What to Do When You Need a Mother

While dusting my hallway last week, I glanced up at the large photograph on the wall of my mother as a child. “I wish you were here Mom, to give me advice”, I said to it.

New losses and an overriding fear or two had been dominating my quiet moments. I knew that if I went to my mother with my issues, her responses to my problems would be soothing but she would also make practical statements and astute observations on my various predicaments. And that’s what I really needed.

For reasons I have never been able to figure out, my mother had street smarts. Given her background, this aspect of her personality has confounded me.  She just seemed to get the caprices of humanity and had an innate understanding of what made someone a good person or a bad one. Lord knows I needed her thoughts about my situations and my state of mind.

Yesterday, I read an article that I am still mulling over. It was about how the feeling of being excluded is what gives us shame. The writer cited a study where athletic ballplayers were eliminated from playing a game while the lousy players were kept on. Even knowing that the athletes were the best players, they still felt a significant amount of shame compared to the bad players, who felt no shame, even though they knew they were terrible ballplayers. It made me think about bullying, which has exclusion at the heart of it, and how victims of bullying feel such terrible shame even though they haven’t done anything wrong. My mother would have understood this theory even without reading the article. She always just knew.

In the wonderful Peter Pan movie, “Hook”, Wendy’s granddaughter Maggie shouts at the evil Hook, “You need a mother very, very badly”. She says it because she recognizes that what is missing in Hook is his love, kindness and maternal nurturing. Maggie, a child, perceives the lack in this fearsome pirate. Her observation is a cutting way of exposing his terrible emptiness as a human. And this is how my mother would have soothed me – with her unique assertions drawn from a knowing within her, just like Maggie. “You can’t kid a kidder”, was also one of her favorites.

So what mothering sustenance can I find since my mother no longer lives on earth? I could search for other intelligent mothering types of the same ilk or I could learn to give it to myself.  I am happy to share the reserves I have drawn upon.

Going to the books – I have plenty of wonderful books that address the need for understanding. But even beautiful picture books can remind me of grace simply by my flicking through them. In addition, I found snippets of former wins within these pages with my random notes in margins and the postcards tucked inside that were sent to me by loving people in the past.

Use of re-mothering dialogue – I’ve recalled some of my mother’s prior one-liners and assertions that she used in other scenarios. For instance, when I used to tell her about someone at school who hurt me, she would often simply say, “And what do you care what they say?”, or “Think above it”, and even once “A pox on him then!”. These one-liners saved me more than once and by re-using them in potent self-talk, I have found them helpful again. This practice has built a stronger inner voice that I trust – a sort of wise mother within.

No blame – no shame – I refuse to blame myself and feel shame for being a human soul with a myriad of emotions and experiences. What brought me to the brink is essentially having a humanistic sensibility and a deep caring of outcomes in a world that is increasingly alienating and my mother would have known this. And that’s what would have made her say the very things which would have turned me around.

I’m doing much better now and I have achieved a wonderful calmness in my realm. Life is like that, isn’t it? A long stretch of peace and joy and then a period of unease and worry over something. But if I can allow myself to use my mother’s tools on my own, it goes a long way in helping me regain balance.