mother wound
There is a photo of me when I am around 7 or 8 years old. In the photograph, which was taken immediately after ballet class, I am on the toilet, scrambling to pull up my black leotard to cover myself. I've managed to yank it only as high as my waist, leaving my torso exposed. My face is frozen in shock and horror; my guardian had burst into the bathroom with a camera, giggling.
I am as indignant about this photograph today as I was the day it was taken. More recently I have been thinking about my anger—about why this photograph feels so significant, so specifically difficult to forgive—and how to properly honor this anger.
My anger has to do, obviously, with 'overexposure', this rapid erosion of autonomy and privacy one often experiences in childhood first. I'm furious at the ways in which my environment and its local culture normalized repeated violations of boundaries, leaving me ill-equipped to recognize even the most egregious abuses of power.
In college I accidentally joined a cult. Well, technically it was an 'aberrant' church, which means it superficially resembled mainline Christianity, with all its attendant failings. But beneath its barely offbeat doctrine was an above-average high-control, authoritarian environment, pyramidal in configuration. (They arranged marriages, took control of people's finances, and forced people to live and work right next to church headquarters. Standard, y'know?)
People always act shocked at this information—that I would join a not-immediately-obvious cult, if only for a couple months—but the reality is, people arrange themselves into pyramid shapes constantly and never think twice about it. Maybe the real shock is how many structures and schemes I'm willing to identify as 'cults' (because they are).
Anyway, I'd missed the signs in autumn, but I'd noticed them before winter break. Even if I hadn't left—even if I'd wanted to belong—I would've been kicked out in due course anyway, because I wasn't able to perform conformity correctly or for long stretches.
I sent a polite email explaining I was uncomfortable and would no longer be attending. At this, the cult first threatened me, then doubled down on love-bombing. Alarmingly, the organization's members would knock on our apartment's back door, never the front, and I would hide in my room anytime I heard the group come calling. Finally, my junior-year roommate Dave answered the door and told them I'd died.
Recently (although I wrote this particular sentence 40 days ago), a friend observed that I’m slow to notice authoritarian environments—slow in general to identify and flag controlling or manipulative tactics. She mused that she has a more finely-calibrated internal barometer of "knowing" than I have, because she’d had a controlling mother.
That was interesting to me, because I’d had an adoptive parent with serious control issues as well. Ah, there was the difference. My first set of parents, the biological set, was negligent, distracted, irresponsible, frequently forgetting me in random public places. The second set was controlling, but stable, secure, affectionate. So from an early age I’d been presented with that false dichotomy: you could have liberty along with chaos and danger, or you could have safety and stability in exchange for enmeshing, for ceding autonomy, being surveilled, being overproduced. I'd changed hands from an unconscious mom to a stage mom.
At some point last year I bought a book called Discovering the Inner Mother, but I eventually realized I was too scared to even start reading.
One time, as a teenager who basically never got into trouble, I walked into the kitchen and realized I was extremely in trouble. My backpack was open with its contents spilled all over the kitchen table. My adoptive parent was waiting to confront me. She was holding a veeeerrry creased sheet of notebook paper. When I look back on this, I now believe she was searching for love letters either to or from my high school boyfriend—looking for concrete evidence that our relationship was inappropriate, I suspect, so she could find a reason to put an end to it once and for all.
Instead, I had written a note to my best friend, and I'd tested out using swears (liberally and edgily, and probably poorly implemented). The swears had been the problem. The note, previously folded into a pull-tab envelope, had not been delivered to its intended recipient after school. Rather, it had sunk to the sea floor of my backpack, where my caregiver had intercepted it after ransacking my stuff. She had unfolded the undelivered note and had read it. Now she was livid. The swears had been the problem.
Tell me everything before I can even think to ask was the lesson here. Transparency in exchange for safety! Artificial intimacy!!!!
This is my origin story as a compulsive oversharer.
There's an expression that has recently been making the rounds on TikTok, Loving a man is a humiliation ritual. That's an interesting comment on patriarchal norms and their chilling effect on interpersonal relationships but, for me, the sentence could be modified to read "a mother's love is a humiliation ritual."
Our anxious, beleaguered mothers are often the ones put in charge of readying us for a cruel world, what with its own caste system in the shape of an MLM. In other words, they're often our first exposure to patriarchal rules and structures: moms tend to be shunted into the role of the family cop. (Don't even get me started on "fun dads.")
But what is a 'humiliation ritual'? Well, first off, it's an Internet term (the 'real' term would be 'ritual humiliation', which is a mechanism of control in most hierarchical societies and clans). GQ explains that the term took off among right-wing conspiracy theorists, then caught fire across the Internet, particularly on social media. The GQ article is a really good explanation of the term, and it also quotes Naomi Klein's Doppelgänger, a book I bought on a recommendation and then completely forgot to read. I will read it eventually.
