A Mother’s Call to Healing Originally published in Whole Life Times, July 1995
The only way out is all the way in.
—Anonymous
I embarked on motherhood as I’d embarked on every other important project in my well-ordered life—with enthusiasm, loads of research, and a stirring preconception of what the future held in store. I read up on Joseph Chilton Pearce’s theories on the natural unfolding of intelligence, and hunted down the perfect pastel rag-woven upholstery for our nursing chair. I did pre-natal yoga, I did peaceful-birth visualizations, I did Bradley.
But nothing could have prepared me for the upheaval that was to come, the rending of my very core to the transformational mandate of mothering. My “Thing’s are perfect, I’m handling everything fine” persona—my “false self”—that had thwarted a few earnest attempts at therapy over the years would soon shred under the pumice of my son’s raw baby neediness, his control-shattering toddler defiance, and the terrifying demands for intimacy that children innocently exact.
Mothering broke me apart, and then urged me to wholeness.
I was scared of my baby. Not during the pain of labor, even when the cord around his neck threatened to complicate his birth. And not when he was first laid upon my chest, a curious little alien. But later, when his separateness from me had set in, when he was Ian, another person I needed to care for, to attend to, give to, that is when I was scared. It scared me to feel the tiny bones under his skin, it scared me to hear his little noises, it scared me when he cried and cried in the still hours of the dark morning. It was John who walked him then, while I stood by and felt incapable of soothing my own baby at those times when it wasn’t nursing he wanted.
Thank God for nursing, the one mother-thing I knew I could do perfectly for him. It provided the only moments of relief from my vague but persistent fears of incompetence, relief from the intangible but relentless drive running deep inside me to always be trying to do it better, or at least do it right. Do what right, I couldn’t define. I just knew that I rarely felt a respite from this steady pressure that seemed to define my life after becoming a mother. And it seemed that I was angry, silently resentful, most of the time.
When there were no specific tasks to accomplish, like diapering or feeding or driving us somewhere, I felt deep discomfort at simply being with my baby. I had learned from my parent/infant class that babies and children thrive on this “wants-nothing time”, that it’s as nourishing to their psyches as food is to their bodies. But as soon as I would sit down on the family room carpet with my baby, to just be there while he explored and played, the resistance would rise up and I would quell it by suddenly thinking Oh, I’ve got to jump up right now and call about those slipcovers, or Maybe I should plan tomorrow’s dinner, or I’d better go wipe the water spots off that table. The refuge of life’s droning busywork.
I had planned for Ian to sleep in a cradle in our room during the early weeks, but on our first night home his snuffling baby noises kept me so on edge, his closeness so chafed at me, that he was alone in his own room beginning the following night. Then I could feel tense and guilty from safely down the hall. My first years of mothering were thus: my need to escape Ian’s crushing dependency on me, and the guilt, the anger, and the ever-present gnashing conflict of my two deepest impulses—to attach, and to pull away (not necessarily in that order). When Ian was about four months old I said to John, “I feel like he’s sucking all the me out of me.” But actually he was sucking the real me, terrified and enraged, out of hiding.
I was adopted when I was five days old in one of the pioneering open adoptions in San Francisco. Mom (my adoptive mother, who died when I was 21), was a charismatic, energetic, powerfully attractive woman with exquisite taste in everything, and a keen business sense. She wasn’t home much, but there was always some caring housekeeper around to attend to me, and to do the cooking. Many hands attended to me but never the ones that felt like home.
When Ian was around eight months old I spoke with one of my past therapists, who explained to me, “You never grieved for your childhood.” The irony was laughable—that several years and thousands of dollars worth of therapy had failed to do what my son was doing effortlessly, without charge. Ian was eroding all of my defenses, stretching open my unhealed wounds, the losses of what I’d never received from my own mother—the unconditional nurturing, the security, the predictability that children crave and thrive on. These were the things that Ian was demanding that I provide him, and in trying to meet his demands, I was scraping an empty, aching well.
While inside I struggled, outside I strained to present a status-quo face. I wore J. Crew, prepared organic baby food, went to Mommy & Me, clenched my teeth, and tried to keep it together. I was living what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls “The Grinning Depression.” My mounting inner conflict made me feel like an alien in a world of seemingly happy mothers-who-adored-mothering. One day, in my car atop Outpost Canyon, I screamed “I HATE BEING A MOTHERRRRR!!!”
