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Essay by a childfree psychotherapist
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Leaning Toward Childfree
Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 18, 2008 |
This essay was written by a childfree psychotherapist named Robyn Posin. It is from her website www.forthelittleonesinside.com. If you'd like to read it in it's original form, go to the website, click on "Keeping Safe Through the Difficult Times" and the title is "Forgiving Before It's Time." I think it's very touching, and I highly recommend it. I know it's long, but I had to cut and paste because there's no specific URL for the essay (just tabs).
Forgiving Before It's Time
[by Robyn Posin]
My mother died on Valentine's Day, 36 years ago, just three months after my 30th birthday. After several years of relative estrangement, I had become re-involved with her through her two years of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. And, I'd spent each of the last ten days of her life sitting beside her hospital bed as she lay in liver coma, moving toward her death. It was long before the Hospice movement, and hers was neither a conscious nor an openly acknowledged dying. Yet, I felt a compelling need to make sure she would not die alone. I tended her and crocheted quietly for hours looking out at the winter landscape in Central Park. My father came to relieve me for the evenings after his workday ended. I'd walk home, see a few evening clients before sleep and then begin the next cycle of the deathwatch.
In the end, she did die alone, discovered at the changing of the shifts at seven in the morning, just before I was to arrive for the day. I did not grieve for her at all. On that morning of her death, and forever afterward, what I felt was gratitude for-and relief at-the reality that I would never again have to deal with her as a physical presence in my life.
It was the best Valentine gift anyone could ever have given me. I was set free then to deal just with her destructive presence as it lived on within me in the voice of the Hatchet Lady, my venomous inner-critic. And, I was set free, at last, to feel the full measure of my unmitigated rage at this woman who had so damagingly mothered me. While she lived, my rage at her had always been tempered by some overarching sense of the pathetic, fragile underpinning of her relentless hostility toward me. Freed from the amorphous, primitive terror that my rage could destroy her, I was finally able to begin the journey of plumbing the true depth of that rage.
From way too early in my life I had learned (as so many of us have) to understand, to make allowances and excuses for my mother's cruel, arbitrary, cold, ridiculing, unremitting nastinesses toward me. Mostly that involved (as so often it does) taking the rap and blaming myself. I was not being a good enough girl, not behaving properly, or I was being, in some obscure way-however inadvertently or unintentionally-the cause of her otherwise unreasoned irritation and hostility.
From the earliest I can remember, I was forever trying to placate and appease her. I seemed undeterred by the fact that most of whatever I did seemed more likely to escalate her meanness toward me. I learned independence early. Although it's probably apocryphal, there's a family tale of my walking to the corner candy store holding someone's-not her-hand, clutching my penny and asking the man there for a pretzel when I was just 9 months old. A similar tale has me well out of diapers before two.
My precociousness, such as it was, had much to do with the fact that it was always enraging to her when I needed anything from her. Whenever I came to her in terror or pain or fear as a little person, her inevitable response was to yell at, to ridicule or to shame me for “making such a big deal out of nothing!” As I've reflected through the years, I've thought that my terrors (or, indeed, any of my needs) overwhelmed and frightened her and perhaps also faced her with feeling her inadequacy to cope with me and that this is what led her so immediately into rage at me.
Getting hurt and getting sick petrified to me. I'd react with a kind of hysterical crying that inevitably brought wrath, ridicule and accusations of malingering from her. I can remember becoming terrified by my own terror at having the breath knocked out of me when, at six or seven, I'd fall while roller-skating. After the first time-when my original terror brought her wrath-I was each time panicked by the knowing that there was only my already terrified self to be with my terror.
I have no memories of tenderness, warmth or loving closeness with my mother. The only gentle touch I remember is having my hair washed by her when I was too little to do it myself. All other physical contact with her that I remember involved being pulled, jerked, pushed, wrenched or slapped. But, much more than contact, I remember icy distance and being ignored.
My earliest, most vivid, devastating and revealing memory of her mothering comes from when I was a little past three. It was 1944. My father had enlisted in the Navy just before he would have been drafted into the Army. Most other women with children in her position gave up their apartments, moved back in with their parents and went to work in factories. My mother, at 26, went back to the work she'd done (and loved) before her marriage, as a relatively well-paid legal secretary. She kept our apartment-living (not without some considerable delight) as an attractive, glamorous single workingwoman-and sent me to live with her parents.
My maternal grandparents-warm, loving, doting non-English speaking Eastern European immigrants-lived only three blocks away from our apartment. During the year that I lived with them, my mother usually came to pick me up for the day on Sundays. Occasionally she'd take me back to our apartment on a Saturday, after a half day of work, so I'd have a sleepover with her. We rarely spent time with the four of us together. (In my late teens I came to understand that there had already been years of discord and resentment from my mother toward both of her parents by the time she'd left me with them.)
