Jan Marquart's Blog - Posts Tagged "daughter-mother"
Daughters and their mothers
I am fascinated by the daughter/mother relationship. My mother died in 1984 so, you might speculate, why am I so interested in this relationship in 2011? Because I have found that even though my mother died so many years ago, our relationship, or rather my relationship with her, still lives.
Strange-you might say. Trust me, the relationship is a powerful one. We were born out of her body, she is our role model as her daughter whether we decide to be like her or not to be like her. For daughters who have daughters they want to parent like their mothers or not like their mothers. Even daughters who were given away by their mothers or who never knew their mothers are impacted by this powerful figure.
I love telling the story about my friend Shirley. When I wrote Echoes from the Womb, a Book for Daughters, www.createspace.com/3546083, I asked 100 women to fill out a questionnaire with only two questions on it. One was, how does your relationship with your mother impact your relationship with women and two, how does your relationship with your mother impact your relationship with men. Shirley wouldn't answer the questions because she thought, since her mother abandoned her at age 5, her mother wasn't relevant.
Years later she married a friend of mine and one day while we were having breakfast out on the peer watching the ocean, I told Shirley I loved her outfit. Shirley is a fantastic artist so colors are her things. Her husband mentioned that he picked out her outfit. Shocked, I asked why. He said since Shirley never had a mother to organize her clothing for school in the morning, she wanted him to do it. She said it would help her heal an old childhood wound.
I love that story not just because these are two very special people to me who love each other so much that they are willing to heal each other, but because it is a testament to the power of mothers.
Tell me your story. I love hearing how this relationship effects your life.
Strange-you might say. Trust me, the relationship is a powerful one. We were born out of her body, she is our role model as her daughter whether we decide to be like her or not to be like her. For daughters who have daughters they want to parent like their mothers or not like their mothers. Even daughters who were given away by their mothers or who never knew their mothers are impacted by this powerful figure.
I love telling the story about my friend Shirley. When I wrote Echoes from the Womb, a Book for Daughters, www.createspace.com/3546083, I asked 100 women to fill out a questionnaire with only two questions on it. One was, how does your relationship with your mother impact your relationship with women and two, how does your relationship with your mother impact your relationship with men. Shirley wouldn't answer the questions because she thought, since her mother abandoned her at age 5, her mother wasn't relevant.
Years later she married a friend of mine and one day while we were having breakfast out on the peer watching the ocean, I told Shirley I loved her outfit. Shirley is a fantastic artist so colors are her things. Her husband mentioned that he picked out her outfit. Shocked, I asked why. He said since Shirley never had a mother to organize her clothing for school in the morning, she wanted him to do it. She said it would help her heal an old childhood wound.
I love that story not just because these are two very special people to me who love each other so much that they are willing to heal each other, but because it is a testament to the power of mothers.
Tell me your story. I love hearing how this relationship effects your life.
Emotional Writing
Every daughter is a daughter. Not all daughters become mothers but that isn’t the part of the dyad I want to discuss here. When I was a little girl I adored my mother. She was creative and beautiful with her red lips and cherry red fingernails that she always tapped on the Formica table while waiting for me to make my move while playing Rummy.
As time went on I often found myself in a chasm of conflict. How could I express my growing will while also being her dutiful daughter? I focused on doing good hoping to win her approval. Sometimes I got it but often I did not. My mother was difficult to please and I know this first hand because, believe me, I tried. I tried for the 34 years of my life she was alive. It got more difficult as time went by and my mother became more controlling. She was threatened by seeing me activate my free will and more threatened when she realized her need for control was failing as I got older and entered adulthood.
The more I let my mother know I loved her the more she seemed to not believe me. It was always a lose/lose situation. Like in the sitcoms on TV I would call my mother and then listen for 20 minutes about how I never call her. But my mother’s ability to be creative, spontaneous, outspoken, and caring lived inside me and she never allowed me to discuss any of this with her because her sadness and pain was the focus of our conversations. It was very difficult. The irony is that I always wanted to get closer to her but the more I tried the more she pushed me away until one day I shortened my calls and visits because I was near a nervous breakdown upon each visit.
I wrote almost daily in my journals about this tormenting relationship. As a psychotherapist I found my client caseload consisting of young women in similar situations with their mothers. The pain I listened to was enough to wrap around the world a zillion times. I started seeing daughters with their mothers and mothers with their daughters. That is how Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters started to form. I realized I was not the only woman in such a painful and frustrating place.
I was so deeply touched by the responses to my two question questionnaire I sent to a hundred women that I published all responses I got back without any editing. After Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters was printed something painfully gripping from deep inside me released. In the writing of the pain, I healed. In the writing of what it was like to be my mother’s daughter I realized my mother was a daughter too and the relationship she had had with her mother was enmeshing having been raised by a single mother. It was through the writing process that facets of this relationship came to me for further processing and understanding.
Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters is part narrative and part journal. From the sales of this book I received dozens of note cards from women who were changed in their relationship with their mothers, not just because they read it, but because they wrote out the incomplete sentences in the back of the book and processed their relationships themselves.
Writing heals. Keep the pen moving,
Jan
As time went on I often found myself in a chasm of conflict. How could I express my growing will while also being her dutiful daughter? I focused on doing good hoping to win her approval. Sometimes I got it but often I did not. My mother was difficult to please and I know this first hand because, believe me, I tried. I tried for the 34 years of my life she was alive. It got more difficult as time went by and my mother became more controlling. She was threatened by seeing me activate my free will and more threatened when she realized her need for control was failing as I got older and entered adulthood.
The more I let my mother know I loved her the more she seemed to not believe me. It was always a lose/lose situation. Like in the sitcoms on TV I would call my mother and then listen for 20 minutes about how I never call her. But my mother’s ability to be creative, spontaneous, outspoken, and caring lived inside me and she never allowed me to discuss any of this with her because her sadness and pain was the focus of our conversations. It was very difficult. The irony is that I always wanted to get closer to her but the more I tried the more she pushed me away until one day I shortened my calls and visits because I was near a nervous breakdown upon each visit.
I wrote almost daily in my journals about this tormenting relationship. As a psychotherapist I found my client caseload consisting of young women in similar situations with their mothers. The pain I listened to was enough to wrap around the world a zillion times. I started seeing daughters with their mothers and mothers with their daughters. That is how Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters started to form. I realized I was not the only woman in such a painful and frustrating place.
I was so deeply touched by the responses to my two question questionnaire I sent to a hundred women that I published all responses I got back without any editing. After Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters was printed something painfully gripping from deep inside me released. In the writing of the pain, I healed. In the writing of what it was like to be my mother’s daughter I realized my mother was a daughter too and the relationship she had had with her mother was enmeshing having been raised by a single mother. It was through the writing process that facets of this relationship came to me for further processing and understanding.
Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters is part narrative and part journal. From the sales of this book I received dozens of note cards from women who were changed in their relationship with their mothers, not just because they read it, but because they wrote out the incomplete sentences in the back of the book and processed their relationships themselves.
Writing heals. Keep the pen moving,
Jan
