About Becoming Your Own Mother

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

“More than anything, I don’t want to be like my mother”: some women make desperate efforts to be different from their mothers (it is curious, however, that many of them themselves note that over the years, despite all their efforts, they all they begin to resemble their mother more and more, both physically - in figure and appearance, and psychologically - in character and habits)

Nevertheless, becoming a mother herself, having given birth to a child, means avoiding the risk of turning, at least unconsciously, into her own mother, and although some may strive for this, others fear such a transformation more than anything else.

Rejection of the maternal model is very common among those women who themselves have suffered from “bad” relationships with their mother and are trying to take all possible measures to build their own relationships with the next generation in the opposite pattern, thus ensuring “good” relationships with their daughter …

But the results are often not very encouraging, if not completely opposite to those expected. Ultimately, a mother who tries to be a “good mother” and give her children everything that her own could not give her herself, risks going to the other extreme, burdening her relationship with her daughter with negative emotions. This is the very case when the daughter of "a woman more than a mother" or "not a mother and not a woman", having suffered in childhood from a lack of love, becomes "a mother more than a woman."

Such a mother is simply unable to imagine that she is trying to give her daughter something completely different from what her child really needs. And the more the daughter tries to free herself from this excessive care - literally a substitute, the more efforts the mother makes, hoping to make up for their imaginary deficiency and correct the flaws in the relationship with her own mother.

An illusion is created that her relationship with her daughter is improving, as the mother gives her more and more love and attention, which she herself lacked, and for her daughter it is always too much, too much. This outer side of "love" allows the mother to believe in the correctness of the chosen behavior, while the daughter has no choice but to resist with all her might and try to free herself.

After all, she cannot even tell her mother: “You think that you are giving me something, but in fact you need all of this yourself, because you did not receive it from your own mother and I can neither accept it, nor give it back to you..

Efforts made in order not to become your own mother can lead to very unexpected consequences and lead to the opposite result.

The way of life and, in particular, the upbringing of children is a territory of choice, upon entering which a woman can feel how different she is from her own mother: starting with a different way of feeding and ending with numerous household trifles. And the mother will console herself with the illusion that she is her own mistress. If only there was no realm of the unconscious. But it is obvious that in this case there would not exist a huge number of novels owing their origin to such an internal contradiction.

It is in those novels, where the fate of at least three generations of women is traced, that it is told what can happen to women who do not want to receive the "maternal inheritance" and refuse to pass it on to the next generations."

An excerpt from the book: "Daughters - mothers. The third extra?" K. Elyacheff N. Einish