On Mothering the Mother Wound

& healing the chasm

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Antigone by Jean Anouilh (trans. Lewis Galantière)

My mother once told me she hadn’t been touched by my father in decades, the pain evident in her drawl. She sounded like a child, as she often does, innocent. Her sadness evoked something spirited within me, something lost and unsatiated. I was still young, still hungry for her love, still confused as to why our relationship was so distressing. I wanted to save her from her plight. Oh, Ammu, let me release you. But she had always been stuck in her misery, a catacomb for all of life’s betrayals, a blurring reminder never to trust anyone. To hate mercilessly. To pretend, to fake it in public, like I find many Librans to do, until she could release her anger onto us in private.

She remembers each memory with a wounded lick, counting them, recalling them, repeating the stories again and again. Of all the people who have hurt her, of all the things she’d lost. But she never remembers how she participates in other people’s trauma, how she’s not just a bystander, how we have grievances against her as well. She has committed grave acts of sin, but she only ever sees herself as the victim. It would take me years into my teens to learn, from my sister, about borderline personality disorder. I didn’t realize it was anything to be diagnosed, I just thought it was my mother. Her in all her bright, undulating fury.

+

I remember her as only having one tone, wrath.

When she was sweet, I stuck to it, honeycomb, never wanting the well to dry. Please, Ammu, love me, love me. I learned how to beg with her. Don’t hurt me, don’t touch me. But I never said it out loud, always silent, in my head. She liked it better that way, she liked me quiet. Her eyes punishing with a glare. Fond of pinching, jabbing, and hitting me with any kind of blunt (or sometimes sharp) object, I never knew how to fight back. I still don’t.

All I have left now is my silence.

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It’s been six years since we’ve talked, since I’ve heard her voice. This has been my choice. It took me years and a trauma therapist to understand I had extreme anxiety and C-PTSD, so that when we talked on the phone, I became easily distraught, hypervigilant to her whims and moods. This has led me to a lifelong tendency of being phone-avoidant. I still remember the times she’d call me to harass me, to scream her fury. Haram jati, chorer bacha, the words in Bangla are almost ludicrously funny when translated: bad seed, a thief’s child, and yet well into my adulthood, these words would penetrate every moment of safety I had built up around me. Miles away, both of us tethered to our phones, the words would catastrophically annihilate me when uttered in her voice. I always felt those words to my core. Like, I was that bad thing, bad seed.

+

She would use silence, too. For weeks at a time, she would ignore us. Generally, if she fought with my father or sister, she would use it as ammunition against us all, determining her power over the family, a war of attrition.

I never understood why we’d all be punished, perhaps this is why it has always felt like the three of us against her. She made it that way, orchestrated it with her retaliation. I can’t remember a time different from this, a time when she treated us with care or respect or vulnerability. She was always accusatory or blunt, using emotional and physical violence as a means to get her way.

It was through volatility that I found her managing my every move. I couldn’t visit friends, I couldn’t stay out late, I couldn’t even go outside without telling her where I was going. Once my sister and I came home an hour late from school, I was eight. She beat my sister with a wooden broom until she bled from her ear, blued and bruised. It was a threat, as every act of violence was. I remember being so embarrassed that she did it outside, where walking neighbors or cars driving past could see the humiliation. My sister took the beat, as she always did, with a sense of nobility that I found striking, oppositional to me.

I have always been the weakest link, too emotional, too feeling, too scared. All I’ve learned to do in my thirty-five years of being on this planet is learn how to run from my mother. Very, very fast and very, very far.

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She still scares me, but I have nightmares about her less. After six years of starting trauma therapy and sitting with grandmother ayahuasca, I’m no longer stuck in my vault of pain. I can see her clearly, through the fog, but I still can’t be near her.

