Mommy Dearest
For much of the twentieth century, mommies were demonized in American Culture.
Perhaps it’s deserved, perhaps not.
Hating on mommy has certainly become popular.
And anywhere you find sad stories of parental abuse, particularly about mothers, you will find a mass fandom of mommy-haters piling on.
I had issues, like everyone else
I didn’t always get along with my own mother. Like all teens, I went from completely dependent at age 14 to completely independent at age 18.
That transition is not without conflict and lingering hard feelings.
Difficulties with parents are universal. Creating a victim narrative in which mommy was terrible has become far too common.
My mother was a gem compared to others.
The worst mommy story I’ve heard
I spent about two years attending a therapy group starting at age 30. One of the women in that group had a particularly disturbing parent experience.
From the age of 4 up through about 12, her father would abuse her sexually.
She remembered one night when she was perhaps 4 or 5; her father led her down the hallway to her bedroom for what she knew was going to be abuse.
On her way past the master bedroom, she caught her mother’s eyes.
At that moment, she realized her mother knew what was going on and chose not to stop it.
She speculated on her mother’s reasons, and none of the answers she came up with were pleasing or comforting.
Her father was abusing her with the full knowledge and consent of her mother.
That’s a lot to digest.
She forgave her mother
The reason this woman was in therapy was ostensibly to find a way to accept what happened to her in her youth.
She could have taken many tacks.
She chose to work toward complete forgiveness because she realized anything less would leave a stain on her own heart, and she didn’t want that.
Over the course of 18 months, I witnessed a lot of yelling, crying, and intense emotional release.
But she made it.
She completely forgave her mother in her heart. She even forgave her father.
She came to believe that despite all her mother’s mistakes, he mother was still her mother, and she owed her life to her, and if for no other reason, that was enough to forgive her for everything.
How bad can bad get?
Is your story worse than that?
Did your mother do something even worse?
Do you want to be in competition with others to see if yours is the worst possible trauma that any mother could ever inflict on a child?
Sorry, but you will not win that competition.
Lori Vallow gets life in US for killing her two children
Lindsay Clancy, mom accused of killing 3 kids
Brandy McCaslin and her children, ages 11, 6 and 10 months, dead
Trauma stories are not competitions.
Whatever happened to you, it was undoubtedly bad.
It’s also not important.
Are you aghast at that statement?
Are you rushing to the comments to tell me that I don’t understand?
That indignation is what’s keeping you trapped in anger, resentment, and despair.
It’s hurting your mother. If she’s still alive, she knows you carry this anger and resentment.
But it’s hurting you even more in ways you may not be aware of.
Whatever your mother did to you, it pales in comparison to what you are doing to yourself.
Why should you forgive your mother?
When I met the woman I described previously, I was doing group therapy work to deal with my own past traumas.
I had far less to forgive, and mostly it was nonsense I blew out of proportion.
Much of what I believed happened to me was my own interpretation of events rather than anything objectively bad.
I spun a yarn of victim nonsense, lived in that narrative, and made myself unhappy.
It was my own doing.
When I stopped attending this group, I correctly surmised that I had forgiven my mother for everything.
I even asked her forgiveness for my bad behavior.
Imagine that.
This came to serve me later when I began practicing Tibetan Buddhism and working with Lamrim.
In The New Meditation Handbook from Tharpa Publications, meditation number eight is Recognizing That All Living Beings Are Our Mothers.
It’s a foundational meditation, as most of the subsequent meditations build on the realizations and feelings generated by thinking about the love of your mother.
Lamrim is the stages on the path to enlightenment. No advanced Buddhist practitioner maintains animus toward their mother.
Any practitioner who has mommy issues overcomes them because it’s essential to moving forward on the journey.
This isn’t only true for Buddhists.
If you want to grow and mature emotionally and spiritually, you need to forgive your mother—not halfway, not conditionally, not with reservations.
Complete and total forgiveness.
You will know you are there when you feel compelled to tell your mother and ask her to forgive you for being angry all these years.
Your mother’s Love for you
When your mother realized she was pregnant with you, she could have evicted you at the cost of your life.
Laws on the matter notwithstanding, aborting fetuses has been a practice since antiquity, and your mother could have aborted you.
You were a guest that she allowed to stay in her own body, despite the pains and the problems a developing baby entails.
If she had made a different choice, you would not be reading these words now.
That isn’t conjecture; it’s a fact.
If you were homeless and destitute and someone invited you into their home and provided you with food and shelter, you would consider that person kind and generous.
Your mother is due the same consideration.
Absent your victim story, you would feel the need to express gratitude for your very existence.
When you were in your mother’s womb, she protected you more carefully than a precious jewel. In every situation, she thought about your safety.
She consulted doctors, exercised, at special foods, and nurtured you for nine months.
She was careful not to do anything that would have damaged the development of your physical and mental faculties.
And even if she fell short in some regard, she made sure you survived.
At the time of your birth, your mother experienced great pain, and even during childbirth, your well-being was foremost on her mind.
