Grieving the Mother I Never Had

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An exploration in “mother hunger” and disenfranchised grief

(NOTE: Quote call outs unless otherwise noted are sourced from the book Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel)

In circles of discourse around estrangement, there is the concept of ambiguous grief - the profound depth of sadness around the loss of relationship with a person who is still living, but no longer in your life. One where there is lack of closure. Grieving the death of the relationship is equated to grieving the still living person associated with it. 

Personally, this has always seemed to be not quite accurate to the experience of estrangement. There is little that is ambiguous about recognizing the level of perpetual and sustained harm in a foundational relationship that necessitates having to make the decision to sever it. The refusal to care about the pain inflicted, change their behavior or make amends is the closure. 

There is a perhaps better term for this experience: disenfranchised grief. It refers to that which is not socially recognized or validated, is invisible, unacknowledged as real or not understood to the depth of its experience. Where the grieving person also faces societal stigma.

Like many who have made the heartbreaking decision to go no contact, what I grieve in respect to the relationship with my mother is what should have and very much could have been, but wasn’t. The mother and the relationship I longed for and intrinsically needed but never had. As such there is nothing materially there to grieve for. It is a blank space. An emptiness. A sea of unending grey. 

“We need our mothers. This need is biologically hardwired into our bodies and brains…From the very beginning of life, instincts compel newborns to stay close to their biological mother as her voice, smell and body are already familiar. She is home.” - Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger

Whether our mothers actually created a relationship that felt like home is another matter. In this sense, many of us grew up being in fact homeless without ever realizing it. 

According to Kelly McDaniel, licensed counselor and author of the book Mother Hunger from which the quotes herein are sourced, there are three essential elements of mothering: 

• Nurturance: It is from our mother and her responsiveness and attunement to our needs both physical and emotional, that we start to learn about the world and our place in it. “From her nurturance, we learn whether or not we matter. We learn how love feels.”

• Protection: We intuit early on from the interactions with our mothers whether we will have a safe, protected harbor from the various threats that exist both inside and outside the family - bodily, emotionally, spiritually, and culturally. “Protection begins in utero and continues for a long time.”

• Guidance: Through both direct expression and indirect modeling, our mothers are our examples, guides and teachers of life, cultural norms, of relationships and how to navigate and exist within them. The degree to which a child will seek and trust a mother’s guidance, however, is dependent upon the solid establishment of the first two elements of nurturance and protection.

It is safe to say that for many of us who now find ourselves members of the estrangement community, there is some measure of those essential elements of mothering that were insufficient or entirely absent from our mothers or primary caregivers. 

Part of reclaiming ourselves after experiencing that lack of secure attachment from our mothers is assessing what we did experience as compared to what we wanted and needed to experience in that most essential and fundamental of all relationships. A reckoning of what we hungered and may yet still hunger for in relationship with our mothers. 

Our need for mothering never really goes away even in adulthood, especially if core needs were unmet in our formative years.

Outside of therapy settings, this exploration can be done via exercises such as journaling, drawing or painting. It could entail creating a collage of sorts, whether a collection of images, lyrics, poems, paintings, or movie scenes that represents the kind of relationship you had as well as what you yearned for. Then through that process, reflecting upon why those selected reference points are so resonant.

It is not about “wallowing in the past,” but about re-mothering ourselves to reclaim and meet our needs in the now as well as to have the capacity to be for our own children what we needed and didn’t receive for ourselves. 

Regardless of the approach taken, prompts can help get the process going and the three pillars of mothering can be just such a way into the exercise.

Nurturance

According to McDaniel, “nurturance is the nonverbal language of I love you and I’m here.” What comes to mind is an intangible sense of warmth and tenderness manifested through a reliable and deeply comforting presence. It is not a term that surfaces when I think of my mother.

Try as I might, moments of affection or a sense of being there are not something I have stored in my memory banks. Whether my recall is colored by the nearer recency of the conflicts in adulthood leading to the estrangement, the passing of years, or a combination thereof is hard to say. To be fair though, there are scant few memories of any kind that I can pull up from early childhood. Of those that I do, few have my mother in them.

There are schools of thought that childhood adversity can produce dissociative amnesia along varying scales - whether specific to an event, loss of memory of certain details from a period of time or systematized to a category, topic or person. 

“When maternal threats are constant, so is dissociation.”

Most of what does come to mind centers around purposely playing or reading alone so as to keep myself safe from becoming a target of my siblings or wanting to avoid the family altogether. 

