Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., MFT
Author of Don’t Call Me Mother: Breaking the Chain of Mother-Daughter Abandonment
www.memoriesandmemoirs.com
So many women talk about their relationships with their mothers—no matter how old they are. For some, their mother still occupies a central place in the psyche. She’s too close, she’s too much. She has advice, snoops into her business, and gives too much advice. The daughter wants time away, she wants boundaries, and fights for more separation from her mother.
For others, the mother still occupies the psyche, but with a wrenching kind of longing—a mother that is biological and even sometimes present, but a mother who is so self-involved as to be emotionally absent, or literally out of the picture. This kind of mother takes up space and energy as a nagging, missing piece, a ghost. Her image hovers, her memory, or perhaps a dream of how it could have been, should have been, but never is.
What kind of mother do you have?
My mother was a dream. I realize now, ten years after her death, that I was always trying to get the dream to come true—to have her be warm and huggy, to have her want to know me, to visit me in my house, to know my children. To know me. It never happened. It left a yearning that I played out with men, it left a hole that I tried to fill in many ways.
My mother left me when I was four years old, once a year appearing in the landscape of my life. I lived with her mother, my grandmother. During each visit they would fight--my grandmother had abandoned her when my mother was young--and in a flurry of anger my mother would leave, not noticing how hard that was for me. Yet each year I would dream of her return, and hope it would be different next time.
So many people—men and women—struggle with this kind of emptiness, the burn of anger in the pit of the stomach, the unanswered questions that can’t be asked: Why are you like this? Don’t you know how much I miss you and need you? Why don’t you love me?
A mother who is neglectful, selfish, and abandoning does not set out to do these things. She is reacting to her own personal problems, her own pain, and maybe even mental illness. It is hard for us as her child to see this fully, or to forgive it. It takes time and healing, meditation and living your own full life.
How to heal the Ghost Mother wound
•Learn about your mother’s life—how she became the way she is—through talking with relatives, if she won’t talk to you directly, or by sitting down and hashing through her history shown in photos and family albums.
•Find adoptive mothers who will nurture you and friends who understand your story.
•Learn to mother yourself—though therapy, through friends and lovers, and/or through having children of your own. We can learn from everyone.
•Write your story. Tell your story. Having witnesses to your story is a part of healing. Seeing compassion in the eyes of others shows you that you are worthy of it, and deserve it.
•Practice forgiveness—first for others who are easier to forgive. Walk in another’s moccasins. Be yourself and create a life you are proud of and enjoy.
•Learn to surround yourself with people who love and like you, and the beauty that makes you feel a significant part of the web of life.
