008: MONSTER MOTHER

This episode is intentionally released in May, which is Maternal Mental Health Month. In acknowledgement of this, I am sharing some links to the organization Postpartum Support International, which helped me gain my footing as a new mother.

Donate to Postpartum Support International:

https://www.postpartum.net/join-us/donate/

Free online support meetings for parents:

https://www.postpartum.net/get-help/psi-online-support-meetings/

This episode I recorded many months ago, but it has taken me some time to feel like I’m ready to share it. The week when I’m publishing this episode, it is the month of May, which is Maternal Mental Health Month. And in this theme, I felt like it was the right time to publish this episode, where I share a bit of my experience as a mother, being shocked to discover that entering into motherhood is not all light and roses. Well, maybe roses, that include both a beautiful flower and some thorns. Some potential for pain.

I wanted to share this episode mostly for other mothers or parents who have experienced something similar and haven’t had the space to process this painful fact, that there are so many sides to parenting, and [that] despite how deeply we love our children, there will come times when we will do something wrong, as human beings, that have their own baggage, their own history. Maybe their own reactive patterns. Traumas. And how to process this realization.

So, in this episode I share with you what I wrote up when I tried to process these feelings, this experience, when I had yelled at my child, as some kind of a sudden defense reaction, that shocked me and left me feeling ashamed. Left me feeling that I was a bad parent. A bad mother.

This episode is emotionally intense at times, so if you don’t have space for that, then feel free to skip or listen to it some other time. But I will share it here for those who feel a resonance and who could gain some value from having a space here, to process, or feel into similar experiences in their own life.

So, thank you for joining this space.

***

I am a bad mother.

I made my child feel afraid.

I made them feel unsafe.

I held them as they screamed. I could not comfort them. They just screamed and screamed and screamed.

(sigh)

Something in me snapped, and I roared at them, and they screamed even more (of course). I thought I would go crazy, but then their father came, thankfully. Saving us both from this moment of pure darkness.

And I howled. I screamed out. From pain, or wrath, or both. I howled like an animal. Like a monster. Like the monster that I am.

The monster mother.

There’s a side of me that wants to explain and defend myself, to please, make people understand, what led up to it. To make myself understand.

All the traumas. The fight or flight response. Being pushed to the limit, by sleepless nights and exhaustion, until I snapped.

Another side of me wants to tell myself “SHUT UP. Nothing can justify what you did. Nothing can make it right. It happened, and you FAILED.”

I failed, as a mother, and now I deserve to carry my shame, as a type of repentance. But even that is never going to be enough. I hate myself for what I did. Sometimes I feel like the right thing to do would be to remove myself from my child’s life, so that there could never be a risk that I would hurt them, scream at them, again. But then I would take away that choice from them. And I think that it’s their choice.

In the end, the only way that I can truly repent is by remaining here, and trying to learn and to heal. To not abandon my child. But not abandon myself either.

And if the day comes, when my child chooses to break off our bond, that is their choice to make.

Images of the selfless, self-sacrificing mother float above me, like unreachable Gods. Ideals, that I can never live up to.

Not anymore.

I started out my journey into motherhood with the naïve notions, or, hopeful notions, that probably many of us have. I was going to be the calm, patient mother. The mother who is present and always loves playing with her child. Who always has fun, who enjoys, who can appreciate her child. And I was those things. I am.

But I was other things too. I am other things too.

Things I don’t want to be. Things that I tried to suppress.

With the birth of my child. With the all-encompassing love that was awakened in me, other sides opened to. A wrath. A darkness. Is that the shadow necessary to balance out all that light, and all that love? Does this happen to other mothers too, or is it just me?

(sigh)

I watch images of other, older Goddesses. The ones that also have a Dark Goddess aspect. She is reachable. She is here. She is me.

I am a manifestation of her in human form, because the older goddessess, that also have a dark aspect, hold both sides. The blinding light of life, and the deep darkness of death and destruction.

