mother

Humans, being mammals, are naturally obsessed with mothers. I'll elaborate. The word "mammal" is from the Latin mammalis which has as its root mamma, meaning "breast". Our entire class of the Animal Kingdom is named for this defining feature of mothers, because of the ability/necessity of infant mammals to receive their first nourishment directly from the body of their mothers. To be fair, we could have decided to name our class Uterals as well, because that's another mammalian trait (and no we won't get into the echidnas and platypus right now). Uterals would have the same connection to mothers, though, so my point stands. We are naturally obsessed with mothers.

This morning my daughter sent a TikTok that showed a father kestrel (a type of small hawk) figuring out how to care for his six chicks after the mother kestrel disappeared. It took him a little while, as he kept bringing whole prey and the chicks had no idea what to do with that, but he ended up figuring out that he needed to tear it up into bite sized bits. Hooray, chicks saved! I couldn't help but try and imagine a similar mammalian scenario. You run into road blocks really quickly. First of all, the vast majority of mammals don't form lasting pair bonds, so usually the father is long gone by the time the baby shows up. The exceptions that I know of are animals that have a social hierarchy of a primary male and a number of females (think lions, wolves, gorillas). In which case the father is around and protective, but not necessarily very involved in the actual survival care of the infant. So, a mammal mom disappears. Reality is the baby is going to die. Even if the father is around in the case of the tribe/pack mammals, there's nothing it can do to feed the young. The baby needs milk. It needs its mother.

I'm not going to take the time to explore the corollaries in humans, except to say that we have phrases such as "deadbeat dad" and "absentee father," but I can't think of any parallel ones for mothers. We have normalized the poor performance or absence of fathers. But we have not and maybe can not normalize the absence of mothers. It isn't a concept we can wrap our brains around because it is a matter of survival.

Okay, I guess I will address humans a little more. Maybe you're thinking, "Look, in the modern age we don't NEED breasts or milk to feed our babies. We have formula and there are plenty of kids being raised by two dads." That's true, and hooray for modern technology. But when we are looking at human psychology and our deep evolutionary wiring, advances of the last 160 years don't really mean anything. Humans evolved with the lack of a mother (or substitute female mother figure) meaning death. That's about 6 million years of evolution. And before that, there was about 160 million years of mammalian evolution. Hopefully now you are all on board with my opening statement. If not, I have some books by Sarah Hrdy you can borrow.

So, being mammals, we have a deep internal sense of the importance/necessity of mothers. But being human, we have crafted all sorts of narratives about What A Mother Is. What It Means To Be A Mother. What Maternal Love Looks Like. These ideas have evolved, kind of, over the course of society, but there are a lot of old themes that persist, even if they get repackaged or rebranded.

All of this is build up to what I want to write about today that's been on my mind the past couple of weeks. It is the pain of what I am calling the mother wound.

A couple weeks ago I was journeying with a couple dear friends and had an opportunity to show up for them while they were processing some heavy stuff. I held them in my arms while they cried. I felt deeply honored to witness and support them in my small way. Both commented later that they felt deep motherly energy and love from me, and how healing it was from them. Both of these friends were raised by single moms who were busy and hardworking and pouring their all into making life okay for their children. But I gleaned from what they shared with me that while they deeply appreciated the tremendous efforts of their mothers, they felt a lack of deep acceptance and love. Mothers are our first taste of what the world is like, and what the world thinks of us. We arrive totally helpless. Are we seen and celebrated for the beautiful unique souls we are? Are our cries of hunger and fear met with kindness and loving attention? Do we internalize that we matter, that the world is loving and safe? What ideas about ourselves do we internalize in those early months and years? The reality is, many mothers are tremendously undersupported and stretched too thin. Even mothers with support and resources are likely to be dealing with their own issues and few (none?) are able to show up ideally for their children. This is just a painful reality of life, but especially modern life, where so many of us are "independent" but deeply disconnected. Humans first develop a reflected sense of self by seeing how those immediately around them respond to them. No one is more immediate than the mother. I think that other loving and supportive relationships can fill a void left by a mother, but in situations where the mother is least available or most damaged, there very often will be no one to fill in the gaps.

