My Mother and Me

First Child
Small.
Hiding.
Don't leave me.

What about me?

I hate you-in-me
Cut, cut it out, cut it out of me, cut it out of me now,
cut it out of me right now.

Bleeding:
Wound
Woman
Whole
Life-and-death.

Flowers
Hope.

I wrote that poem, and the one the below, on July 25, 1999, at a Healing Theatre workshop entitled "Your Mother and You." One of the exercises in the workshop was to take off items of clothing that represented our mothers, and say what characteristics of our mothers we were discarding.

At the workshop, I came to see more clearly ways in which I was not able to separate from my mother. But I have also had to face integrating the things inside me that are identified with my mother. I think, somehow, I have to separate from my mother and integrate her at the same time. I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but in writing this page, I am trying to better define how it is true for me. At that same workshop, I made a picture of the overall healing process which you can find here: spiral.

Second Child:
Is she gone?
What was she doing here?
I thought...
I don't know what I thought.

She is so big I can't breathe
There is no air left for me
Her body makes mine breathe.

Give me space
Someone hold me loosely
hold me up while I make a new skeleton.

I can't cut her out without dying
Don't look in the mirror
I cannot hate her without hating myself.

How to go forward
without leaving her-in-me behind?

In the first three stanzas of this poem, I write about lingering fear, about sexual abuse and about healing. But what I want to examine further here are the issues raised in the last two stanzas. I want to write about what it means to look in the mirror and see my abuser. Over-and-over again, I have started to reach my anger, started to express anger at my mother and my grandmother for abusing me, only to have my anger turn back against myself. Partly that is an old pattern of turning my anger against myself. In addition, I think that the anger turns back because there is so much of my mother and my grandmother in me. I wonder if that identification is a particular problem for people abused by close relatives of the same sex and even more so for women abused by their mothers.

Partly my identification with my mother is a result of the abuse. A key part of the experience of sexual abuse was not having boundaries, as the second stanza describes. I believe that during the abuse I had the sense not only that my body belonged to my mother instead of to me, but also that what I felt were her feelings, not my own feelings. I sought the sexual abuse rather than trying to avoid it because it was the only way I knew to get my mother to meet my need to be held and loved and also because becoming one with her was a powerful high. I don't know whether to describe it as being able to go back into the womb, or whether to describe it as a feeling of power, because if I was her I was big and powerful instead of being the small scared child I left behind.

For my mother, I think there was a kind of identification going on as well. Perhaps it wasn't me that my mother was trying to hold, but herself as a child. I was reading a book that includes a philosophical discussion of gay sex (The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, by Daniel Mendelsohn), and I had a flash of recognition when I got to a part where the author talks about falling through the partner back into the self.

Since my mother and my maternal grandmother both abused me, I assume my mother was abused by her mother. I think my mother was acting that out when she abused me, that the child she was comforting and hurting at the same time was not really me but her own inner child. For some reason that makes me feel better; perhaps it says that it wasn't something specially bad in me that caused the abuse but rather my resemblance to her as a child (same haircut and everything).

My identification with my mother (and hers with me) was expressed in practical ways as well as in my response to the abuse. As a child I tried very hard to like everything my mother liked. I do not know how much of that was just what my mother expected, how much it was a desperate search for approval, and how much it was because the abuse had left me without the confidence to have my own opinions.

As I became a teenager, I found some safe ways to be different, but I never risked rebellion. Interestingly, my mother picked up one of the interests I developed as a teenager, and it led her to a rewarding job. Somehow I made a good and separate life, but I still feel not myself, that much of what I like and dislike are my mother's opinions (as they were in my childhood--she has changed some of them since and I have stayed with what I grew up with). I don't spend a lot of time with my mother or talk to her often--at this point it is her-in-me I am bound to, not the real outside person.

When I write that I cannot cut her out without dying, I am, in part, expressing the dilemma of the child abused by an adult on whom she is dependent--the child could not reject the abuser because the child cannot survive without that person (for more on this read Jennifer J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse ).

It is easy for outsiders to see that childhood dependence, and also the well-known phenomenon by which prisoners can identify with their captors, as reasons why it is difficult for me to reject my mother or be angry at her for the abuse. Some people do finally choose to reject completely mothers who have abused them. But for myself, I want to say something different and perhaps in a subtle way more radical. I want to say that not only do I get stuck in identification with my mother, but also I must in some sense embrace that identification, not reject it, in order to be a whole person.

When I write "I can't cut her out of me without dying," I mean that so much of what I am comes from my mother that I cannot get rid of everything in which I am like my mother without destroying my self, just as I can't change myself so I don't look like her. I don't know the psychology literature well enough to know what are the key statements of the idea, but I do know that there is a discussion of how women don't separate from their mothers the same way men separate from their parents.

I think that that "normal" lack of separation is, in part, what I am caught on. There is a sense in which I feel "I am her" that I think is more fundamental than the general phenomenon of identification with an abuser. I came from her body, I have a body like hers, I have so many of the same features and tendencies both inherited and learned. I believe I can choose to make something different of myself, but I feel that in my raw material I am another version of her caught in the same web of family.

Most recently, I have struggled to come to terms with how I am like my mother even in many of the things I hate most in her. I have faced that I too have impulses to abuse and therefore I am not fundamentally different, though I have been blessed with being able to act differently (see The Shadow ). I see accepting the bad parts of my mother inside me as a way in which I make a commitment to all the parts of myself. Just as I have promised the wounded child in me that I will not leave her behind, I choose to make a commitment not to leave behind the parts of me that come from my mother, what I call her-in-me. I have to face the destructive power in me, and also characteristics that can perhaps be channeled for good or harm.

I don't know whether I can figure out how to separate from my mother and integrate her at the same time or whether the trick to doing two contradictory things at once is not to try to analyze it. I feel at least that the issue of identification with the mother/abuser is something worth naming.

back to top

home | pam | pem | female-female abuse | book reviews |