The memory I have is of waking up one night on my little cot in the small room off my grandparents' kitchen. I woke crying hysterically in anguish and desperation. My whole body remembers the convulsive, inconsolable sobbing and abject longing for “my mommy.” No matter what my grandparents did, no amount of holding, soothing, or loving words could quiet my desperation. I just had to have my mommy.
It was after dark and my grandparents had already been in bed, undressed. Still my grandpa got dressed and walked the three blocks to my get my mother. (They had no telephone in those days.) I've no idea how late it might have been, or whether my mother had been asleep, or how long it actually took for him to go and come back with her. I sobbed non-stop, gagging and choking on my own mucous, curled between my Grandma and the doorjamb to my room the whole time.
I remember hearing the key in the door, and watching my mother coming in. My body remembers getting freezing cold with panic as she stalked in and stopped, leaning on the porcelain wash tub on the far side of the room from where I stood leaning into the doorjamb. The fury in her hard eyes is a powerful, visceral memory still; so, too, her cold and enraged voice as she snarled at my sobbing little self across the room, pointing a wagging finger at me. “If you ever do this to me and your grandfather again, I'll….”
For years, I couldn't remember with what it was that she threatened me with before she turned and stalked right out of their apartment, leaving me paralyzed, frozen and numbed. I recalled her words some twenty years later, in my first therapist's office, in the middle of an almost disassociative panic state. The panic state had been triggered by my suddenly becoming aware of feeling some intense neediness for my therapist. I was having a terrifying experience in my body. It felt as though invisible hypodermic needles were pulling all the strength out of my knees. In that moment, I re-heard her cold enraged voice snarling at me: “If you ever do this to me and your grandfather again, I'll break both your legs!”
There was a relentless litany of negating, invalidating, dismissive, belittling words and actions (or ignorings) of hers that lacerated me throughout the first 30 years of my life. The lashings continued for yet another seventeen years at the hands of my vicious inner critic: the internalized voice of my mother that I called the Hatchet Lady. (Only after years of working on and with the Hatchet Lady, was I at last able to defang and transform her into an almost gentle ally.)
As I've come to know my own self more fully, I have understood how trapped and overwhelmed my mother must have felt as a parent/wife/woman in her times. I have grown great compassion for the woundings in her life, for how profoundly damaged she must have been, for how few options/paths were available to her. I have been able to see the grief and resentment behind her competitiveness with me: I received both from her parents and from my dad the love, tenderness and attention she so desperately craved from them. How enraging and infuriating it must have been for her to watch them treat me as she yearned to be treated by them. I can understand that she would hate and resent and want to punish me.
As I watch young mothers with young children, I know I could never in my wildest dreams have had the emotional wherewithal to cope with the 24/7, 100% attention it takes to parent in our non-tribal culture. I am filled with such abiding gratitude that I had the self-awareness, the help of Spirit/my deep-knowing self and the willingness to tolerate considerable criticism that all combined to allow me the freedom, as a young woman, to choose consciously, not to birth or parent children. I know my mother's world was a harder one in which to see that option, much less to consider risking it.
I can accept that my mother did the very best she could within the limits of her capacities and self-awareness. I can feel compassion for and understand her emotional damage, her impossible predicament. I cannot and do not, however, forgive her for the ways she wounded that little, delicate being that I was.
The life-long struggle to free myself from the toxic legacy left by my mother's damaged and damaging mothering has been the foundation of my healing journey. The wounds, convolutions and tangles of my relationship with her were, in a sense, the greatest gift she gave me. Without the comforts and acceptance of traditional mothering, I've had to find other ways to comfort and mother myself. Her crippled mothering forced me to the deep work with myself. The deprivation and pain fostered in me an extraordinary awareness of what a being needs for it to grow and thrive.
My years of doing the inner work to grow a fiercely compassionate, consistent, unconditionally loving, protective mother-within have born lavish fruit, fruit that has nourished not only me but also the people I work with as clients and, more lately, the people who read the tales I write from the inside of my healing process.
I would not be the woman I am, the woman I so dearly love and so freely share had I not suffered what I did from my mother. Her mistreatment was the ground from which this me has been born. I would not trade this me for a different childhood, a different mother. I have created great wonder and magic from great pain. And, still, I cannot and do not and may not ever forgive her. I cannot even imagine what would make forgiving her a possibility for me.