I think of her touching me and my skin crawls over. I think of her hands, and I wish that my only memories of them weren’t pain. She has soft, chubby little hands that I loved to massage. Sometimes I still wish I could touch them to ease her arthritis. I became good at locating the ache, relieving her tension, but all I remember of those hands is brutality now. Something that I can’t release, like tension, like IBS, are the memories. When they come, it debilitates me.

Sometimes I want to remember so I have reasoning for why I am the way that I am. I need proof, goddammit. Proof of why it all hurts so much.

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I want her to die, became a childhood mantra. If I’m being honest, I still wish for it. So I could go back home, so I could see my father, so I could hold my sister and say I’m sorry for abandoning you. They didn’t deserve it, they didn’t deserve what I did to them. Which is leave. Which is tell everyone what happened to me. I ruined everyone’s lives, didn’t I? Or maybe she already did that and I took the only chance I had for survival. But I want to go home. I want a childhood bed. I want to be back in Australia. I haven’t been back in six years, and my body misses the smell of eucalyptus.

+

My anger has dissipated. In fact, these days I rarely feel it towards her. I hardly even think of her most days, and when I do, she’s just a remnant of a former life. I feel shame that I have felt motherless when so many children are actually motherless but I’ve never known what a mother is for, or what goodness a mother can bring.

When Muslims tell me paradise is at your mother’s feet, I want to scream, not when you’re abused by her, not when you have to witness her depravity, all the sick things that she’ll do to you. But people expect mothers to be abused by their husbands, so nobody has sympathy for a child. I’ve never known my mother or felt like she was mine. She’s always been a horror show, something out of a movie. At times, so sadistic that it was like a caricature of evil. Somebody who harms you in the ways she has can’t be your caretaker, too. Love and abuse cannot coexist, I think, bell hooks ringing in my ears.

I understand this is why I’m so absent from the experience of motherhood, why it’s escaped me. It’s an impossible experience, these days, to long for something you will never have, or a time you will never get back. I am no longer a masochist. These days, I protect myself, my body and soul. I say thank you to the dark corners that exist inside of me, I say thank you to her, for making me into exactly who I needed to become.

At times, all I feel for her… is love. Or, even mercy.

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Who would have thought I could have arrived here? Not me, not I, not my misery. I couldn’t have imagined that Allah would revive me, that I would no longer be a dead, touched and broken thing… but I’ve stirred out of my woundedness. I’ve found a way back to myself… or a new way… to myself. It’s possible to heal. It’s possible to forgive. I realize it’s not always possible to forget, but I don’t want to punish her anymore. My absence is a punishment. I know she prays to see me, wails in her sleep and wakes my father up with my name on her tongue. I know she bullies them to find ways to contact me, but over time, I feel her control less and less. My absolution is that I escaped. And that I learned what was never mine—this life—and regained it in my grasp. Isn’t that extraordinary?

Nobody showed me the way. I pulled myself up off the floor, and I showed myself the path. I spoke with clarity and compassion, things people rarely afforded me. I learned to be soft when all I’ve ever known was cruelty. I taught myself to cook, to oil my body, to grow my hair back when it had fallen out, to heal my gut, to look at myself and say, I love you, baby Fa… and mean it.

Right now, I feel rich. I realize that this is the biggest gift. Mother’s Day is no longer a day when I feel anger at other people’s childhoods. I can go about my day and almost forget that I spent the first thirty years of my life unloved. This love that I have for myself makes me unbreakable.

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I write to you all, especially those like me, because I love you. I love you like I love myself. I love you fiercely. I love you like a mother does. You are not alone; you are exceptional because of your power, because of the pain that has anointed you. Use that pain as service, use that pain to heal yourself and others. You have an incredible gift inside. To the incest survivors, child sexual abuse survivors, you are my kin. My chosen family. I speak so you can hear me. I got you. We got this. Let us bury our wounds and plant seeds.

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If this essay resonated with you, I will be teaching a three-part workshop on writing with vulnerability. I’d love it if you joined me or if you shared it with someone who needs this right now. Sending love.