Good Mothers
My five year old comes to me, again and again, with the same requests. "Play with me", she asks me. "What can I do? I'm bored." I can see that she needs a playmate, and I know that if things were the way I know they "are supposed to be", many peer playmates would be available to her every day. All day. Without having to ask me for a ride. Without asking to risk private involvement with other families of her school friends that I don't know, and don't know if I even want to know.
We live privately, almost like aliens in a foreign culture, and there are often no playmates for her to be with. So she brings her social needs to me. The "good" mother in me, says 'drop everything and play with her. She needs it. Look at her sad little face'. If the spirit is with me towards playing a game, we do play and we have a good time. But if the spirit is moving me towards some other thing, stopping to play with her would be impossible for me to enjoy, and hence, impossible for me to do. Either way, she still brings me her needs.
There is this thing that has been laid on mothers, to "be" whatever anybody needs. Mothers are expected to be the smoother-over agent, the fixer, the adapter, the wild card that adjusts like a chameleon to fit whatever social or emotional needs that family members convey. But the more the mother races around, scurrying and adapting, the more everybody gets addicted to that substitute energy, and the less of a person the mother becomes.
Being a mother is a relationship. But we make it more than that. We make it into a role, an identity, like a never ending script, often based on what we wished our mother had done. We write this script when we are little children, with big needs but with small conception of what is going on.
Little children cannot see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire culture, that makes all kinds of problems, including making playmates too rare and life too boring. All they see is mother, there, busy with something, and they think
a. I felt good when mother played with me yesterday.
b. I want to feel good now, but I don't.
c. If mother plays with me again I will feel better again.
d. Mother won't play with me. I feel bad. Mother is the problem. She is being a "bad" mother.
e. (When I am a mother, I am going to do it better than that. I am going to play with my kids anytime that they ask.)
A very logical set of thoughts, but only if we only take in a very small focus of facts, and ignore a huge chunk of reality. From the perspective of the little child, mother is huge and all powerful. She does what she chooses, she can do anything.
But from another perspective, we see that mother is just one woman, and in many ways powerless, locked into position in a huge web of society that applies pressures and defines options from within and without. And the only options offered within her mind, or within the world, are those considered normal and acceptable by the society in charge.
One of the most profound factors that is keeping mother powerless to create real positive change for her family, is that mandate to serve everyone, and make everyone happy, on their terms, right now. That inner mandate to be a "good" mother, from the five year old child's point of view, needs to be overturned before we can turn our attention to the actual issues important to our families.
There is more to being a person, with children, than being a mother. Most of the things I like best about myself, I was introduced to by my mother, as a role model, in that she did those things herself. The best things she did for me, she did not do for me. She did them for herself. I watched her write, and she loved it. Now I write. I watched her go to college after raising four children. Now I start my work, finally, as I am approaching 40, after four children.
If she had done nothing but serve my every whim when I was a child, I would have had no model about how to be a woman, except to serve every whim of another. Which would have been a very poor sort of life.
We live privately, almost like aliens in a foreign culture, and there are often no playmates for her to be with. So she brings her social needs to me. The "good" mother in me, says 'drop everything and play with her. She needs it. Look at her sad little face'. If the spirit is with me towards playing a game, we do play and we have a good time. But if the spirit is moving me towards some other thing, stopping to play with her would be impossible for me to enjoy, and hence, impossible for me to do. Either way, she still brings me her needs.
There is this thing that has been laid on mothers, to "be" whatever anybody needs. Mothers are expected to be the smoother-over agent, the fixer, the adapter, the wild card that adjusts like a chameleon to fit whatever social or emotional needs that family members convey. But the more the mother races around, scurrying and adapting, the more everybody gets addicted to that substitute energy, and the less of a person the mother becomes.
Being a mother is a relationship. But we make it more than that. We make it into a role, an identity, like a never ending script, often based on what we wished our mother had done. We write this script when we are little children, with big needs but with small conception of what is going on.
Little children cannot see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire culture, that makes all kinds of problems, including making playmates too rare and life too boring. All they see is mother, there, busy with something, and they think
a. I felt good when mother played with me yesterday.
b. I want to feel good now, but I don't.
c. If mother plays with me again I will feel better again.
d. Mother won't play with me. I feel bad. Mother is the problem. She is being a "bad" mother.
e. (When I am a mother, I am going to do it better than that. I am going to play with my kids anytime that they ask.)
A very logical set of thoughts, but only if we only take in a very small focus of facts, and ignore a huge chunk of reality. From the perspective of the little child, mother is huge and all powerful. She does what she chooses, she can do anything.
But from another perspective, we see that mother is just one woman, and in many ways powerless, locked into position in a huge web of society that applies pressures and defines options from within and without. And the only options offered within her mind, or within the world, are those considered normal and acceptable by the society in charge.
One of the most profound factors that is keeping mother powerless to create real positive change for her family, is that mandate to serve everyone, and make everyone happy, on their terms, right now. That inner mandate to be a "good" mother, from the five year old child's point of view, needs to be overturned before we can turn our attention to the actual issues important to our families.
There is more to being a person, with children, than being a mother. Most of the things I like best about myself, I was introduced to by my mother, as a role model, in that she did those things herself. The best things she did for me, she did not do for me. She did them for herself. I watched her write, and she loved it. Now I write. I watched her go to college after raising four children. Now I start my work, finally, as I am approaching 40, after four children.
If she had done nothing but serve my every whim when I was a child, I would have had no model about how to be a woman, except to serve every whim of another. Which would have been a very poor sort of life.
NEXT: Kingdom of the Child
