One of the most difficult situations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are not saints or saviors – they are just people who, no matter how dirty or painful our friendships, and no matter how complicated the relationships of adults, love us in the best way they knew, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.
It is the work of a lifetime to accept this fundamental truth, and the triumph of life to accept it not with bitterness but with love.
How to make that liberating change of perspective is what a playwright, suffragist, and psychologist is all about. Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) reflects in a passage in his 1968 biography. The Average of My Days (public library).
You write:
A mother's love for her children, even her inability to give them up, is because she is under the painful law that the past life must be fulfilled. Even if it's just a whole swallow, she acts like any frightened mother cat who eats her kittens to protect them.
With a sentiment reminiscent of Kahlil Gibran's understanding of the delicate balance of intimacy and independence essential to romantic love – which is always an echo of our constructive attachment – he adds:
It is not easy to give up intimacy with freedom, safety and danger.
With a keen eye on the expectations of parents that all children live under, until adulthood, he writes:
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of development. It cannot happen otherwise because he is motivated to know that the seeds of value that have been planted in him have been planted. He does not pass the burden of love, until the end he carries the weight of hope for those who carry it. Sadly, strangely, she is forever surprised and suddenly offended that her sons and daughters are only human, because many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, somehow be a savior. Maybe they're right, and they can believe that the rare quality they saw in a child applies to a struggling adult.
Perhaps that idea was what Maurice Sendak was saying when he saw that life is primarily a matter of “having your child alive and alive and something to be proud of.”
Fill in Kahlil Gibran's advice on children, pioneering psychologist Donald Winnicott on the role of the mother in society, and Alison Bechdel's superb Winnicott-inspired. Are You My Mother?then it's fun Mother's Eyes — a soulful short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill's poignant advice on how to survive when your parents die.
