One of my mother wounds is rarely feeling free of tension when I say No. \u00a0As a child, the only way I could come up with to deal with my raging alcoholic mother, even when she was sober, was to stay small, stay compliant and say yes to whatever she wanted from me.<\/p>\n
Who knows what I would have wanted to be or wanted to express outside of her environment, but I grew up within it as a people pleaser, and more specifically, someone fine tuned to try and please my never satisfied mother. \u00a0She just never liked me. \u00a0It started off poorly at my birth when she was disappointed I was a girl and went on until her death when she disinherited me.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, the wounds from this mother have been a source of a lot of deep sorrow but also a lot of growth. Taking back my power has been exhilarating as well as painful. \u00a0Not being compliant, not toeing the line, not stifling my truth, not staying small: each act of defiance has helped heal the wounds that generations of women in my family and every family carry. \u00a0Each act of defiance has released me into a greater sense of self.<\/p>\n
Defying my family of origin and my mother in particular took me into my own resources, that deep well within us all, and took me to the God within. \u00a0I am so grateful for this.<\/p>\n
And yes, I feel compassion for my mother who was carrying her own immense mother wounds. \u00a0But this compassion lives inside me alongside the conviction that it was not okay what she did to me and I do not have to deny this truth to cover for her failings.<\/p>\n
One thing that took a long time to address was the mother wound of self care. \u00a0My mother left me no room for self care. \u00a0She couldn’t even be bothered to hold the bottles that fed me. She propped them with pillows and left me to it.. \u00a0My parents would laughingly tell stories of the doctor telling my mother that I was not gaining enough weight and was too polite a baby. I learned early to stay small and make few demands.<\/p>\n
But I was a person, as we all are, with needs and wild, fiery life flowing through me. As I got older, I realized I could have a secret life \u00a0of doing what I wanted as long as I was home in time to do my chores before dinner. I wandered the forests and imagined a different life. Sometimes I lived it. \u00a0Completely unsupervised in my secret life, I learned to drive a car when I was nine. \u00a0My best friend Lynn and I would drive her family’s old Studebaker up and down a strip in her back field, \u00a0We could get “Old Foolish Carriage” up to 30 mph down one straightaway. \u00a0I am sure it was the act of a loving God when the front axle broke, and the car died.<\/p>\n
As life unfurled, I continued to balance out the expression of my inner zest better than my need for self care. \u00a0Life at home felt like a coffin, but away from home I explored things that I was truly passionate about and committed to them fully. \u00a0Later I declared my truths to one and all and stood by them even as there was\u00a0intense criticism about my choices. \u00a0My spiritual search started in earnest when I began my own family in my twenties. My father thought my spiritual choices and life work meant I worked for the devil. \u00a0My mother just called me crazy.<\/p>\n
By the time my family of origin devolved into the new low of my youngest drug crazed and violent brother threatening to kill me and my children while the rest of my family of origin looked the other way, I found my mother and father’s behavior dark but not unexpected. \u00a0I had patched together my own way to live my life and go for my truth. \u00a0I grieved at what I had never had from them- love or even safety- but I continued on, not looking to them for help. \u00a0I followed through on the cultural taboo of breaking off with them completely in order to use what energy I had to protect myself and my own family.<\/p>\n
Some mother wounds were a bit more slippery to see and resolve, and self care was one of these. \u00a0When I look back on the orthopedic injuries I have had- I broke my left arm and wrist into dozens of pieces in 2012 and then did the same thing to my right arm four years later- I see that these were opportunities to heal the original drama of having parents that did not care for my physical being when I was a child. \u00a0I may have mentioned this before, but when the orthopedic surgeon looked at the x-rays of my break in 2012, the first thing she said was that I had broken my arm previously, and it had not been set properly. \u00a0When she said this, I had some deep awareness that this happened when I was four. It didn’t set right because I was not taken to a doctor. \u00a0I also have broken ribs and broken bones in my feet that healed wrong. It pierces me with sorrow that little Molly navigated broken bones all alone.<\/p>\n
With the more recent arm breaks, my recuperations were a chance for me to receive love and care from the people around me now and also learn to slow down and inner mother myself in my recovery. It was also a chance to let go of the kind of self vigilance I have had since birth and learn to trust that in the life I had created for myself I had surrounded myself with people that would care for me when I couldn’t care for myself. AND THEY DID.<\/p>\n
I am in my sixties now and through my second Saturn return. \u00a0For me, the territory of this Saturn return was a return to the concern of \u00a0self care. \u00a0The last few years have called me to pare away more lingering “a nice daughter does this” ie “a nice daughter doesn’t have time to take care of herself because she is busy taking care of everyone else.” The paring away means I am free to follow through on what I believe to be my purposes here with more reverence and more discernment, more joy and more space.<\/p>\n
Life gives us so many opportunities to examine what it is we believe is important and what needs to be discarded. \u00a0The old dragon mother dialog of shoulds becomes increasingly unhelpful, \u00a0but mercifully, life constantly highlights these old chestnuts and helps us to discard them. No is always a vital word for women and a sentence in its entirety, but this comes home to me more and more as I am aware my time is not infinite as Molly Sheehan.<\/p>\n
Yesterday was a small victory for me and my ease with the word No. \u00a0A fellow beekeeper came to my door wanting me to contribute honey from our two hives so she could fulfill a contract she had with a local organization. \u00a0I told her I did not have the honey for this. \u00a0I could have added nor do I have the interest as this organization has been a patriarchal bastion of pain and suffering for all of my family. \u00a0She pressed me, saying it was bee sisterhood and the bees could give more honey now. \u00a0This is way past when I harvest honey from our bees. \u00a0At this point in the season, \u00a0my whole focus is on getting the hives through the winter and this means ample honey for them. \u00a0I felt my niggling old mother wound of being nice, sharing at my own expense, but it was exhilarating to just say No.<\/p>\n
And so I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my mother wounds is rarely feeling free of tension when I say No. \u00a0As a child, the only way I could come up with to deal with my raging alcoholic mother, even when she was sober, was to stay small, stay compliant and say yes to whatever she wanted from me. Who knows … Continue reading Taking Care of the Hive<\/span>