And I suddenly realize that my snapping and roaring at my child happened at a time when I was denying myself from expressing my darkness. I wanted to nurture my child so deeply. I wanted to help them, to care for them, to comfort them, that I somehow stepped over to the other side. Into the opposite, and I roared.

Because I had no outlet for that dark, destructive power, it forced its way out at the worst moment.

I feel that I need to share this story to help others who may have done the same. Or others, who are shocked by the darkness that came with motherhood.

(sigh)

To create this space, where I can express that darkness. Because it needs its place. You need to let it come out, somehow. You’re carrying so much power. Your creative power of caring and love needs to be balanced out by your destructive darkness.

This doesn’t sound nice. It sounds horrible, because, we are taught to think in the terms of creation and light being the good, and destruction and darkness being the bad. But in different situations, in different ways, we need both.

So in this space, that darkness can be now, for a moment.

Take a moment to feel it in you. To allow it to be. To sit with it.

And maybe, hopefully, it will not surprise you the way it surprised me.

I try to listen to it now, to hear what it has to say and learn from it.

What do you want, dark and destructive power? The mirror side of my love and creative power. My dark destructive power tells me that it is awakened when it wants me to set a boundary. It wants to remind me of the space that exists between me and my child. That space lets both of us grow. That space reminds me about the value that my own life - just my own life - also holds.

I can have a life of my own too.

The way that mothers are portrayed in my culture, or the way that I have taken on the role of a mother - mothers are denied any right for their own life. When you become a mother, you lose your right to a self, because the force of that tremendous role: The Mother, the archetypal character, overwrites your person.

And when that starts happening, the Dark Goddess steps up. Because eventually she knows, that the mother that can sustain in caring for her child long-term. Is the mother who can also sustain in caring for herself.

The selfless, personless mother who melts into her child might not roar at them, but she stands at the risk of suffocating them.

If she does not recognize where she ends and her child begins, she will not be able to give her child any space to grow, and she cannot grow either, because she has lost herself and has nothing to grow.

And that’s why we need both. We need both the closeness and the distance.

In denying myself my need for distance, for space, my “dark goddess aspect” stepped up and tried to create that space by force. But I don’t want to use that kind of force on my child.

I need to intentionally create space, other spaces for all my sides. For all my emotions. So that I can express my love. So that I can express my anger. So that I can express my love unburdened by that anger.

I can never again be a mother that has not hurt, has not scared, yelled at my child. But in this, I’m not alone. For each and every mother, the day will come when they have to hurt their child in one way or the other. If not by screaming, then by simply, being unable to live up to the child’s expectations.

We will all go through life experiencing some kind of a hurt. And I can’t remove hurt from my child’s life. But I can be a mother who takes the next step. Instead of abandoning my child because I feel too ashamed to be around them, I can stay, and admit that what I did was wrong. I can tell my child that their reaction to my actions makes sense. Their screaming when I roared at them makes sense. That their emotions are valid.

I can tell them that I’m sorry.

I can tell them that I’m also still in a process of healing and in the process of learning, and that I’m grateful for this opportunity to learn from them, to learn with them.

I can tell them that I love them no matter what, but that my actions were not in line with that love, because my fight response got activated.

I can tell them that this was not their fault, that it stems from my own trauma.

From abuse that I have gone through myself, which has created a very strong defense reaction, when my nervous system gets overstimulated.

Maybe I don’t tell all of these things to a two-year-old. Of course I express it in a way that I think they can understand. But I do tell them these things, more or less.

Once I have calmed down, I can tell them.

And I have.

And I will.

I will keep doing so, until I don’t need to anymore.

***

Inside of me I can see the visual of a flower. This flower is me, growing in my own garden. The garden of my life.

And there I can see another flower. A smaller flower. The flower of my child. And we share a root. We are connected, under the surface.

We are connected to other roots too.

But above the surface, I can grow on my own.

And so can my child.

We can grow together

and alone

in the garden of

life.