Contemplating the mother wound on Mother’s Day
The daughter who must not rise
I know many wonderful women, both mothers and non-mothers, who share one thing in common. They were rendered invisible by their mothers and the enabling members of the family system through roles like scapegoat, servant, nuisance, golden child, parentified child, or emotional caretaker of everyone around them.
As I dug deeper with them, envy repeatedly emerged as the driving force beneath the wounding behaviour.
Envy is a status regulating mechanism used to preserve a social order within a hierarchy. The object of envy, the daughter, is seen as competition for male attention, particularly that of the father, but also as a threat to the mother’s status, visibility, authority, desirability, and psychological position within the family system. The mother, feeling threatened because of her own underdeveloped character and immaturity, experiences her daughter’s emergence as destabilising and reflexively (and sometimes deliberately) attempts to contain, diminish, criticise, shame, neglect, sabotage, invalidate, belittle, blame, ignore, and employ countless other strategies to prevent her daughter from rising or even attempting to rise, thus restoring internal order and preserving the carefully tended family hierarchy.
Envy that is disowned drives women to take down those they experience as threats to their status, turning them into rivals in response to their status anxiety, even when that person is their own daughter.
The daughter grows up believing she has a stain on her soul and is destined to be unloved, abandoned, invisible, or trapped in dysfunctional relationships because men cannot be trusted. Not surprisingly, the primary male authority in her life never protected or defended her from her mother’s aggression. Keeping the envious matriarch happy and preserving the social order is the enabling father’s priority in this family system.
For all the women whose mother wound is reactivated on Mother’s Day, you owe it to yourself to become visible to yourself, to build, create, love, take risks, to succeed in your endeavours, and to keep trying even when the inner bully that sounds like your mother tries to convince you that your existence is shameful, excessive, pointless or a waste.
The response to envy is to persevere, innovate, and pursue your goals so you rise in status on your own terms and become visible outside the defunct family system that tried to erase you.
Motherhood is hard. It confronts women with their own character, envy, insecurity, narcissism, immaturity, selfishness, status anxiety, and unresolved wounds. Some women mature through matrescence while others become trapped in cycles of control and aggression, taking their distress out on the children they're meant to nurture.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers reading this and love to all the daughters whose precious lives were made possible by a mother, regardless of her character.
Thank you to all my friends, family, and clients who have shared their experiences of motherhood with me over the years. Thank you to my mother whose unconditional love has been one of the stabilising forces in my life.
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You certainly aren't afraid to bring up some difficult topics. And you do a good job with them. I always labeled this competitiveness. But envy is a good label.
Thank you, Nathalie. That was apt.