Mother Wounds

Hi beautiful peeps!

I’m currently writing this to you while healing from a herniated disc in my neck. I spent most of November in bed as a blubbering mess from illness after illness and with that, mental health spiral after spiral. (I feel like it was the Universe’s way of forcing me to rest, since, if you know me, that’s difficult for me to do as I’m quite the opposite of a couch potato.)

I had a lot of time to think about my relationship with my mother— a topic that never really ever leaves my sphere of thought, truthfully. So this month’s piece is a poem surrounding that.

I know it’s a spicy one, too, when I finish writing a piece and just stare intensely perplexed at my computer screen like that Calculus lady meme, and ask myself: “Yikes. Am I really going to share this?”

But here I am, because that’s the whole point of this newsletter.

Writing this felt scary, too, like I was in some violation of some universal contract we all have in society to never speak less than positively about our mothers. When we say anything even slightly negative about them, it often feels like slander or vitriol, because we live in a mother-loving culture, mothers are holy, and rightfully so— heck, before we’re even born, we quite literally reside within their physical bodies.

Our bonds with them feel emotionally, psychologically and spiritually inseparable at times. Therefore, it also makes sense that any conflict or disruption with them can hurt us tenfold than any other relationship in our lives. She holds the power.

So a disclaimer: To be 1000% clear, I love my mom. I would do and have done anything for her. She is beautifully and tumultuously complex, and although I think I know her so well, being her only daughter, I am positive I only know 5% of the multitudes she contains. So don’t get it twisted, y’all. I have tons of stories about how awesome and powerful she is, but this month, this is what it is.

Enjoy.
With mucho gratitude,
Amy

Word count: 1,150

Premium subscribers, please find the full pieces here:

I have this recurring dream of my mother crying
and I’m carefully wiping her tears
except she isn’t nearly 60 years old
Instead, she inhabits the body of a toddler
Here, she is my adopted daughter
Left in my possession,
I have been given the role of her primary caretaker
To learn the lessons of this sacred karmic bond 
from a past lifetime

She kicks and screams
She likes to pull my hair and punch me in the leg
when she doesn’t get her way
And I allow all the beating and screaming
because of all the beating and screaming
I know her biological mother did to her
And her mother
And her mother
And her mother
And so on and so forth

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