Loving Our Mothers & Ourselves

Parenting can be a dangerous business. We give birth and suddenly realize that everything we do will have an impact on our child. We know this, because we harbor the wounds of our own parents. In Meredith Hall's memoir Without a Map, she explores this impact of parenting on her life and the life of her own child. Hall's parents forced her to give her child up for adoption; as a young teenage girl in the 1960s, she was powerless to change this outcome. This wound was so deep that she lost herself, literally wandering the globe. That wandering ended when a woman gave her breast milk to keep Hall from suffering. This sacred offering, given out of love and compassion, awakened a deep understanding about motherly love and community that propelled her back home to make peace with the past and to find the child that she gave up.

Like Hall, we all have wounds of powerlessness and self-denial. Often these wounds center around our mothers. I deeply relate to Hall's troubled relationship with her mother and the trauma that she experienced. At 15-years-old, I became pregnant. My mother's ultimatum was that I would have an abortion. I remember the incredible powerlessness that I felt and the sense of betrayal that my mother was the orchestrator of that experience. For many years, I internalized the pain of that event, and I believe my mother did too. In 2012, my mother had a massive heart attack. My brother called me from across the country to let me know that they were taking her off of life support. Lying in my bed, processing her death, I realized that her spirit needed forgiveness to move on and so did mine. I sent my forgiveness out to her soul, and a wave of relief passed through me.

As women, we often commit acts of violence to each other. We make back-handed comments, compete instead of encouraging each other's success, and perpetuate standards that are not natural to us (usually to appease the men in our world). This is our shadow work. Men have their own. We need to make peace with our mothers and ourselves. We need to acknowledge and forgive the ways that we have limited the freedom of the women around us. We also need to face and forgive the ways that we have limited ourselves.

Feminine energy is nurturing; it is our greatest strength as women. It's time to love completely without shame, to embrace our exuberance for life, to proudly show our emotions and recognize that they deserve a place in this world. The Divine Mother (the feminine aspect of God) is offering us a cup of milk from her breast. She sees that we are starving, that we are lost. Our planet needs us to unite in the name of growth and abundance, but it starts with compassion and forgiveness.