Here's that Klein quote, by the way:
Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden.
To humiliate means to debase and dehumanize; the word's etymological root is 'dirt'. It might also be considered a sort of performance. As Ute Frevert writes,
Similar to shaming, humiliation needs spectators to accomplish its purpose. Beyond destroying the victim’s sense of self, humiliation is about exposing his or her subjugation to a social world that looks on and cheers the aggressor.
To clamp down on those in society who seek to humiliate others thus entails depriving them of a complicit audience. Educating and incentivising citizens of all ages to refuse to consent to and, if possible, object to acts of deliberate humiliation is essential.
Last night I was on the phone with a good friend, and I mentioned the core biopsy I'd had three months ago. "It was supposed to leave a tiny puncture wound," I explained, "but it didn't heal correctly and it left a big ol' scar instead." I paused. "Literally, a 'core wound'," I clarified. It's very funny to me.
Lately I've been trying to solve for myself the mystery of ego and of id, of the sun and the moon. The procedure and subsequent scar had invited me to ruminate—in a way that I find too on-the-nose—on Melanie Klein's theory of object relations. Klein's work posits that, when care and attention are withheld from a child, to the extent that the neglected child goes hungry, the child, quite literally unable to perceive or distinguish and witness its mother as a whole, divides its caregiver into recognizable, understandable parts, i.e. a good breast and a bad breast. (I hate to say it, but what follows might be a viable defense for bottle-feeding.)
This is obviously a false dichotomy—this, the neglected child's first moral/value judgment—and this extreme bifurcation becomes its own form of developmental trauma. To be sure, having a caregiver who behaves erratically and unpredictably, vacillating between extremes, would also do it—no need for the personification of the boob. Either way, this false identity binary follows the child into adulthood under the guise of "splitting": as adults we may have difficulty completely integrating the 'good' and 'bad' 'halves' of ourselves and, in turn, we have difficulty seeing others as 'complete people', struggling to accept the multitudinous, seemingly contradictory facets of one another.
"Then, too," I continued without taking a breath, "there is the fact that, the more self-absorbed the mother, the more she sees her child as an extension or reflection of herself—and the more the child will therefore see themselves as as an extension of their mother, having internalized the belief that they're her reflection. And then as an adult they'll go on to see others as extensions of themselves, so they'll be hypercritical and potentially controlling, issuing harsh value judgments—"
"Wait! Hold up! Stop! I need you to—"
"Huh?"
"I need you to say that again."
"What did I—"
"The more self-absorbed the mother, the more the child will see themself as an extension—"
"Oh! Yeah." I tried to piece the original sentence together. "So a self-absorbed mother will make her child believe they're her reflection. My adoptive mother constantly warned me about getting into any trouble, because I was 'a reflection on' her. And it's like, no! I'm not! I'm a reflection on me!"
"For the record," my friend said, "I do see you as an extension of myself—"
"Oh, sure."
"In the sense of the fabric of the universe—"
"The rich tapestry of—" I said before descending into giggles.
I sometimes think, I said, laughing, I sometimes think the universe is just one guy—like Internal Family Systems, except all of life itself is the universe's 'internal family'—"just one guy in the fight of his life against himself." Oh, I cannot say this without cackling.
Maybe that means that when I am doing 'parts work'—trying to get all the competing energies inside me to communicate, or to at least get along, to each feel equally witnessed and equally paid-attention-to—that I am actually praying for world peace, in a way.
I also mentioned, to the same friend, that I'd read this book 20 or so months ago. I'd started out fully believing I would be reading about someone else's mother, then realized I was reading about my own. At that point, I'd melted down. I'd phoned my best childhood friend. "I can't recover from this!" I'd cried into the phone. "I will never be okay again!" At the time I super duper meant it, too.
"Because, you know, this had totally destroyed the foundation of my belief," I was explaining now. "I'd always struggled to understand the eventual deterioration of our relationship. And here was this book reframing it for me as, maybe the dynamic had been inappropriate from the start, maybe it didn't start with me. Which flew in the face of everything I'd believed, which was that I was the problem in every environment." I gasped, hearing myself. "That I was the problem in every environment!"
"Yep," my friend said.
And although other people must've genuinely believed I was the problem in those specific settings, it did my health no favors to go along with that narrative. But this belief was necessary in order for certain pyramids to retain their shape. That's just called job security.