What I lack in explicit memory, I seem to have in implicit memory - halos of feelings and sentiment. The residual implicit memories of my mother from early childhood are of someone who was emotionally distant and unavailable.

The absence of nurturing wasn’t anything I realized until much later upon reflection. There did always feel like there were important things missing - I fantasized about discovering having been adopted and that explaining my lack of sense of belonging -  but like all children, I assumed the fault of my unlovability was mine. 

The delayed recognition is not at all unusual. 

“Identifying maternal neglect or abuse doesn’t happen until later in life. It’s as if we are protected from knowing until we are truly ready to know.”

Protection

Maternal protection is an innate need. From infancy through to adolescence, the reliance upon a mother for emotional safety and connection is wired in children and the degree to which that need is met establishes the type of relationship that carries on into adulthood. When children do not find emotional safety with their mother, they develop a myriad of coping strategies and survival mechanisms - often maladaptive. 

The absence of safety when not established in early childhood, can then lead to distance and escalations of conflict in the adolescence and teenage years as well as beyond.

“Little ones who learn to rely on themselves for comfort and safety become guarded teenagers who are hard to reach.”

I recently came across a college autobiography writing assignment sharing recollections with my mother. There was a ritual that my mother engaged in every morning of my freshman year of high school to evaluate my appearance to determine if I was presentable enough to leave the house. Not out of any concern for me, but of how I represented and reflected upon her. 

I was in a goth, punk phase and styled myself accordingly. She was mortified. Those morning interactions would frequently turn into fights.

I wrote, “Eventually the fights got physical. When I infuriated her by ignoring her rantings and standing in a deliberate calm in front of the mirror, she would start smacking the back of my head out of frustration and anger. Once, I grabbed her wrists to prevent her from hitting me, causing her instead to try to kick me. Stronger, I was able to hold her at a distance so that she could not reach me. I laughed at her as she flailed. Incensed, she finally tore her arm out of my grasp and slapped me across the face. Out of reflex and adrenaline, I slapped her back. She became immediately still and proclaimed in a voice shaking with anger that I would never be allowed to skate again.”

At the time, figure skating was the only thing I cared about. It was both my escape and means of physical and emotional release. Without the capacity to connect on a relational level to address what was underneath my choices and behavior, the threat of taking that away was an easy and oft go-to tactic to inflict retaliatory punishment and achieve behavioral compliance. 

Until rereading that paper, I had forgotten about those morning inspections as well as that particular incident of defiant self defense. Far from being protected or seeing her as a source of safety or refuge for teenage turmoil, I was protecting myself from her. 

I have to admit even now experiencing an ever-so-brief flash of mixed shock, shame and pride at the revisiting of the incident through that writing assignment. Shock and shame because of course, how dare I fight back against my mother? That is a taboo of the highest order - even though it would not be deemed as such in most any other relationship outside of parents or family. Feeling shame around doing so is a reflection of successful, well-established cultural indoctrination. 

There is a sense of pride though as well. Pride because I see the parts of me that, even at that young age and in that family dynamic, refused to give up on myself. I see the strength and spark that was apparently threatening to them while being so vital to me in holding onto an authentic self. The revisiting also provides hindsight clarity around how those recurring and never resolved conflicts were markers of the ongoing neglect and maltreatment that ultimately resulted - some thirty years later - in estrangement.

I understand now, in reflection, that my rebellious “punk stage” as my family referred to it, was the cry of an anguished 14 year old trying to simultaneously protect herself, assert her own agency and reject shaming demands for conformity. One with no model of healthy dynamics with which to recognize the pervasive dysfunction. A desperate attempt to be seen, heard and to matter within a family that did its best to render that member invisible.

With the benefit of hindsight and greater awareness of my mother’s own history of compounded and devastating circumstances of trauma, hardship and abuse, I can have an appreciation now that she didn’t have the resources - internal or external - to constructively address conflict let alone have a functional understanding or awareness of developmental stages and needs. 

But that knowledge was of no help to me then nor, as I know now, should I have ever been tasked with compensating for her unhealed and unprocessed trauma or relational ignorance. What was made clear was that no trauma could ever compare to hers and I was therefore unjustified in any assertion of harm experienced. 

“A mother’s unrepaired emotional scars from her own upbringing adversely impact her maternal instincts.” Such a mother, “easily distressed... can’t tolerate when her daughter has big emotions, particularly if they are negative emotions. Afraid that she has no solution, a vulnerable mother may push her daughter away to avoid feeling helpless.”

