It is common for mothers to reject a child by assigning particular hopes to that child, even the fantasy of whose realization fills the mother with envy she can not tolerate. In order to protect herself from chaos, she rejects the child, who is granted no standing independent of the fantasy. Some hopes are truly dreadful. Our mother’s eyes mirror us. To see with our own gaze we must step through the mirror. If it does not yield we have no choice but to shatter the glass, risking injury to ourselves.
Much, if not most, of what we know of our mothers we know as neither “me” nor “not me”, but rather as a vein of personal possibility rich in the intrigue of the familiar. We labor throughout our lives to extract ourselves from this, to mine and refine it.
What we might call “momologue,” the discourse of our mothers within us, is located in an indefinite zone between monologue and dialogue, moving now closer to one pole and now closer to another, occasioning us considerable confusion about our internal states as subjects.
A mother’s job is to support the development of just that fantasy of mother that will later provide the standard by which she is indicted, tried and found wanting.
Mothering exposes many a woman’s Achilles heel, so that she is internally shamed forever before her children’s questioning eyes.
For the child of an unavailable mother, another name for mother is “the closest person I never knew.”
Many a woman who experiences her life and body as prison, sets out to have a child as a form of jailbreak. She hopes she will be able to free herself from herself by reproducing. Imagine the disappointment that must ensue. One way to cope with such disappointment is simply to repeat the whole process without recognizing that it is doomed to failure.
What every child experiences is that mother, the most intimate ally, is separated by but a single blink of the eye from mother, the most intimate enemy. A mother who is only good is only half a mother.
When our mothers use denial to avoid dealing with what is most central to us and most inconvenient to them, we learn to imagine others as stones.
There are many mothers whose devotion to their children is only a masquerade. What lies behind this sentimental ruse is a relationship of ruthless, even sadistic expropriation based on a tyrannical envy that has its origins in the mother’s own immense frustrations, frustrations so great and so far off the human map that she can cope with them only by denial and dissembling.
We live as very very small children in the shimmering tent of our mothers’ aroma. The comfort of this experience no subsequent disillusionment can take from us.
The secret of separating from many a self-proclaimed devoted, even selfless mother, is the realization that, despite all the protestations to the contrary in word and gesture, such a mother is quite selfish enough to survive on her own.
In the recesses of our minds we are prone to experience ourselves as if we were our mothers more than we care or dare to know.
There are many mothers who can not bear to hear that their children can love them with their imperfections but not without them.
Because our mothers are our original and most intimate enemies, we should not be surprised when later opponents take on a maternal guise and seem to us implacable, overwhelming, unreasonably unyielding, bent on depriving us, humiliating us, even destroying us. Nor should we be surpised that we are attached to our enemies and continue to want from them what they do not have to give.
We do not leave our mothers once and for all, but thousands of times in the course of our lifetimes, each time asking ourselves, “Is there life after mother?”
One of a mother’s most intimately arduous tasks is to find consolation for the illusion of omnipotence which her child was for her. Motherhood confronts a woman at once with heightened illusions of omnipotence and the most immediate facts of personal vulnerability, including death at childbirth..
When we are tiny, we experience our mother’s body as a collection of continents, a prophecy of all travel to come.
When our mothers are unconsciously, but regularly and deliberately cruel, what is most dangerous to us as small children is that we experience our sufferings as foolish, hidden from ourselves behind a partition of deceit erected in the service of our loyalty to our mothers.
Every mother is a monster in that it is her job to demonstrate life to her children.