I slipped back into the anesthetic numbness of my infancy and childhood. I felt like Meryl Streep’s character in “Postcards From the Edge,” when she tells Gene Hackman, ” know I have the perfect life, I just can’t feel my life.” I had a wonderful husband, a beautiful son, a lovely home, great friends, but I somehow couldn’t connect with the experience of all that. I couldn’t inhabit it, feel it against my soul. I was skimming over the surface of life for fear of the menacing undertow beneath.
“Find ways to cry,” my old therapist suggested by phone from Canada, his new home. I read John Bradshaw and Alice Miller; I journaled up banished feelings; I worked on reforming those old, bad-parent voices in my head, to be more accepting of the ageless, needy child inside me. But I became even more selfish than before.
My new therapist, Johanna, found me awash in a very entrenched, “slippery,” and pervasive free-floating anger around my childhood. My grinning depression. I would sit there on her couch and talk about how I was one of my mother’s accessories… and I would smile. I would recount how my mother neglected me in favor of her work and her hobbies… and I would smile. Johanna urged me to let it up and out, to hit a cushion, to yell the smile off my face. I couldn’t. The wall of shame, of embarrassment, of propriety, of what good, acceptable girls do, was too tremendous to scale.
The fact that I was adopted had never been much of an issue in any of my therapies; we had simply focused on the neglect I experienced in my adoptive home, the kind that goes on in all kinds of families, usually in the name of love or guidance or God or money or, as in so many families, my mother’s own untended wounds.
But there was an aspect of my experience as an adoptee yet to be unveiled, an aspect of experience shared by countless people, not only adoptees. I was soon to learn about a special kind of invisible trauma that is part of many people’s legacy, which builds their walls of defenses and control stronger, higher, deeper than most—almost impenetrable. And I was to learn this lesson from my second child, my daughter, Eve. Giver of life.
She wasn’t due for a couple weeks. John and I were at the symphony, and had to leave at intermission because I was feeling so strange, something akin to nausea, but not quite. When we returned home I walked straight through the house, not stopping to hug my son or chat with the baby-sitter. I closed our bedroom door behind me, stripped off my clothes and crawled into bed. I began to cry, then sob, wrapped in the sheets in a fetal position. After some minutes of this sobbing, words began to come out of my mouth. “Mommy…Mommy…Mommy doesn’t want me, Mommy doesn’t want me…”
I knew exactly what it meant.
Eve came the next day, and I fell madly in love with her, easily, angstlessly. She slept next to my side of the bed until she was three months old, when I could no longer shoe-horn her into her little cradle. The first night that she slept alone in her room I cried deep tears of loss, while at the same time rejoicing that I could feel so attached to her, so human, finally. Eve had blasted away a wall of grief that would have kept me sequestered from her as it had from Ian.
In the year after Eve’s birth, I began to explore the adoption literature, researching my notion that as an adoptee I had come into the world already wounded. My intuitive sense was that the day before Eve’s birth I had experienced a spontaneous regression to my own pre-birth feelings. I was led to an article by Nancy Verrier, a therapist and adoptive mother, author of The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. She challenges the long-held assumption that separating a newborn from its biological mother has no ill effect (on either of them). She invokes the growing body of pre- and perinatal psychology research, astounding findings about what a fetus experiences in the womb, what a strong connection it has with the mother long before birth, and how intelligent, aware, and remembering a newborn is. She proposes that bonding doesn’t begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological, and spiritual events which begin in utero and continue throughout the postnatal bonding period. She further asserts that the interruption of this natural evolution caused by the post-natal separation from the mother inflicts a wound that is primal, even cellular in nature.