It is these types of patterns, driven by the mother’s inability to establish emotional intimacy with her child, that therefore prevents connection. Instead of forming a secure attachment that is then nourished and strengthened through the developmental years, what manifests is an insecurity of trust and an inner child existing in a state of perpetual deep woundedness until, as an adult, we find the resources to work on healing and re-mothering ourselves.

Image credits: AdobeStock photos

Secure maternal relationship evolution vs a deeply wounded inner child

Guidance

A solid, secure foundation of nurturing and protection must be established in order for there to be receptivity to maternal guidance. As McDaniels states, “for maternal guidance to be effective, there must first be a trusted bond.”

Compounding the barriers of a mother’s unhealed personal past to creating that bond, the cultural conformity that was necessitated for her to engage in and ultimately buy into within patriarchal society can impose further challenges to the mother-daughter relationship specifically. 

”Sometimes women compensate for misogyny by behaving like those in power.”

Such was the case with my mother’s admonition to my teen self on the verge of dating, “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.” This was her sage conveyance of a woman’s value in relationship with the opposite sex and imposition of purity mentality applying only to women and girls. Through such commentary, I learned quickly that my mother would be neither my ally nor a sought out guide around the development of my own feminine power and autonomy.

Though what really shattered any interest in seeking her perspective was the clockwork-like predictability of her preamble to the conferring of any input - whether or not it had been asked for:  “you know, your problem is…”

No matter if I had actually been looking for guidance or simply sharing a story of something that had occurred that day, I would be the recipient of her disparaging judgement and criticism. 

So much so that, nearly every time, the moment after I opened my mouth to share some piece of my life or my inner world, I instantly regretted it. I learned to heavily edit. And then, eventually, I simply stopped sharing. 

The result was that as an adult, conversations - and the relationship - could only manage to be maintained at a superficial and transactional level. No part of my authentic self felt safe to be shared with her.

It is a deeply lonely and isolating feeling to have “I want my mom” moments only to instantly have to shut them down and assess what other sources of comfort or guidance might be safe and available to turn to. It is an ever present ache to have a need to find emotional safety in others while having difficulty in trusting that such safety is true given the absence of that experience from a mother. That foundational ability to trust was never established.

I sometimes need to remind myself that I don’t need to carry the burden of guilt over the failed relationship. It was never my role to build and nurture it; it was hers. 

It is a hard fought balance to come to a place of being able to hold both an understanding and empathy for why my mother was incapable of establishing a secure, nourishing attachment and also a recognition that the only healthy choice for myself and my family was to walk away. 

While I can have admiration and even awe at what she survived, her unhealed turmoil does not obligate me to overlook how that lack of healing led to the infliction of irreparable trauma and harm upon me. Nor does it excuse the very deliberate and intentional punitive behaviors she enacted every time an attempt was made to raise concern about the relationship. 

The reality is, “lack of nurturance and protection is neglectful, and neglect is a form of emotional abuse. Emotionally abusive mothers rarely repair the hurt they cause, and the lack of acknowledgment is what causes enduring psychological trauma.”

Ultimately, there is often a ridiculously herculean task assigned to women in evaluating the relationships with their mothers. Not unlike the herculean task of women for millennia. To see with devastatingly learned clarity the dynamics in which we were mothered. To seek to understand the history of our mother and what she specifically endured from her intergenerational past - both within her family and within the social, cultural and historical contexts in which she was raised.

To take stock of not only how our mothers may have failed us - intentionally or not - but how patriarchy failed us all and set both mothers and daughters up for failure. All while recognizing that it is not our job to absorb the sins of what was inflicted upon them by their families, or of cultural impact, in order to have to endure a relationship in the now. 

To come to the realization that we deserved better in a maternal relationship than one characterized by expectations of one-sided tolerance and endurance of abuse or dysfunction.

It is knowing that our healing will always include grief that cannot be fully articulated or understood, and some level of unsatiated hunger for what we never had. The re-mothering we engage in on our own provides a path towards our own internal repair along with a sorrowful understanding that there can never be what never was. 

“Healing - identifying, understanding and remembering - can be as painful as the original abuse. Even if you understand that your mother’s cruelty wasn’t purposeful, the pain she caused you is deep, and it needs repair.”

[Please note: The educational series columnist is not a licensed mental health professional. The articles under this series are written from a peer to peer perspective.]

Source of quotes unless otherwise noted: 

McDaniel, Kelly. Mother Hunger. Copyright 2021.Hay House, LLC.