An ode to the mother and to love misunderstood

We mothers live with the sacred thought that we love our children. We do everything we can for their well-being and health, we give of ourselves, we express our love. Each of us, in whatever way she can, tries to do her best. But later we often begin to doubt whether we are doing the right thing, above all when our children, our dear creations, do not behave as they are expected to. They flare up, they treat us badly, and that hurts us. Then we ask ourselves questions that we try to answer (in the better case, because some of us do not even have time to ask).

What is going on?

Why is this happening?

Can I no longer talk to my daughter?

Why is my son silent and does not share anything?

Where is my daughter?

He is not right for her.

She is manipulating my son.

Why is he rude to me?

This child is not mine.

How did it come to this?

I have come across statements such as: “I love my son so much, and he ran away from home, he left me. He does not want me to help him, to support him. Why?”

“My daughter sends me away, she does not want to see me. What will I do without her? Life has no meaning.”

“My son has not managed to achieve anything in his life; he has no initiative.”

A daughter, happy that she has managed to break free from her mother’s possessive, crushing love, finds the man of her life. She discovers true and warm feelings and does not want to hear about her mother any more.

Disappointed and sad mothers. They look for the mistakes in themselves or attribute them to others. They look for someone to blame.

We mothers, so anxious to keep our child safe, do not dare let go of its hand. We hold it tight and do not let it fall. In this way we teach it that it must not fall, that falling is very frightening. We deprive it of its own experience of tumbling to the ground and getting up again, so that it can see for itself that there is nothing dramatic about falling, and that you do not stay in that position for ever: alone or with someone’s help, you get up and carry on. It is not humiliating to cry, to ask for help.

The smaller the child, the lower it falls from, and the more easily and quickly it gets up. If it does not learn to do this early, there is no way it will happen later; it will become dependent on the hand that must not let it go.

Sometimes we very much want to choose for our children. Without realising it, we take over their choices. Only because we think we have more experience, information, knowledge. That is undoubtedly so, but it is our personal experience, our personal knowledge. Let us allow the child to exercise its right to a personal choice, to build up its own experience, while we can agree or object, but with reasons and by sharing our own emotions and feelings.

How is a grown-up son to take the initiative if he has never had the chance to make a decision on his own and cope, if there has always been someone to stand behind him and act, to do things for him?

How is another grown-up son to ask for help if, when he needed it, there was no support beside him and he was always alone? He prefers loneliness and running away from a home where he never understood that he was loved, and where no feelings were shared.

The personal character we have shapes the particular nature of our relationships.

Some of us like to break away from reality, to build and live in an imaginary world of our own where everything is wonderful. We do not trust our bodies; we do not allow them to feel and to experience emotions, pleasure, love. We are afraid to touch; we comply with prohibitions inside us or outside us. Where is the child in all this? It is alive and physical, with its own needs for love and affection, and so it stops trusting its body and grows up with ideas, immaterial notions that it believes in more than in its own reality.

The ever-protective mother eagle, whose care knows no end. Is the child dressed well, has it eaten? Has it taken its sandwich? Self-sacrificing for the sake of the child. She is so possessive and crushing that the child’s only way out is to start a revolution and run away, or to turn into a powder keg that never stops filling up. It does not dare to unburden itself for fear of losing what it loves, and remains forever a loyal subject.

Some of us like to be admired, to be an important part of our loved ones’ lives. To control, in order to keep the child safe. To spare it negative feelings. The certainty that our children are what they are thanks to us, and that without us they could not cope.

We are afraid of being left alone. We are afraid that if the child leaves us, there will be no one left to love and adore us.

At other times we are anxious, living with our fears: whether we come across well at work, at home, among friends and relatives, neighbours, whether we are moral and ethical enough. We impose on ourselves and on the child the thousands of rules that we ourselves inevitably comply with. We sow the seed of rejecting the norms, or of the fear of breaking them.

In adolescence there are sometimes upheavals in the relationship between mother and child, and it is necessary to make time for communication. To build a strong bond, not one that punishes, burdens and binds, but one that brings relief, calm and trust.

We think it is only logical that our children assume, know and are convinced that we love them, because that is how it should be, it is logical, we are their mothers after all. We live with the thought that everything is fine and under control, that we talk normally with our grown-up child, but is that really so?

It is not the deeds or the sacrifices we make that are sufficient proof of our love.

Published in Zdravey magazine.