It got me thinking about a few of my other friends, and just how many of them have "complicated" relationships with their mother. Some mothers left the family, some were present but constantly singling out the child for criticism, some were abusive in other ways. Lots of fraught and complicated relationships with mothers. My own relationship with my mother is fairly uncomplicated, but she never really has been the nurturing or affectionate type, and I have struggled to figure out how to become a kind of mother that I never knew but somehow felt drawn to. I can honestly say that I did look to the animals for inspiration when pregnant with my first child. I read books about attachment parenting and noted how our closest animal relatives, the great apes, carried their babies everywhere. I figured that was our evolutionary heritage, what we were biologically wired to do. Other aspects of caring for a newborn felt very natural to me, too, even though I'd not really seen it modeled. Babywearing, nursing on demand, co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding. I put a lot of research and care into cultivating my own maternal self with my kids, and providing a good environment for my babies important to me and luckily supported by my partner. (Lest this come across as too self-righteous, I will say that it is pretty much the only area of parenting I can look back on and say that I wouldn't change anything and have honestly no regrets over. I found plenty of unique ways to mess up over and over again, but this one area I feel I got right.)

Back to the mother wound. The way that this idea has taken shape for me is a core wound of not feeling seen. Not feeling like we have a sense of worth. Not feeling that we are loved just for showing up in the world, separate from anything we might do. Carrying this wound is possible even if we felt like our mothers did a solid job with us and we can't point to anything overt or specific that would have caused it. Mothers are human, after all, and all have flaws. But if there are glaring problems with our maternal relationship, there is likely to be a very deep mother wound. And if your mother said hurtful things, those words may ring in your mind as The Truth. To be rejected or abandoned by one's mother is death, at least to our core biological self. No amount of thinking will get us out of that.

During a journey last year, I experienced a time of complete relaxation. I felt like I had never before been so present in my body yet so relaxed. It occurred to me that THIS was the feeling we all desperately want, but we don't even know it. I felt held in the arms of the earth, even though I was just laying on my mat. My shoulders usually carry the tension of everything I have to get done or have on my mind, but it had all melted away. We all have a deep physiological need to be held safely and lovingly. Hopefully this happened to us many times as infants, but as we get older, we still have that need. Yet we don't cultivate or really have a framework for non-sexual touch in our society. Touches mean something, and not just "we need to experience touch." Being in physical contact with someone who wants absolutely nothing from us is deeply healing. We feel accepted and safe. This is one way we can heal the mother wound.

To be seen for who we are and to receive the message that we are good is a key part of maternal love. We can cultivate this with our friends and our family members. We can practice with ourselves, too. To accept our humanity and understand that there's no such thing as perfection. Perfection is showing up as who we are, flaws and all. My mom used to say, "Every mama crow thinks her chick is the blackest," which I interpret as the idea that parents are biased towards their own children, but I like to see the positive angle of this. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone felt that level of love from their parents. Wow! Someone thinks I'm awesome! Yay! Instead too often parents raise children with fear that overshadows the love. Be this way, do these things, definitely don't do that, you've got to fit in these boxes. Ram Dass refers to it as Somebody Training.

No matter the sort of relationship we had with our own mothers, we can heal the mother wounds we carry by seeing ourselves and loving ourselves, and finding people in our lives who see us and love us, just for being. Our presence lights them up and excites them. We can heal our mother wounds by connecting with the mother of us all, Mother Earth. Standing barefoot on the ground. breathing the air, feeling the breeze, noticing the beauty in the small and large things, all the gifts that she is constantly giving us while asking nothing. We can release our hurt and pain into the Mother and she can take it. We can feel her supporting us anytime we are quiet. She's got you.