My Mother Myself?

In 1977, Nancy Friday published a book called My Mother Myself.

I read it in the mid 80’s, when I was about 25 years old, and it was mind blowing.

I couldn’t believe the information that I was taking in.

I think those were the days when I first started to read self help books. Nancy Friday’s book was about women who had been reared by their mothers to conform to the pre-feminist society that they would have to now struggle to get out of that kind of mode, because it was such a “modern time” in 1977.

But “becoming your mother” goes much deeper than that.

Even if you haven’t had a difficult birth with your mother, and even if your birth was super wonderful, you might still see all of the similarities between you and your mother, that don’t feel congruent to you.

You might be thinking, the last thing you want is to be like your mother! But she was our first female role model, and we modeled everything that our mother did, said, didn’t do and didn’t say.

I have so many beautiful freeze frame moments with my mother, like watching the way that she would put on her makeup. I’d watch her do that in fascination and have caught myself “being my mother” in my own make-up process.

Watching the way that she would draw, so focussed, in flow, she was an amazing artist. Those are ways I’m happy to be like her.

And there were terrible things that I learned from my mother too. And guess what? Your mother learned all of those things from her mother, your grandmother. And your grandmother learned all of those things from your great grandmother, and so on.

Seven generations of cellular memory are passed down. We might not get all of the beliefs from our ancestors, but we could get some of them.

So if you feel like you’re constantly triggered by your mother, or even if you want to be identically like her, both things can be a shadow part of you, the dark and the light shadows.

We want to have our own way forward. We want to carve our own path and our own identity. We don’t want to pedestalize people and be exactly like somebody else. I know I invented that word, that’s my way forward! I like to invent and play with words.

We want to find our own way through our life’s journey. When they die, eventually, it’s such a heart wrenching thing to lose that person that we’ve idolized all of that time. So we want to have an equal, balanced connection and relationship with our parents.

If your mother is somebody that you struggle with or that you’re challenged by, or even somebody that you hate, well, I would really encourage you to reframe that and look at that as a gift. Use that as information so you can look at those shadow parts in yourself, see what you modeled and how those behaviours might show up totally differently for you in your life.

We’re mirrors with our parents and we don’t see it because we don’t want to see that negativity in ourself. We don’t want to see those same kind of behaviors playing out in our lives the way that our mothers did. We certainly don’t want to repeat our wounding with our own children.

So, instead of just blindly following the information that you got from your mother, and staying stuck in your own limiting behaviours and beliefs, it’s important to find your own understanding of things. Get the whole picture from an adult point of view if you can.

Even if everything was absolutely rosy and beautiful, those first two early formative years are powerfully relevant as to the relationship that we form with ourselves, our safety and security in the world and with others, and the relationship that we form with our mothers.

I learned early on how to walk on eggshells around my mother, and because I’m the person that I am, I spent most of my adult life chipping away at her so that we could have a good relationship.

I figured, even before I became a mother, that if I was a mother, I would want to know what my kid felt and what was going on for her. Turns out, I had sons. So did my sister. We all thought we were going to have a family of girls, but we all got boys. Weird! Didn’t model how to mother a son!

As a mother, I always wanted to have clear communication with my children, because I didn’t have that clarity as a child. I’m sure I annoyed my sons a lot, too. “Let’s talk about it. What’s really going on for you? You know, if you change your mind set about that…”. MUM!! But boy, did they turn out well, if I do say so myself!

Not just daughters, but your sons pick up behaviors from you as the mother too. If you’re a man, maybe you picked up things from your mother that keep you stuck in adult life.

I worked deeply with one of my sons on relationship issues because he was terrified if he fell in love, she would leave him. Yes, I was the cause of that wounding in my son! Helping him heal that, so he could find his person and get married, helped me heal my own guilt around the wounding I had caused my beloved son.

I did some of my very best work with him on relationship issues because I had to face my own deepest stuff, own it, and transform it with him. It was seriously powerful.

It is also said that women will ‘marry their fathers,’ meaning, the same kind of man. And of course, I chose a man who, on the surface, was totally different from my father.

But over time I noticed many fundamental similarities in both of them. They’re both hilarious, but have a totally different sense of humor. They’re both writers, yet have a completely different style of writing. They’re both highly intelligent, also in a different way, and they’re both workaholics.

My father left my mother. I knew Bobby would never leave me, yet he “left me” by diving into his work. My parents didn’t communicate, but Bobby and I did. My parents didn’t heal, but Bobby and I did.

So you might not see all of the connecting dots and patterns and mirroring going on between you and your mother, because repeating patterns show up in different ways, but that relationship is profoundly important. You came out of her. Her cells are your cells.

And as a mother, your child came out of you! What kind of environment have you created for your child? We are just a product of what our parents have created, from what was going on for them when they were pregnant with us, and same thing for our children.

This is how generational belief systems are passed down. If you think that your mother still has a major negative influence over your life, or that you’re struggling, this is a great time, especially while she’s still alive, to sort it out and find out who your mother is.

When my mother died, I knew so many things about her life that even her sister and other family members didn’t know.

I knew because I asked her all of the questions when she was alive. I wanted to know when I was 15, what it was like for her when she was 15. I wanted to know what her life was like and how she felt when she was a little kid. I wanted to know all of these things, because she was my mother, and it’s the most important relationship you can have.

Understanding where she came from, certainly helped me understand why she was the way she was and it also explained so much about myself.

If you want to finally heal with your mother, or understand some of the “stuckness” in your life and repeating patterns, I would really love to hear from you.

Please book a call with me. It’s a free educational 20 minutes. Let’s have that conversation! This could be a life changing time for you in your journey. Now’s the time to break the chain in your own family dynamic.