Making Peace with Being Woman

An excerpt from a book I am writing:

One thing I noticed in all the interviews I did with women about their relationships with their mothers is that to make peace with who their mother was is essential for their own wellbeing. It is as if our history lives on deeply inside of us, so that to expunge the demons of the past includes embracing them first. The wholeness of who we are includes and is in part because of this very past we most don’t want. We can’t get away from it by ignoring it if it dwells within us every step of the way. Which it does, really.

We are of and from our mothers whether we like the person they were or not. And those who most loved their mothers were most willing to see the gladness of their past. Ironically, sometimes this made it difficult to move on, too. Being stuck in the past is no better than trying to expunge it from the core of our cells. Neither attitude works, really. But to embrace it – now there is a different story. A happy one.

Therein seems to be the healthy way. The middle ground, as it were. To embrace our past is to include it gladly in our present, without clinging or pushing it away. The middle way of acceptance, embracing, seeing who and what we are in the continuum of life as it was handed to us. We can only start there which is here. When we accept gladly that which was given us to deal with in this lifetime we can most readily get on with the living of it. We can make the changes we need to from where we are, not where we wish we were already. Which is simply impossible at best.

What ground do we have to stand on if not the solid ground of where we are? Even if we are headed in some direction that will move us eventually to a different place, we must start from where we are. Peggy Tabor Millin, in Women, Writing and Soul Making, remarks: “Because feminine responsiveness does not make the splash or the money and success required in our culture, because it is not ‘out there’ and ‘in your face,’ women, as well as men, devalue it.” “By the 1970’s the Power Principle had co-opted the women’s movement, opening the doors to women on condition that they turn their backs on their roles as nurturers and responders and become competitive and action-driven. With few models for feminine power based on the synthesis of feminine and masculine, we went to where the power lay – into the world of the Power Principle.”

It is time – we are in great need – for feminine integration as part of power. We have to translate from the debased female to what it would look like to have that principle honored. All of this sounds so self-evident, yet with the imaginative power of our brains and minds we can imagine whole fantasies to distract us from the task(s) at hand – which we most need to deal with to become our full potential. Our Being. Of Life, free from the constraints we were handed as the straitjacket into which we were born.

What I realized after my mother’s death was a sense of being loved that I had never encountered when she was alive. Encumbered by the straitjacket of her time – religious and cultural – she never broke free to extend the love which she really was. She lived the norm of her times. But after her death, she has come through to me in myriad ways, again and again loving me where I had felt previously judged. It has been a most remarkable journey that continues still. I had not realized how very little association I felt in any way with any sense of a Divine Mother. In our time of patriarchal religions holding sway, the only reference to the Divine is masculine. Even the Holy Trinity, which holds the potential of including the feminine to be complete in its expression, has been stripped clear of any such reference and speaks only to the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. A more complete version would be: “The Father, Mother, and Divine Beloved.” These reflect the major relationships with which we need to make peace, find consolation and “Divine Love” to feel fully safe in this world.

Peggy Millin, again: “Now is the time of redefinition of feminine power, a definition based on inner values rather than on outer roles and action.”

Beyond what our mothers taught us

[An excerpt from a book I am writing]

Peggy Tabor Millin in her book, Women, Writing, and Soul-Making, asks: “Why is it that women disown their genius, have so much trouble claiming it, and can be swept off by the smallest current of criticism? Are we so born to pleasing others that we do not know who we are, cannot find that inner thread unless it is handed to us?”

There are many mythologies that separate us from ourselves. The myth(s) regarding women is one of the most insidious and pervasive. Almost all religions are patriarchal. It wasn’t always this way, but it has been long enough to seem like “basic reality”. The rules of patriarchy and patriarchal religions automatically create a sense of “less-than” for women. Most of the rules in these religions apply to and for men. The need to tone down a pervasive arrogant ego implies there IS a “dominating ego”. The issue for most women by and large has to do with egos so shattered they don’t even know who they are outside of the roles they play in making others OK. Although this still speaks to the need for reducing the influence of a “negative ego”, the ego of which we speak for women is most often that inner voice of self-condemnation. It requires a different medicine. And going at it with the pickaxe of judgment just does more harm to an already injured place inside of us.

Many women grew up under the influence of mothers who were steeped in the deepest brine of this matter. Barb told me that the hardest part about living with her mother was that “it was sad and depressing. Not much joy. I knew she was unhappy. I felt bad for her. I constantly felt that I wasn’t good enough. I learned to keep things hidden, be quiet, to be embarrassed about who I was.” Lynette said, “It was hard to see my mother suffer. She dealt with so many issues: the loss of her mother, the infidelity of my father, the loss of my brother, her son. My father started drinking, and she couldn’t cope any more. Even so, she never took it out on us and maintained a ‘smile through adversity’.”

