Being a Mother is Devastatingly Difficult

Being a mother is devastatingly difficult.

Devastating because you’re not always very good at it.

Devastating because sometimes you hurt their feelings.

Devastating because you can’t always hold your shit together and you end up hurting the person you love most.

Motherhood is about loving and loving well.

And you’re supposed to be good at that, right?

There is no greater shame I think than failing at that.

Clients walk into my office every day and at some point I ask them:

“Tell me about your mother.”

Well, guess what? I am the mother now. I am on that list.

I will be the woman my daughter talks about with her therapist. I will be the woman my two daughters discuss when I am not there.

I say to my clients, “your mother is a complex woman and we are not here to blame her. We are here to understand her. Because in understanding her, we begin to understand you, what was passed down to you, and what is now your responsibility to transform as best you can.”

Because motherhood also means not doing the thing our mothers did. Despite how hard our mothers may have tried (and most of them surely did), I suppose this is the nature of evolution: doing it better each time.

You know what you needed as a child but didn’t get, and so now you do your best to do it different. And mostly you succeed.

What you didn’t anticipate was how overwhelming parenting would be or how out of control you would sometimes feel.

Considering these are the cornerstones of trauma (overwhelm and loss of control), how could parenting NOT evoke your own wounding — and the defenses you developed to protect yourself?

Doing the work of uncovering the feelings you have split off from is imperative. Your relationship with your child will insist upon it.

A part of you will insist upon it because you will hear it: your mother’s voice in your voice.

And you will feel it: your mother’s shrieking anger in your anger, or her coldness in your coldness.

You will know it is not you. And you will work to find your way back to yourself.

But there is just no denying the visceral sense that everything you are trying to hold back partially seeps in anyway.

That’s because, as mothers, we are doing far more than just nurturing a human being.

We are STANDING GUARD at the gates of trauma.

And we are fucking desperate.

Desperate to keep our own wounds from invading the souls of our children.

And no matter how much we stand guard, trauma has a way of bursting through those gates.

It has a way of unconsciously slipping through the cracks.

The intergenerational transmission of trauma is real.

Trauma is in our fucking DNA.

And I see her little amygdala, my daughter, so sensitive and fierce, and I see my own nervous system. Here it is. It’s already inside her. I have already failed her.

Sometimes I wonder whether the protest and rage that was stifled inside of me as a child found expression through my own child’s intensity. She comes at me with a vengeance it is hard for me to understand.

A fierce fight I was never allowed in my own childhood now comes through my own child, full throttle.

And while it is the thing that sometimes triggers me, it is also the emotion I work hard to make room for, to allow, and to contain with my own solid fortitude and presence.

To let her rage against me and yet not go away.

This, my friends, is hard AF, and I do not always succeed.

But I am determined to keep her fierceness intact and to model for her what fierceness can look like without hurting people.

I am determined to teach her that she is powerful enough to feel it all without acting it out or shutting it down.

This requires me to heal my own trauma at an expedient rate.

And she holds me to it.

“Mommy, when you scream at me, I scream at you. When you scream, you are learning me to scream.”

She is 4.5 years old.

Well, that right there is the difference.

What I have given my daughter is the language to know her mind and the safety to speak it.

Because what I do real good is repair.

I repair like a motherfucker.

I take responsibility immediately.

I take her back into my arms immediately.

I listen to her feelings.

And I give her a map of my mind.

“That was my fault. I was stressed out. I was worrying about things in my head and it caused me to have a reaction that was big and scary and not okay. I think what I needed was to get out of my head and just be here with you guys. Because you don’t stress me out. Mommy’s thoughts stress her out. I am so sorry.”

I give her a map of my mind so she can develop a map of her own.

This map, over and over again, is:

“Here’s what I’m feeling. Here’s why. Here’s how I acted. Here’s how it affected you. Here’s how we talk about it. Here’s what I’m going to do differently because this is my responsibility to change.”

And that feels like something. That feels like something BIG. It keeps the golden thread of connection solid between us.

But no amount of apology can take away the depression of my regret. It takes me days to recover.

Repair as I do, the moments that revealed my own unresolved trauma still happened.

And it’s easy to forget — in those moments — all the really good things you are doing so well. And it’s easy to forget how much resilience a child can have with just a little bit of love and I know my child gets A TON.

Perhaps what is devastating is that I know I will inevitably affect my daughter.

And I know she will face hard things in life, including rejection, shame, and assholes.

And I can’t save her from any of that.

And that breaks my heart that she has to experience the world as it is and discover her own grit and depth through suffering like most of us do.

But then I remember something major: self-worth. The ultimate protector.

Self-worth is what I show her when she calls for me and I respond every single time. Self-worth is in the always-available cuddles and the snuggles of our nighttime routine. It is what I infuse into her being when we hug. It is in the presence I bring to our relationship, making that real contact with my eyes and my voice. It is in the allowing of her to be angry with me and the allowing of her to be independent without me being threatened.

She will know her worth because we have valued her — ALL of her thoughts, ideas, impulses, and FEELINGS.

She will know herself and claim her whole self (her joy, her rage, her grief, her momentary helplessness, and her tenacity) because we have made it safe for her to do so.

And I try to remember that she will come to know herself-not only through obstacles-but also through the experience of BEING LOVED over and over and over again.

Throughout her life, I will be watching from the sidelines, confident and proud, quietly managing my own anxieties, holding back my own shit so that she can live a life ALL HER OWN. A life I completely trust her to navigate.

And I will do perhaps the hardest work of all, which is to forgive myself for being imperfect — because being perfect is impossible. All I can know deep in my bones is that I loved my child and she felt it, and that I worked tirelessly to stay one step ahead of my own wounding.