When you were born, you looked wretched, but she saw only beauty and loved you dearly.
You were born completely helpless, unable to understand language or even recognize your mother. Without her devotion and care, you would have perished in agony in a matter of hours or days.
She fed you, bathed you, clothed you, responded to your tears, and comforted you.
She wiped the filth from your body. Have you ever changed a diaper? Do you think she did that for fun?
Even when your mother had problems, she always showed you loving expressions, called you sweet names, and sang lullabies to put you to sleep.
If she had forgotten you even for a short time, you might have died or been disabled for life.
Each day of your life, your mother was there to rescue you from disaster, and she always considered circumstances from the point of view of your safety and well-being.
When you were small, your mother would not sleep well, vigilant and ready to awaken at the slighted sound of your crying.
As you grew older, your mother taught you how to eat, drink, speak, sit, and walk.
She sent you to school and encouraged you to do good things in life.
Whatever you’ve attained in your life is due to the foundation of goodness she provided you.
Your mother’s foibles
Your mother was not perfect.
Neither are you.
Are you holding her to a standard you don’t meet? Many people do.
If you have an entrenched victim story, your mind has already flooded with objections.
Your mother did terrible things to you.
“My mother did [insert your trauma here].”
You have impugned her motives.
“My mother was terrible because [insert your nefarious reasons here].”
You have negative characterizations of her.
“My mother is an awful person because [insert your list of her flaws here].”
You might even get others to agree with all your points. Your mother may even be in jail, found guilty by a jury of her peers.
No matter how justified your victim story is, if you cling to it, you will suffer.
It’s really that simple.
Anger, Resentment, Spite, and Retaliation
The following is adapted from How to Solve Our Human Problems by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.
Anger is a disturbed mind that identifies an animate or inanimate object, finds it unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it.
You’ve identified your mother as the problem.
You don’t want to be around her, so you find her unattractive.
You focus exclusively on what you perceive as her bad traits and qualities.
You feel your mother deserves the emotional pain your negativity inflicts upon her. You may even wish bad things were to happen to her because you feel she deserves it.
You are angry at your mother.
Spite is when anger has hardened into Resentment, and the person wishes to speak harshly.
Do you speak harshly about your mother to others? Is your spite an admirable trait?
Resentment is formed when anger is sustained without forgetting it.
You resent your mother.
If resentment is sustained for long periods, the desire to retaliate arises.
Anger and resentment prompt people to retaliate against those perceived to be the cause of harm; in your case, you want to hurt your mother.
The desire to retaliate often causes people to expose themselves to unnecessary troubles merely for petty revenge.
Have you done anything to get back at your mother? Do you want to? Do you feel good about that?
Anger is Destructive
Anger makes everyone afflicted engage in bad actions that lead to untold suffering.
Anger blocks any progress on the path to spiritual liberation, leading to unhappiness or depression.
Anger is a painful state of mind.
Anger makes everyone tense and uncomfortable.
Anger makes it difficult to sleep, and even when sleep comes, it isn’t restful or refreshing.
Anger makes it difficult to enjoy activities, other than cruelty, inflicting pain on your mother for its own delight.
Anger motivates action without deliberation. Angry people often lose their freedom of choice, driven to action without concern for consequence.
Angry people often die alone, having pushed away everyone who was close to them.
Are you so angry at your mother that you want her to die alone, thinking you hate her?
Be careful what you wish for because it might happen to you.
Rage and Aggression
Anger is like fire. It starts as a spark, and if fed with confirming thoughts, and given enough time, it grows into an inferno.
Anger becomes rage, and like large fires in nature, it can grow out of control and consume everything and everyone in its path.
Rage is uncontrolled anger.
Aggression is an increase in anger that motivates the desire to harm others either physically or verbally.
Rage and aggression lead to violence.
How far are you willing to let your anger go?
Do you like the portrait of who you have become due to your anger against your mother?
Maybe you hide it well on the outside but on the inside…
Perhaps it’s time for a change, don’t you think?
How to forgive your mother
To forgive your mother, you must want to. You must see some advantage in it.
The last several sections of this writing were intended to provide you with motivation in that regard.
If you still don’t want to forgive your mother, I suggest you read it again.
If you wish to burn your insides in the fire of anger until you embody the evil you detest, then that is your choice.
Stop reading here.
You will never know the joy of your mother’s love again.
Even if your mother is deceased, if you forgive her, she will love you from Heaven.
Stop feeding the anger beast
The first step is to stop adding to your anger and resentment by reminding yourself of all the things you perceive wrong with your mother.
Stop telling yourself your victim story.
If you do tell yourself your victim story, don’t blindly agree with it and reinforce its certainty.
Learn to undermine the certainty of your victim story.
Ask questions like:
“Is that a fact, or just my opinion?” Recognize that it’s an opinion, something you can change.
“Even if that’s true, is it worth the pain I cause myself?” Recognize that it is not.
“Is there another way to view the situation?” There is always another way to interpret what happened. Your current interpretation is the most negative one possible. That’s why you chose to believe it.
