My Mother My Self?

Seems so..

Been reading Nancy Friday yesterday on a plane on the way home from a sunny weekend away. Wow.

You have to read it.

If you're a woman, it will explain so many of the things you don't like about turning into your mother, and may well help you avoid that fate, which seems to me to be a 99.99% certainty for most of us.

Men, you need to read this one too. You will if you really love your woman, and want to understand some of those weird things we do.

I was particularly moved to tears to read one paragraph on postpartum depression. It explained so much. I know my own mother had depression after I was born, but have never really given it enough thought, or put the pieces together in the right way before. I needed Nancy Friday to spell it out for me.

Depressed mothers don't give babies the nurture they need. Depressed mothers feel that way sometimes because of all the cultural conditioning there is about women having some mythical kind of 'maternal instinct' (no, it doesn't seem to just 'come' if you look at the stats, that's the myth), and those that don't feel that immediate and much-hyped and idealized 'motherly love', feel so inadequate and freaked out by it.

My mother has always been the over-compensator, smothering me in over the top mushy sentimentality, which has always seemed like a lie I couldn't explain, and I think I came to realize yesterday, that that is an act of overcompensation. Words and feelings and actions haven't matched always. I don't think I'd put 2 and 2 together quite like that before and come up with 4, but if I apply that to the rest of my life, I can see what drives those over-the-top people is a fear that they aren't up for it.
A natural extrapolation for non-feeling, is the over-compensating smothering mother. I can see how that is driven by guilt and shame. It's a far cry sometimes from the real thing. Not that I think she doesn't love me, but I think in that first year of life, she found it hard. It wasn't the fairytale she hoped it would be.
It wasn't the fairytale she always told me it was, either. And that's an important point.

My individuation process clearly didn't go that well. I wasn't breast-fed, for a start. Now I have the framework to see what to do about it, and why all this last while in my own life has manifested the way it has. Not that Husband has ever complained about my 'oral fixation'...
I transferred that unfinished or damaged individuation process to Husband, who has made a great 'mother' for me all these years in a lot of ways, and in other less helpful ways too, been perfectly like my own mother.

The negative things, my clinging, fear, not wanting to be out of his sight, his nagging and million questions, and slowness in learning certain things, etc. In so many ways he's a lot like her. And of course, thankfully, in so many ways just the opposite! ;-)

So, wow, I have some food for thought here.

A lot of this stuff I have known, obviously, or heard or read about, it's not exactly hidden knowledge, but there's something very powerful about hearing it from another woman's point of view, because she has the same stuff going on, the same issues, and can put it in language I can understand better than all the male-oriented psychobabble about Electra complexes and such, which mean next to nothing if not written about from direct experience. It's the emotional empathy that is always missing in these male-oriented explanations of why us women are emotional creatures sometimes. Men are sometimes scared of female emotion, especially a lot of the ones that write about it. Freud was never analyzed..