In her words I felt that miraculous ring of truth. I delved deeply into pre- and perinatal research, which continues to broaden our understanding of how profoundly affected a person can be by the circumstances and attitudes surrounding their conception, gestation, and birth. I soon came to understand Verrier’s “primal wound” as a continuum of separation actually beginning months earlier in the womb of a mother who has emotionally detached from her baby. I learned about the foundational existential traumas of being a mistaken conception, of having a mother who is disappointed—or worse—at the news of her pregnancy, and who psychically rejects the baby inside her or even considers abortion. (These circumstances aren’t true of all adoptive pregnancies, but certainly the majority.) The message transmitted to that incipient being is that she shouldn’t exist, she doesn’t deserve to exist, her creator doesn’t want her to exist. Some believe that it is in those early weeks of intermingled genesis and rejection that the “false self” begins to form, out of sheer survival instinct. This new perspective resonated deeply within me and helped me make sense of the fact that my core issues goes beneath abandonment and rejection, to a basic sense of invisibility and unworthiness of existence—of simply being wrong.
I soon realized that many, many of us, not just adoptees, were conceived by mistake, or in anger, or were carried in deeply ambivalent, fearful, mournful, or rejecting wombs. And there are no boundaries for an embryo, for a fetus; a negative response to rejecting maternal energy or even her stress hormones is a negative response to one’s universe, for the mother is the child’s universe at that point, and until several months after birth. A template is formed in those early months for one’s later experiences, especially in the realm of connection, intimacy, trust, and worthiness; we tend to construct our lives based on those templates. And the primal experience of being denied and rejected—of being wrong—undermines true self-worth so deeply that no “externals” can shore it up—not a very successful career, not admiring friends, not a loving family.
Trying to “reframe” my attitudes or amend my responses through insight or diligently incanting affirmations never seemed to have a significant or lasting effect, which added to my frustration and feeling of incompetence. It was like trying to push a car with flat tires uphill through gravel. A little movement was possible, but no relaxing of the vigilance, no peace.
A spiritual healer told me several years ago, “You have your story stuck in your body.” Several sessions of Network chiropractic began to unstick the story from my body, and then a gifted primal therapist who specializes in pre- and perinatal issues helped me to connect with the story, to own it. This work has been about embracing the shadow, a theme that Clarissa Pinkola Estés addresses so beautifully in her various books and tapes. Thomas Moore’s The Care of the Soul also helped me shift out of the “fix it” model of healing into an embracing model—taking back what has been banished from the soul. It is an exercise in paradox: when I embraced the part of me that raged, I could begin to accept. When I embraced the part of me that felt worthless, I could begin to build self-esteem. And when I embraced the part of me that resented my children, I could begin to truly love them.
Over the months, Wendy, my primal therapist, bore witness to my tears of anguish, whines of longing, and profanity of rage. She empathized, validated, and contained me while I felt like I was walking into the void, for that is how terrifying it felt. I would emerge from our work centered, peaceful, at ease, connected back to my life, to the universe. I truly believe this work is nature’s Prozac; everything I have experienced has been about lifting the lid off of a lifelong depression, which some believe is caused by intense, deeply-held feelings seeking—and also resisting—expression.
Wendy once explained to me that you don’t get to get what you never got. You only get to feel how bad it feels, and that’s when you heal. “It’s already gone, it’s already lost, and the only thing that you can do in therapy to heal is feel the loss. There’s nothing to fill that hole—there’s no man, there’s no sex, there’s no drugs, there’s no house, there’s no money, because it’s already a loss. People hate that, because they want a therapist to fix it. But all you can do is bring them to that empty hole, and let them look in again, and scream at the emptiness.”
As in the space/time continuum of quantum physics, my healing is always beginning. The layers of denial slough off and the work deepens, as wounds open further to the balm of new insights and—most critically—skillful empathy. My journey back to the pain of the womb needed the prelude of some basic understandings about what had come later. It was a tracing backwards and inwards, beginning where the hurt was less, and going to where the agony lay, the agony woven into my marrow and my psyche
Ultimately, for me, this is a spiritual journey, a conscious cooperation with the destiny I do believe I chose. It was a grueling pilgrimage “all the way in” to reach that pure and joyous fragment of soul that was waiting to be reclaimed, the faintly burning ember of which Pinkola Estés speaks. I fanned it back to life with my fervent wish to be whole, to be a healthy mother for my son and daughter. At times it felt like it would destroy me but instead, the healing call of mothering has carved out of me my true Self, who daily, gloriously, feels life against her soul.