Like many of the women who came of age between the Depression and World War II, my mother spent much of her adult life feeling thwarted, frustrated, bitter and depressed. Much had been made in high school of her considerable intellectual capabilities. Still, she'd been forced by her father to give up a college bound track for a business track in which she'd learn skills to help support her family during the depression. She'd had a brief (and from her journals, a seemingly exciting) career as a legal secretary. Yet, once she married, she was expected, according to the custom of the time, to quit and be solely supported by her husband.
During the war, she sent me to live with her parents when my father went into the Navy. She went back to work as a legal secretary and kept our apartment. For a brief and heady time, she got to live alone and have a career that she enjoyed.
She was miserably unhappy and frustrated. Over the years she become increasingly more depressed. She passed to me, albeit less than consciously, the mantle that had been taken from her. I was charged with the task of doing and becoming what she had been stopped from doing and becoming. With the charge came a strong belief that my doing this would make her happy. Hoping that, if I could make her happy, she would then be happy with and loving toward me, I took the charge seriously.
From my earliest days at school I was a dedicated overachiever. In primary grades, I always brought home report card filled with “Outstandings” (except in the “works and plays well with others” category where I usually “needed improvement”). In the later grades, when marks were in numbers, mine always ranged in the mid to hi 90's.
As I continued through the grade levels, I added endless numbers of extra-curricular activities. I wrote poems and stories for which I won small prizes. In high school, I was ardently active in the productions of and also president of the Drama Society. I was president of the Speakers Bureau, Co-editor-in-chief of our school newspaper, a “cheerleader” for the Honor Society. I was part of an All-City Chorus and an All-City Actors Group, both of which involved weekly traveling to rehearse and to perform regularly on educational radio and educational TV. I graduated from high school as a Senior Celebrity, “The Girl Who Did Most” and as a Merit Scholarship semi-finalist.
Despite the gifts I brought of my considerable accomplishments, my mother never seemed to get any happier or more loving with me. In fact, her responses, when she paid any attention at all, were hostile, cold and critical. She scoffed, demeaned and devalued. Each time, I would head out to do more or to do differently. I was endlessly searching for the magical key that could unlock her, that could bring her happiness and win for me her love and acceptance.
My own expansive joy and excitement with what I was doing and bringing to her always paled at her response (or lack of response). I would feel heartbroken and confused, bereft. Gradually, I internalized her scornful “raised eyebrow” look and voice. My inner critic, the “Hatchet Lady” was born. The Hatchet Lady demeaned, devalued and undermined the things that I did or created before my mother had the opportunity to do so. The Hatchet Lady always ridiculed my delight in myself, my excitement with what I might be doing. “So What?” and “Big Deal!” were her watch-phrases. Whatever I was, whatever I did was, to her, never right or never enough.
The lavishing of love, attention, acceptance, recognition from my dad, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my teachers - all this was as ashes to me. No amount of external recognition, no prizes, no honors carried any weight against this now internalized negative view of myself. Everything positive from the outside triggered the old Groucho Marx “why would I want to belong to any club that would have me as a member?” feeling. By valuing me, the source was automatically and inevitably devalued.
Still, I never seemed able to stop the doing, the searching for the illusive, magical accomplishment/achievement that might finally prove me acceptable and worthy of love both to my mother and to the Hatchet Lady inside of me. (Pirouettes is the story of the continued unfolding of this searching.)
When my mother died just three months after my 30th birthday, I felt no grief, no sense of loss. I felt, instead, an enormous surge of relief and release. I felt set free from the weight of an impossible, lifelong burden. She was no longer there to be unlocked. Now I had only my inner Hatchet Lady with which to contend.
Somehow my mother's death opened the space for me to finally know in my bones that no amount of “more doing” and no amount of further external acknowledgments could ever make me feel good about myself. I understood deep in my cells that I had to find some different way to live with myself, to feed my aching hunger.
Over the next two years, something deep within me kept nudging and leading me along the path to leaving a whole way of life that, in ways I couldn't articulate, had come to feel completely “wrong” for me. I had an abiding sense that if I didn't get to where it was green and still, to somewhere where I could be just with myself, I literally would die.
For years as either a friend or a therapist, I had ardently encouraged others to give themselves permission to be, to accept and to love themselves just however they were in any moment. Yet, imbedded in my “doing, proving, achieving” life, I had no such permission for myself. When, two years after my mother's death, I actually did leave both the East Coast and that way of life, I began the journey of finding my way to simply and lovingly accepting the me that I might be in any moment.
As, gradually, I could stop trying to be worthy, or trying to be any particular way at all, I could begin simply to discover how I actually was. I could slowly come more and more to be in the middle of my experiences, actually exploring and enjoying my self rather than evaluating and monitoring myself. I began to care about my many-sided self with at least some of the tender gentleness I had, until then, brought only to my caring about others. I found a therapist who, for a while, could be for me what I had been able to be only for others. She helped me to find permission to take the unconditional loving I could so easily give away and fold it back into my very own self
The journey to healing the damage in the Hatchet Lady has taken many more years and an always deepening commitment to lovingly honor and accept myself in all my unfinished imperfectness. But, feeding the starveling inside of me began only as I could stop looking outside of myself for her nourishment. (The Little Ones Story chronicles this part of the journey.)
Until we can begin to treat ourselves lovingly, nothing loving from the outside can reach past our invalidation of it. No one can love us into loving ourselves. Their love can support the seed of our self-loving, like bringing coffee and donuts to the barricade. The starveling inside of us (on the other side of the barricade) needs us to actually feed her. She needs us to believe she deserves our own loving care. She needs us to believe she deserves our love just because she is and breathes.
Often we begin this process by acting, on faith, “as if” we believe these things are true. We act “as if” because we have never had such truths modeled for us by those who parented or took care of us. It is a slow, often scary road. But, it is the way home.
Travel gently.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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