When I was 6 or 7 years old, my brand-new guardians took me to Disney World for the first time (of two trips total). I remember getting onto the elevator with my most prized possession, a doll named Christina, who had a small, soft body and a big plastic head.
Another couple boarded the hotel elevator with us. The young woman covered her hand with her mouth to stifle her laughter: because Christina was my most prized possession, I was violently tossing her in the air without catching her. I might’ve been swinging her by one leg, letting her hard hollow head crash into the wall of the elevator.
Children are immature, antisocial, and the centers of their own universes. When that woman laughed, I was shamed in a constructive way; I was suddenly able to see my behavior through her eyes' camera lens. Why treat prized possession as object that is detestable? It will be many more years, if ever, before a child realizes that other humans are sovereign, boundaried nations who, if truly treasured, cannot be possessed or controlled.
Fifteen days ago I read, astonished, about no-fault divorce. The primary benefit of no-fault divorce—which is currently a political battleground in the U.S.—is that it allows the couple to solve their own conflict without triangulating by bringing in a third party, a judge to evaluate the evidence and determine who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. The end of many marriages is a tragedy, so naming a winner and a loser can feel a little grotesque. If you're grown-ups who love each other, you can split your belongings yourselves. It's cost-effective, besides.
The vice president is against all this, obviously; he thinks divorces should be as difficult and expensive and gut-wrenchingly bureaucratic to obtain as possible. Ugh. I have been navigating other bureaucracies lately; they are diabolical, deliberately labyrinthine and filled with catch-22s.
"Well of course he's opposed to it," I said of no-fault divorce out loud, closing the article and standing up from my desk. I wandered into my kitchenette area.
"Don't worry, J.D.," I said to myself now, grimly envisioning eventual cosmic retribution while soaping a dirty dish in the sink, "you're gonna come back as me. Actually," I said, dropping my voice low and muttering to myself, "I think I probably already did a go-around as J.D. Vance. That would explain why," I said, and I said the next part much louder, "I was born smug and on a mission. And already hating women!" I mugged at an invisible audience, shrugging with soapy hands: ta-da! Then I laughed, because I'm really just here to entertain myself.
Or maybe to punish myself—for having been J.D. Vance in another life, I mean. He's going to freak out if he ever discovers himself on the other side of the eight ball. Good luck being reincarnated as your own long-suffering grandma, buddy. You'll love the book you write about you.
A number of years ago I tried out one of those face-filter gender-swap apps and was viscerally upset by what I saw: the kind of louche inadvisably perched in a tiki bar all night (at the time I'd actually lamented, specifically, "tiki bar," and possibly also "Disney guy"), with too many strongly-held opinions and oh my god he's starting to slur his words. I really disliked imagining this about myself, only in part because it demystifies my friendships and dating record. I exclaimed to my spouse, "I am problematic! I am a problematic man!" He laughed, but I was serious.
I can't help but constantly worry I'm a 'good' woman but a very, very bad man. Or do I have that exactly backward? I feel like I was born to be a fun dad and, instead, there's an entire cop mom trapped screaming in the shadow he casts, having a fucking meltdown. Sometimes it feels like two people are trying to get a divorce inside of me, and they are asking me to be the arbiter of which one is 'right' and which one is 'wrong'. I refuse. I won't do it! Work it out amongst yourselves. Reconcile! Figure it out! I'm busy!
Actually, that's cute. That happens in Tomodachi Life a lot—where your friends' doppelgängers are all crushed into an apartment building together, living literally on top of one another, and they're constantly getting into little spats and coming to you to complain about it.
"Go make up," you tell them.
"Help me calm down first!" they chirp back in their little electro-bird voices, demanding coregulation. So you tend to them, feeding and clothing them until they've regained the capacity, the sanity, to say I'm sorry.
A phrase I keep returning to is erosion of the soul. I'm not exactly sure where I picked this one up; it feels like an idea that just floats around in the ether. And the powers-that-be are seemingly hellbent on it—on, not just killing us in dramatic and symbolic and preventable ways, but making sure to fracture our spirits into a million pieces first. This fragmentation of the Self is systemic and generational, so that the process of the soul's erosion extends well beyond cradle-to-grave.
Since typing the above paragraph, I've begun reading the 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. It is a semi-philosophical work by a psychologist who converted to Christianity in his 40s. In its second chapter, the author attempts to develop a working definition for 'evil':
Evil is in opposition to life. It is that which opposes the life force. It has, in short, to do with killing. Specifically, it has to do with murder—namely, unnecessary killing, killing that is not required for biological survival.
[...] When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is also that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life—particularly human life—such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.
