constantly revolved around the triangle, each of us playing all three roles.

Shortly after I “divorced” my mother, I became my maternal grandmother’s legal guardian. Given that her children lived in other states (and in one case, in another country), it made sense that I, who lived about ninety minutes away, take on this role. Not to mention, as I said earlier, the relationship between my mother and her mother was strained.

When it became obvious that she’d no longer be able to live alone in her home, I moved her into a skilled nursing facility, cleaned out her house, and sold it. It was while readying her house for sale that I found a series of letters she and my mother had written to each other, from the time my mother was eighteen and in college.

I treasured those letters because they gave me so much insight. They mirror, almost exactly, some of the correspondence my mother and I have exchanged over the years. In some cases, the letters conveyed basic day-to-day observations and news, but other letters were filled with rage, hurt, accusations, and confusion.

I even found the famous “I’m divorcing you” letter my mother sent my grandmother.

My point in sharing this is to illustrate that despite what we say, despite what we might intend, what we model is what makes the biggest impact. I’m not saying I divorced my mother because she divorced hers, nor am I saying that what either of us did during that time was right (or wrong). Dysfunctional patterns, if not noticed and acknowledged honestly, get passed on.

Although I chose not to have children, I saw the effects of those patterns in some of my other relationships, from my marriage, to my sister (same father, different mother), to my stepkids. I was harsh, critical, controlling, and downright mean sometimes. I believed I was justified. I was treating others the way my mother had treated others, the way she had treated me…and the way I had treated myself. Being “in conflict” was the norm. I was used to it.

I’m not blaming my mother, or her mother, for the patterns. What was passed down was the unconscious pain of being a woman in a culture that does not equally value women. This is the pain of “not good enough” and of harsh self-judgment, criticism, and unworthiness.

This pain has been passed down, woman to woman, mother to daughter, for centuries.

They told us “just be yourself,” but they taught us (via example) to be someone else. Conform. Standardize. Comply. Obey. And if we didn’t, we were often accused of being selfish, or being a show-off.

Think about it for a second. Centuries ago, women were burnt at the stake, stoned, and drowned (literally and metaphorically) for being their true selves, for expressing their true selves. Especially when that self was deemed to be evil, magic, wild, intuitive, inappropriate, too sexual, too thin, too fat, too much, too smart…you get the picture.

Fast-forward to the beginning of twentieth century and instead of being murdered, women were labeled as “hysterical,” thrown into institutions and locked away, told that it was for their own good.

Today? The murdering and locking away still happens, especially to women of color, but mostly it takes the form of being shamed, harassed, and threatened in the media.

It makes sense, then, that our mothers (and grandmothers and great-grandmothers), scolded us for being anything that might make us unattractive or ineligible for marriage, because for most of history women could not survive on their own.

Thus, generation after generation, women have had two universal (and often unconscious) conflicting needs: (1) I must be my true self…I must express my true self. (2) I must protect myself from being burnt at the stake, so I will squash and mold and contort myself so I “fit in” and am deemed “okay.”

So of course our mothers felt the need to protect us, while at the same time trying to model independence, while at the same time trying to protect themselves, while at the same time being pressured to “do it all”—perfectly—while at the same time, perhaps, turning to addiction or becoming mentally ill or, maybe, just being jealous and pissed off.

By itself, this generational pain is one of the most significant sources of dysfunction in our relationships. Those beliefs and patterns are running in the background of our lives, and we often have no clue that they’re there at all. We just know that we’re not as content as we’d like to be. Our relationships aren’t fulfilling and rich.

The good news is that we don’t have to take what is handed down. It’s not something to blame our mothers or fathers (or ourselves) for, it’s something to understand, accept, and work on. Meanwhile, we come to know that we can do hard work without suffering—that it can be one of the most joyful, affirming things we ever do.

By being honest and aware of how, at first, I chose to believe that I was not good enough, I opened the door to healing. In deciding that I didn’t want to believe it any more, I released it, not just for me, but also for my mother, her mother, and on and on, and walked through that door.

Doing this work heals—not just you, and not just in the present—but also past generations (although I believe doing it just for you is perfectly okay). It also changes the future for the better.

When we choose to focus on and heal our mother stories, we transform them from something that wears us out and causes us to suffer into something that is a source of wisdom, creativity, and peace. We go from believing we should be happy all the time to being alive and awake. We go from thinking we’re broken and needing to be fixed to knowing we’re complete and whole as is.

And that is the number-one reason to take an honest and compassionate look at your relationship with your mother and to ask yourself what you’ve chosen to take from her and what you’re passing on, and if it’s not what you choose, then to heal it.

World peace does indeed start inside each and every one of us.