Years and volumes of pressure from New Age, spiritual and psychological hype all around us keeps pushing forgiveness as the solution, as the path to freedom/enlightenment, as the ultimate goal of all healing for all of us. Over and over, through the years, I have struggled to keep wresting permission to honor my own inability and unwillingness to forgive what feels to me unforgivable. Revisiting all of this painful history as I've written this tale has moved me again, most acutely, to emphatically carve out the space for my right to hold what's so for me.
I can and do have compassion for this profoundly damaged woman and I can and do accept that she did the very best she could at the level of consciousness available to her. I cannot and will not forgive this woman until or unless the day comes that it doesn't feel like to do so will violate the tender damaged little one inside me who was this woman's hapless victim.
Whenever we who have been victimized or traumatized-emotionally, physically, psychically, sexually-are being pressured into forgiveness before or unless that forgiveness arises organically from our own depths, we are being encouraged to violate and re-victimize our delicate selves. Any philosophical system, spiritual practice, psychological theory, religion or person/healer (including any part of ourselves) that would so pressure any of us needs to be challenged/questioned/set aside in this domain. Sometimes the best we can hope for is acceptance, compassion and perhaps some kind of understanding of the context of the victimizer's life circumstances.
Consider being as tender as you possibly can be with your wounded, upset, hurt or angry self.
Forgiving Before It's Time
[by Robyn Posin]
My mother died on Valentine's Day, 36 years ago, just three months after my 30th birthday. After several years of relative estrangement, I had become re-involved with her through her two years of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. And, I'd spent each of the last ten days of her life sitting beside her hospital bed as she lay in liver coma, moving toward her death. It was long before the Hospice movement, and hers was neither a conscious nor an openly acknowledged dying. Yet, I felt a compelling need to make sure she would not die alone. I tended her and crocheted quietly for hours looking out at the winter landscape in Central Park. My father came to relieve me for the evenings after his workday ended. I'd walk home, see a few evening clients before sleep and then begin the next cycle of the deathwatch.
In the end, she did die alone, discovered at the changing of the shifts at seven in the morning, just before I was to arrive for the day. I did not grieve for her at all. On that morning of her death, and forever afterward, what I felt was gratitude for-and relief at-the reality that I would never again have to deal with her as a physical presence in my life.
It was the best Valentine gift anyone could ever have given me. I was set free then to deal just with her destructive presence as it lived on within me in the voice of the Hatchet Lady, my venomous inner-critic. And, I was set free, at last, to feel the full measure of my unmitigated rage at this woman who had so damagingly mothered me. While she lived, my rage at her had always been tempered by some overarching sense of the pathetic, fragile underpinning of her relentless hostility toward me. Freed from the amorphous, primitive terror that my rage could destroy her, I was finally able to begin the journey of plumbing the true depth of that rage.
From way too early in my life I had learned (as so many of us have) to understand, to make allowances and excuses for my mother's cruel, arbitrary, cold, ridiculing, unremitting nastinesses toward me. Mostly that involved (as so often it does) taking the rap and blaming myself. I was not being a good enough girl, not behaving properly, or I was being, in some obscure way-however inadvertently or unintentionally-the cause of her otherwise unreasoned irritation and hostility.
From the earliest I can remember, I was forever trying to placate and appease her. I seemed undeterred by the fact that most of whatever I did seemed more likely to escalate her meanness toward me. I learned independence early. Although it's probably apocryphal, there's a family tale of my walking to the corner candy store holding someone's-not her-hand, clutching my penny and asking the man there for a pretzel when I was just 9 months old. A similar tale has me well out of diapers before two.
My precociousness, such as it was, had much to do with the fact that it was always enraging to her when I needed anything from her. Whenever I came to her in terror or pain or fear as a little person, her inevitable response was to yell at, to ridicule or to shame me for “making such a big deal out of nothing!” As I've reflected through the years, I've thought that my terrors (or, indeed, any of my needs) overwhelmed and frightened her and perhaps also faced her with feeling her inadequacy to cope with me and that this is what led her so immediately into rage at me.
Getting hurt and getting sick petrified to me. I'd react with a kind of hysterical crying that inevitably brought wrath, ridicule and accusations of malingering from her. I can remember becoming terrified by my own terror at having the breath knocked out of me when, at six or seven, I'd fall while roller-skating. After the first time-when my original terror brought her wrath-I was each time panicked by the knowing that there was only my already terrified self to be with my terror.
I have no memories of tenderness, warmth or loving closeness with my mother. The only gentle touch I remember is having my hair washed by her when I was too little to do it myself. All other physical contact with her that I remember involved being pulled, jerked, pushed, wrenched or slapped. But, much more than contact, I remember icy distance and being ignored.