On the other hand, ironically, sometimes the very love that our mothers provide to us leaves us feeling “less than” in ways that may be surprising to those who grew up without a sense of safe haven with their mothers. Lanelle describes her mother as “so much a mother, constantly helping and present – supporting. I felt taken care of. But – I also felt less than some times – she was so good at anything and I often felt like I was not doing enough. There was a detriment of her doing all for me. I didn’t learn to persevere or figure things out so well.”

The cultural milieu and myths in which we grow up influence us in one way or another. Our mothers, of course, had this same paradigm in which to grow, survive and (amazingly) sometimes thrive. In many ways, the relationship we have with our mothers invokes the most basic Buddhist principle of learning to neither cling nor push away the reality in which we dwell. It is notable that within mother-daughter relationships, the syndrome of “never being enough” came about whether our mothers were too critical, or too helpful. This seems reasonable when our moms were constantly finding fault with us. But it is interesting that this syndrome can also arise within the context of our mothers being so good that we never feel we can compare favorably to her.

The cultural milieu in which we grew was the same, by and large, as that of our mothers. We were ALL taught – in one way or another – that as a woman we needed to earn love by being nice in the way women had to be. To placate, make OK for others. Spirituality in men’s terms has women as their helpmates. There is no mention of women in their own right under these doctrines. Our culture reflects the same more.

One ironic answer is to embrace. Use that which IS our inherent strength – for the good it can do us all. Embrace the mother we had – who did the best she could. And – most importantly, embrace ourselves – in the moment, doing the best WE can. Like in Tai Chi, we move WITH the energy of what we do best, but learn to include ourselves in the matrix of receiving as well as giving. The only way we can make the maxim, “it is in giving that we receive” really work is if we also really receive!

Learning to turn the spotlight of nourishment on our own parched souls may take some time of unlearning some of the most harsh rules we live by. But it is essential for our wellbeing.

Change

It has become nearly common knowledge that when a caterpillar hides itself in a chrysalis to metamorph into a butterfly, it decomposes completely. From this soup of apparently random cells come progenitor cells, called imaginal cells, which find one another in such a way that a new cohesive pattern is formed. A butterfly. In the cosmos is contained the plan – the blue print – for this new form to take shape.

In like fashion, every decomposing leaf, trunk and body can be seen to be returning to the chrysalis womb of the great Mother, Earth, to be reshaped into the cellular pattern of that which is waiting to be formed from those particular cells. All matter is imaginal. Transforming yet again and again into new forms of the Cosmos’ imagining.

What is seldom mentioned in the butterfly story is that the original caterpillar cells put up a fight. There is some initial struggle when the newly christened imaginal cells reach out to find one another in that soup. Some are killed in this battle. Eventually, they do coalesce, and that which is to be does emerge, but beneath the hardened shell of that chrysalis the newly created butterfly had to ward off the efforts of the dying caterpillar to maintain itself before it could successfully find its own new form.

I imagine personal and societal change must surely follow this same pattern. If you are experiencing discord and turmoil in your life; if you know change needs to happen but you feel yourself clinging to some outmoded past, give your imaginal cells a boost.

Imagine yourself as that butterfly you are longing to be. Imagine the world as that place where you want to be. And see how you fit into that new pattern.

Then – live it. It is what you are here to do.

Good Enough

I don’t know anybody who is free of the feeling that they are never quite enough — and it’s such a source of suffering. I don’t think anything can be more painful than living every day with the scorching thoughts of: “I’m somehow not OK. There is something wrong with me. I can’t quite figure it out, but I’m sure I need to fix something about me to make me OK.” That’s torture.

This topic has loomed especially large in my mind recently because my mother died last month. Most of us don’t feel perfectly mothered. But a very interesting thing happened when my mother died. She had increasingly lived her life as the martyr that the faith in her religion encouraged her to be. It became quite gruesome, and she died the way she had lived —suffering horribly.

Throughout my last two months with her, I focused on trying to release the chains of the patriarchal religion which had so convinced her of her unworthiness. I wanted her to taste what it was like to be mothered in a loving way as she became more and more dependent. At the very end — in the last two days — I held her and rocked her, as her breath became more labored and she could no longer resist. I reminded her: “Right here, God loves you. The Angels are holding you. You did nothing wrong. You are innocent.” She finally began to lighten in the last hour, tears streaming down her face (and mine).

Two nights after that, I bolted straight up in bed. I was feeling the most intense loving, divine Presence. It was my mother! I felt then, and it has been absolutely there ever since, “This is what it is like without all the --.” -- garbage of condemnation. “This is what it’s like to just feel loved!”

What so many of us are dealing with, I’m convinced, is all that garbage wrapped like barnacles around the skin of the feminine. I believe this is true for both men and women. By female energy I mean the soft, receptive, gentle quality of nurturance. I see this deprivation as the real starvation behind so many addictions and pains.

Often, our entrance into the awareness of this Divine Space comes unbidden. It is always there – always available, when we stop agitating against it, believing we have to “do something” to earn it, to deserve it, to find it.

Being loved has as its only prerequisite that we exist.

This is an excerpt from a longer article, found at: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlehome.html