The Mother Wound

My journey to healing the most difficult wound of all

Where do I begin?

The very first piece I shared on Substack was called Trauma Train. It was a poem I wrote about my experience with my mom that started in August of 2022; that was about two years ago. At that time, she began to share stories of her childhood and about her marriage to my dad. These stories were very hard to hear; her childhood, as well as her subsequent marriage to my dad at the tender age of eighteen, were overwhelmingly unhappy times.

As a coach and spiritual person, I hear heart wrenching stories all the time and usually, I can bear it. I have a ritual to shake the emotions of others from my heart to carry on clean and clear for the next client. I thought I could do the same for my mom. I thought that I could listen, validate her pain, and perhaps help her release her heart and mind from the endless loop of torturous memories.

I was wrong.

I was wrong in every possible way. You see, her mind was being impacted by a tumour on her pituitary gland which meant short term memory loss; the long-term memories of her past were gloriously intact, filled with misery, sadness, and a need to speak her truth. She would tell me the most heinous details and not remember the next day, nay, the next hour, sharing the story.

I thought I could handle it. I thought by listening to her, I was being a good daughter. I thought I could lift my mom from her pain by listening. I could not have been more incorrect, which became imminently clear the day she began sharing stories about her marriage to my dad. There are things that no child should know in detail about their parents; she shared these with me.

I did not sleep for a week after the first horrible story of control, infidelity, and pain. Every night, I would dream the scene as she described it. I was only a baby when it happened and somehow, I found a way to blame myself for my father’s actions. I did not share the story with anyone at the beginning and I asked my mother to stop telling me. I spoke to my brother about the stories, without the gory details and he thought perhaps mom and I were having a communication issue. This left me feeling unheard, unsupported, and more alone carrying the burden of her pain. As a certified essential facilitator, who has coached others in the corporate world, as well as in my personal practice, and someone whose job it was for over ten years to write project and change communication for a company of over three thousand people, I rejected that assumption. I do not have a communication issue; I have an issue with these stories being told to me.

I was caught between being a good daughter, and preserving my own mental health. She told me she had no one else to speak to, no one else she trusted with the stories. I bought her a journal and some beautiful pens, suggesting that she write things to get them out of her mind. I suggested a therapist; she had been to one when she left my dad and it helped, didn’t it? That resulted in more stories about what happened when she tried to go to a therapist with dad.

I struggled with the conflicting feelings, a lack of sleep, and uncertainty about how to proceed for a while until finally, I confided the full story to my husband. His response was palpable; anger, protection, disgust, and a definite validation that the stories needed to stop.

Once again, I asked that the stories stop and for a while they did; the anxiety inside of me, however, did not stop. Every time her number popped up on my phone, I wondered if the stories would start up, driving across town to see her meant a knotted stomach, and a reminder of just what might be in store for me. I tried to steer her onto more positive things, I would try to change the subject by telling her about something good happening to me or one of the kids. She would appear to be listening, wait until I was done, and carry on as if I was some commercial break in her soap opera.

My husband said, she is like a juke box, once that quarter drops, the song has to play.

I started to limit my visits. I noticed that there was almost a time limit where she would run out of the current list of things to talk about, then revert back to the old; making note of the time, I would depart at the time the loop would start up, but not soon enough to stem the flow completely. There was one thing to be thankful for, that she stopped telling me stories about my dad. They were still awful but at least not about the person whose DNA coursed through my veins directly.

How is a daughter supposed to listen to the terrible things their father did to their mother and be okay with their parentage?

To be continued…

These are some of the books that helped me through these times:

Thank you for reading. Your time and attention are precious and I appreciate you spending it with me.