My earliest, most vivid, devastating and revealing memory of her mothering comes from when I was a little past three. It was 1944. My father had enlisted in the Navy just before he would have been drafted into the Army. Most other women with children in her position gave up their apartments, moved back in with their parents and went to work in factories. My mother, at 26, went back to the work she'd done (and loved) before her marriage, as a relatively well-paid legal secretary. She kept our apartment-living (not without some considerable delight) as an attractive, glamorous single workingwoman-and sent me to live with her parents.
My maternal grandparents-warm, loving, doting non-English speaking Eastern European immigrants-lived only three blocks away from our apartment. During the year that I lived with them, my mother usually came to pick me up for the day on Sundays. Occasionally she'd take me back to our apartment on a Saturday, after a half day of work, so I'd have a sleepover with her. We rarely spent time with the four of us together. (In my late teens I came to understand that there had already been years of discord and resentment from my mother toward both of her parents by the time she'd left me with them.)
The memory I have is of waking up one night on my little cot in the small room off my grandparents' kitchen. I woke crying hysterically in anguish and desperation. My whole body remembers the convulsive, inconsolable sobbing and abject longing for “my mommy.” No matter what my grandparents did, no amount of holding, soothing, or loving words could quiet my desperation. I just had to have my mommy.
It was after dark and my grandparents had already been in bed, undressed. Still my grandpa got dressed and walked the three blocks to my get my mother. (They had no telephone in those days.) I've no idea how late it might have been, or whether my mother had been asleep, or how long it actually took for him to go and come back with her. I sobbed non-stop, gagging and choking on my own mucous, curled between my Grandma and the doorjamb to my room the whole time.
I remember hearing the key in the door, and watching my mother coming in. My body remembers getting freezing cold with panic as she stalked in and stopped, leaning on the porcelain wash tub on the far side of the room from where I stood leaning into the doorjamb. The fury in her hard eyes is a powerful, visceral memory still; so, too, her cold and enraged voice as she snarled at my sobbing little self across the room, pointing a wagging finger at me. “If you ever do this to me and your grandfather again, I'll….”
For years, I couldn't remember with what it was that she threatened me with before she turned and stalked right out of their apartment, leaving me paralyzed, frozen and numbed. I recalled her words some twenty years later, in my first therapist's office, in the middle of an almost disassociative panic state. The panic state had been triggered by my suddenly becoming aware of feeling some intense neediness for my therapist. I was having a terrifying experience in my body. It felt as though invisible hypodermic needles were pulling all the strength out of my knees. In that moment, I re-heard her cold enraged voice snarling at me: “If you ever do this to me and your grandfather again, I'll break both your legs!”
There was a relentless litany of negating, invalidating, dismissive, belittling words and actions (or ignorings) of hers that lacerated me throughout the first 30 years of my life. The lashings continued for yet another seventeen years at the hands of my vicious inner critic: the internalized voice of my mother that I called the Hatchet Lady. (Only after years of working on and with the Hatchet Lady, was I at last able to defang and transform her into an almost gentle ally.)
As I've come to know my own self more fully, I have understood how trapped and overwhelmed my mother must have felt as a parent/wife/woman in her times. I have grown great compassion for the woundings in her life, for how profoundly damaged she must have been, for how few options/paths were available to her. I have been able to see the grief and resentment behind her competitiveness with me: I received both from her parents and from my dad the love, tenderness and attention she so desperately craved from them. How enraging and infuriating it must have been for her to watch them treat me as she yearned to be treated by them. I can understand that she would hate and resent and want to punish me.
As I watch young mothers with young children, I know I could never in my wildest dreams have had the emotional wherewithal to cope with the 24/7, 100% attention it takes to parent in our non-tribal culture. I am filled with such abiding gratitude that I had the self-awareness, the help of Spirit/my deep-knowing self and the willingness to tolerate considerable criticism that all combined to allow me the freedom, as a young woman, to choose consciously, not to birth or parent children. I know my mother's world was a harder one in which to see that option, much less to consider risking it.
I can accept that my mother did the very best she could within the limits of her capacities and self-awareness. I can feel compassion for and understand her emotional damage, her impossible predicament. I cannot and do not, however, forgive her for the ways she wounded that little, delicate being that I was.
The life-long struggle to free myself from the toxic legacy left by my mother's damaged and damaging mothering has been the foundation of my healing journey. The wounds, convolutions and tangles of my relationship with her were, in a sense, the greatest gift she gave me. Without the comforts and acceptance of traditional mothering, I've had to find other ways to comfort and mother myself. Her crippled mothering forced me to the deep work with myself. The deprivation and pain fostered in me an extraordinary awareness of what a being needs for it to grow and thrive.