“What would my mother’s point of view be?” Have you ever pondered this? Most people don’t.
Would your mother agree with your woe-is-me narrative? If so, then she is sorry and wants your forgiveness. If not, then you should consider how she might view things.
Even if she is crazy or delusional, at least you would demonstrate empathy with her point of view.
Otherwise, that beast of anger will eat you from the inside out.
Put out the fire of anger when it’s a spark
Buddhist practitioners learn the value of squelching anger at the earliest possible moment before it becomes a raging fire.
Watch your mind. As soon as it becomes disturbed, you should remind yourself of the many faults of anger as described above.
Whenever you start ruminating on your mother’s faults and blaming her for your problems, you should remember that fault-finding, blaming, and anger only create more suffering for yourself and those around you.
You should divert your attention to something else—anything else, but preferably a list of your mother’s good traits.
Create a list of your mother’s good and admirable traits
She doesn’t have any, right?
Did I just read your mind?
Anger creates mental barriers to anything that extinguishes the flames.
Anger far prefers to go through the list of your mother’s faults, the terrible things you blame her for, and anything else negative you can heap on her.
Thoughts about your mother’s good or admirable traits would be a wet blanket extinguishing the flame.
But that’s what you need—and should be what you want.
Once you have your list, meditate on it.
Keep the list handy, and read it multiple times per day.
Add to it as you think of more admirable traits. Anything, no matter how small, is worthy of writing down and remembering—like you did with your list of her foibles.
(In case you didn’t notice, this is also how to rid your mind of enemies of all kinds in your family and outside. Read the post linked below for more info.)
Make anger your enemy, not your mother
Since you have much anger inside you bottled up as resentment, you need to detach this anger from your mother and direct it onto itself.
This way, you can fight fire with fire, setting a backfire in your heart to prevent further damage.
This has the side benefit of awakening the desire to rid yourself of the anger as quickly as possible.
If you ingested poison, you would act immediately to rid your body of it. The emotional poison of anger shouldn’t be treated any differently.
Admit that you want your mother’s love
Anger arises whenever you don’t get what you want or find yourself in an undesirable situation.
You are angry at your mother because you want something from her you don’t feel you are getting.
The reality of life is that you can’t always get what you want. Getting angry about that won’t help. In fact, it makes it less likely you will obtain what you desire.
You want your mother’s love and support, like she provided you as a baby.
Maybe you will never obtain that. Perhaps she is angry at you, mentally ill, or deceased.
But admitting that you want your mother’s love opens a doorway.
It allows you to move past your anger to the sadness that underlies it.
Most of your anger toward your mother is a smokescreen that hides an enormous reservoir of sadness beneath.
It’s a despair and pain so deep you can’t imagine surviving a plunge into that cold water.
Yet, every hurting child must go there, cry an ocean of tears, and cleanse the sadness from their heart.
There is no other way.
Tears wash the stains from your heart.
Cultivate a mind of patience
Emotional work takes time. Even if you go deep and sob from your depths, you won’t only cry once, not with your deepest pain.
You will feel sad and cry, then you will come out of it for a time—days, weeks, or months even—and then you will feel sad again and cry more.
If you cried constantly for days or weeks, you would become depressed and endure other problems.
Mourning and recovery from trauma takes time. How much? As much as it takes.
Patience is a mind that is able to accept whatever occurs fully and happily.
Patience is not bearing the pain with a feigned smile.
Patience means welcoming wholeheartedly whatever occurs without wanting things to be any different.
Nothing your mother did is so bad that it can’t be accepted patiently, with an open, accommodating, and peaceful heart—despite the objections your mind is offering right now.
If you cultivate the mind of patience, your victim story won’t find a ready listener willing to agree with certainty that your mother is terrible, an irredeemable bitch who deserves to die.
When you think about it, you’ve already demonstrated tremendous patience—for sustaining the negative.
You’ve clung to your victim story for many years, with the clouds getting darker and darker, knowing full well you will sustain that negativity until you die.
You can cultivate a mind of patience for forgiveness as well.
It will take as long as it takes, but if you stay the course, the rewards will be a clear mind, a clean heart, and a happy life.
The wish to repay your mother’s kindness
The sign you have completely forgiven your mother is when the spontaneous desire to repay her for her kindness arises.
Impossible?
Perhaps it feels that way today, but if you are committed to forgiveness, this feeling is your signpost letting you know you’ve arrived.
Why do I believe this?
Earlier in this writing, I said that in The New Meditation Handbook from Tharpa Publications, meditation number eight is Recognizing That All Living Beings Are Our Mothers.
Well, meditation number nine is Remembering the Kindness of All Living Beings. The meditator is invited to extrapolate the love of your mother to all living beings and revel in their kindness.
The only way to get there is to have genuine feelings of kindness toward your mother.
If you recognize the many ways your mother was kind to you, the desire to reciprocate that kindness arises naturally.
I know it seems impossible today, but you can get there.
Don’t do it for your mother. That won’t motivate you to even start.
Do it for yourself. A clean heart is its own reward.