The first time an adult tried to cover my mouth to keep me from talking, he also covered my nose, and I could not breathe. In a panic, I tried to bite the soft flesh of his palm. No! We do not bite! The first time I decided I didn't like or trust my biological parents, I hopped into a tiny motorized car and attempted to drive out the front door. No! We do not plot our escape!
I was constantly 'in trouble' by the time I was school-aged. No matter how I spoke, I was always too loud: "Your voice just carries." In class, I would feel restless and jump out of my desk, pacing around the room. No! We do not leave our assigned seat! At recess, if I didn't like someone else's behavior, I would punch that classmate in the face. No! We do not punch other children in the face!
On Friday (I wrote this particular sentence five weeks ago), a friend told me he is playing the latest Indiana Jones video game. I told him I'd been thinking about Indiana Jones a lot lately, because we constantly have to remind people that, yes, it's okay for us—or for most of us, on behalf of the rest of us—to punch Nazis in the face. In a way, we are having to unlearn a childhood lesson, giving ourselves permission to do the behavior we were born already doing.
When we are broken of our 'fight' and 'flight' responses, we are left with only 'freeze' and 'fawn', which is the whole point—to build a child who fawns and, later, an adult who fawns. Fawning and stewing, fawning and stewing, while frozen in place: it's the most capitalist thing there is.
"You're so angry!" my adoptive parent would admonish, a constant refrain—the anger was the problem—so I hid it, the way good children do. By age 11 I'd developed psoriasis. Unexpressed anger doesn't just get digested and disappear. The poison seethes in the body, migrates to the tissues, ferments. Eventually there must be ventilation or else it bursts.
When anger is disrespected—unacknowledged, unpracticed—it becomes impossible to properly direct. Unaddressed, it explodes onto the nearest bystander. This turns anger into something unhelpful, which further invalidates and devalues what is, oftentimes, a just feeling, an important clue. To bury it away is to hide a truth from yourself: a red flag, or maybe a key, a map.
Recently—and this time I actually do mean recently—I was chatting online with a friend as she did her day job.
"You sound stronger," she remarked. "Fortified." She went on to say she didn't hear fear in my 'voice' anymore—"more a productive anger." Then: "You've bridled it."
I raised my eyebrows at this, since this is extremely very much what I have been working on.
"Sacred rage!" I replied. "I kept running into that term on the Internet. I realized I'd had the anger groomed out of me." It was more than that, though. The term has challenged me to completely rethink myself.
"Figuring out how to bridle that rage into something that serves you, and is also a net positive on the world, is the hardest fucking thing," she said.
"Well it has to be honored and directed," I replied, having already written part of the above passage but having not yet finished it.
"Absolutely," she said. "Reckless anger, sure, that's dumb—and human. But bridled rage? Sacred, considered anger? A gorgeous thing. A necessary thing. It sounds like you've nailed it. (Teach me the waaaaaaaays!)"
"Uh YOU taught ME?" I replied, my dismay now totally unconcealed. "Hello!!"
I went on to say, well, for me, it's the mother wound. I was constantly in trouble as a kid for being angry, biting people, trying to run away. "Use your words." I did! I used them! Those got smacked down, too. You begin to ask yourself, why is everyone always trying to shut me up? I must have something important in here to say.
Who am I really angry at? It's complicated. If I were angry at just one mom, I'd have to also be mad at her mom, and her mom. Who am I really mad at? My mom—for reflecting patriarchal norms, for normalizing authoritarian excesses at home—and at her mom, and her mom, and her mom. So: "Ah! My mom is both victim and victimizer, embedded in the patriarchy, where she became my first experience with it...!" Any enmity or hostility that could be directed toward any one person is now several degrees removed. Ultimately my fury is at the invisible structure itself.
(To another friend, even more recently, I remarked that this thing goes straight to the top! "And who is at the top of the pyramid? A long-dead ghost!" We laughed. "The worst part," I said then, thoughtfully, "is the ghost probably had a good reason, originally, for setting up the whole system the way they did." Or, at least, they thought it was a good reason. Or maybe there was a specific problem they believed they were solving. Sometimes maybe the system starts off on the right foot and then deteriorates, degrades, enshittifies. Often, though, it is rotten to its very core.)
I concluded by telling my friend I was grateful for seeing certain models acted out interpersonally, because this had enabled me—empowered me, now that I'm thinking about it—to notice those same qualities on a macrocosmic scale instead.
"Grateful! Good lord," my friend replied.
"ABG!" I messaged back.
"Babe did you do a speed run on your lessons learned? lol. Fuckin NERD."
I do feel fortunate to have so many friends who are already moms, because it always feels great to get approval from someone else's mom.
That's as good a place to stop as any—to wash my hands of this entire topic and walk.