My years of doing the inner work to grow a fiercely compassionate, consistent, unconditionally loving, protective mother-within have born lavish fruit, fruit that has nourished not only me but also the people I work with as clients and, more lately, the people who read the tales I write from the inside of my healing process.
I would not be the woman I am, the woman I so dearly love and so freely share had I not suffered what I did from my mother. Her mistreatment was the ground from which this me has been born. I would not trade this me for a different childhood, a different mother. I have created great wonder and magic from great pain. And, still, I cannot and do not and may not ever forgive her. I cannot even imagine what would make forgiving her a possibility for me.
Years and volumes of pressure from New Age, spiritual and psychological hype all around us keeps pushing forgiveness as the solution, as the path to freedom/enlightenment, as the ultimate goal of all healing for all of us. Over and over, through the years, I have struggled to keep wresting permission to honor my own inability and unwillingness to forgive what feels to me unforgivable. Revisiting all of this painful history as I've written this tale has moved me again, most acutely, to emphatically carve out the space for my right to hold what's so for me.
I can and do have compassion for this profoundly damaged woman and I can and do accept that she did the very best she could at the level of consciousness available to her. I cannot and will not forgive this woman until or unless the day comes that it doesn't feel like to do so will violate the tender damaged little one inside me who was this woman's hapless victim.
Whenever we who have been victimized or traumatized-emotionally, physically, psychically, sexually-are being pressured into forgiveness before or unless that forgiveness arises organically from our own depths, we are being encouraged to violate and re-victimize our delicate selves. Any philosophical system, spiritual practice, psychological theory, religion or person/healer (including any part of ourselves) that would so pressure any of us needs to be challenged/questioned/set aside in this domain. Sometimes the best we can hope for is acceptance, compassion and perhaps some kind of understanding of the context of the victimizer's life circumstances.
Consider being as tender as you possibly can be with your wounded, upset, hurt or angry self.
Guest
Re: Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 18, 2008 |
Wow...my own mother could have written that. My grandmother was also of that generation-no choice but to spawn. Although my mom is a good mother, she freely admits that it took a lot of work on her part to learn how to parent without abuse before she had me-and she stopped at just me. Even then, she wasn't perfect-I remember almost having my teeth slapped out when I was in high school, buried in calculus homework and couldn't get away to buy some milk at the store for her. She later apologized and said it wasn't even me, she understood I had to finish homework-but that was how her mother reacted to not getting her way with my mom and her siblings (specifically her sisters-her brothers hung the moon) when she was growing up. I can honestly say that watching my mother's life-long struggle with a mother who screwed her up in childhood is a huge factor in my own choice to not have children-your impact on that child doesn't end when they are out the door at 18. I don't think the clueless people raising kids today realize that-I grew up with an example of that in front of me every day.
CJ
Re: Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 18, 2008 |
Thanks for posting this, LTC. My childhood was not as bad as the author's, but it was difficult enough living with an alcoholic Dad (Sundays mainly, but still). Whoever thinks words don't hurt, has never experienced being shamed, belittled, etc. by someone important to them. I decided that, if I would ever emotionally abuse a child, I would do well not to have any. And no one intends to hurt their offspring--scratch that, some people do, and it's horrific. It's a chance I do not want to take.
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Re: Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 19, 2008 | Registered: 17 years ago Posts: 3,073 |
You know what? No matter what your past was, you are a product of it. At the same time, you are an individual with your own mind. To know the limitations of that mind, and live within those, is probably the greatest thing one can do for themselves and others.
Kudos to all of you who have chosen to go against the grain and live according to their own minds.
:beer
"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me
Kudos to all of you who have chosen to go against the grain and live according to their own minds.
:beer
"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me
Leaning Toward Childfree
Re: Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 19, 2008 |
I don't think Robyn Posin's mother even wanted to get married, let alone take on the commitment of having kids. I admire Robyn Posin for realizing her limitations and giving love and nurturing to people in other ways. Another person who survived a hellish childhood and grew up to be childfree (and a gift to the world!) is Lynda Barry. I highly recommend her work.
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Re: Essay by a childfree psychotherapist March 19, 2008 | Registered: 17 years ago Posts: 3,073 |
No matter what gets you there, knowing yourself and your limitations and living within those is probably the must underrated thing in this society of conformity. It's too bad, because we'd be a much happier society as a whole if people weren't forced into bullshit roles they had no desire or ability to maintain.
Good on us for knowing ourselves and good on us for living within our personal confines.
:yr
"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me
Good on us for knowing ourselves and good on us for living within our personal confines.
:yr
"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me
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