The Mother Wound

This is an excerpt from my memoir, which is currently a work in progress.

CW: abuse, neglect

C.S. Lewis is famously (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in Christ like I believe in the sun. Not because I can see it, but because by it, I can see everything else.”

My mother wound is like that. I know it’s there, not because I can feel it, but because by it, I feel all other wounds. Wounds from others really just feel like expansions of — or elaborations on — wounds from her.

It’s difficult to speak of her, not because she was so many destructive things and the words are too heavy, but because she was so few life-giving things and the words are too faint, too slippery. There is a mother-shaped absence on the inside, and I keep trying to fill it with tiny grains of word sand, using only my fingers.

It’s only been in the last few years that experts are starting to recognize the damage done to children by neglect. The damage of abuse is a given; abuse builds all the wrong neural pathways that lead to repeating patterns of dysfunction. Decades can be spent trying to tear down painful highways in the brain that keep the person trapped in self-destruction… in favor of building newer, healthier paths.

More recently people have begun to notice that — as grueling as that is — it’s perhaps easier in some ways than trying to grow a pathway where there isn’t one at all. It’s easier to fix something broken than to build something where there is nothing. This is the difference between abuse and neglect. While both things can feel insurmountable — and this is definitely not about which is ‘worse’ — it took many years for experts to start taking note of the impact of deprivation on children.

My mother happened to be both abusive and neglectful, but her methods of abuse were more covert. Her ultimate target was my soul, not my body. The combination almost seemed engineered to contradict itself and keep me confused; as if to make me question whether the abuse was actually even abusive because I wasn’t worth noticing in the first place, remember? — so why would anyone expend that much effort on me?

If my avoidant attachment style was a weed, and you could yank it up by the roots to see what it grew from, you’d find a huge ball of nothing. An absence instead of a presence. A space where something should be but isn’t. Her presence in my life is expressed most painfully by absences.

How do you write about what isn’t, what wasn’t?

There are some mothers who are simply bad at mothering; they don’t understand what children need but they try to give their children what they can and their hearts are in the right place.

My mother was not one of those women.

My heart was her science lab.

My emotions were her toys.

It’s not even that she just didn’t love me; that would be simple enough, and while sad, much less complicated to try to understand or explain.

It’s that she didn’t seem to see me as a person, but rather, an object; a thing to be experimented with, shaped, molded, influenced — like a lab rat to be prodded and poked and injected and observed for whatever reaction she could invoke in me — whether by her actions directly, or by withholding something from me that I desperately needed.

So what logically follows is also this: the absence of my mother is associated with safety, whereas the presence of my mother is associated with danger. I learned at a young age to stop needing her, because needing her meant she had to appear, and when she appeared, whatever came after that was too painful for me. But this task was multi-faceted, because not only could I not stop needing her all together (children need a mother), but I also learned that she required me to need her in specific ways — so she could feel important — but only in the exact ways she found fun and personally fulfilling.

However long it took, over time, my baby heart gave up. Dysregulation became the safest place to be. Dysregulation became a constant state; a state my body handled in terrifying isolation, in the only way a newborn can: some form of comprehensive shut down.

Eventually, up became down and right became left, and my nervous system became activated when in close proximity to others, rather than being comforted by them. Being near — both physically and also emotionally — had come to feel dangerous.

Avoidant attachment is about feeling safer when alone; being alone is the state in which my nervous system learned to be at rest.

My mother was where the hope of co-regulation went to die.

My mother was fright with no solution, and later, I found God to be just more of the same.