Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  ♦ To keep your marriage together (or to get someone to marry you in the first place)

  Despite all the articles in the popular press, all the studies, and all the cautionary tales presented in novels and movies, people still appear to believe that a baby can heal a relationship already under stress. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. And while disagreements over childrearing aren’t among the top three reasons people divorce—those remain infidelity, drug or alcohol abuse, and money—they are extremely common. Here’s the thing: Just as lovers wrongly believe they’ll simply smooth over disagreements about money, couples tend not to discuss their views about raising children ahead of time.

  The good news, of course, is that your original motivation for having a child need not dictate how you parent if you are willing to be honest with yourself and work hard at seeing how your unconscious, unarticulated, and unacknowledged needs—not your child’s—are influencing your behavior. With awareness, we become better mothers.

  MAKING THE DECISION: YES OR NO?

  Having a child was very important to me, and I went on to have three. Yes, I was nervous, but I was also determined to have my kids be loved in all the ways I wasn’t. Was I a perfect mother? No, far from it. But my children thrived and I showered them with love, affection, understanding, and support—everything I was denied myself .

  ~Lorraine, 48

  I didn’t trust myself enough to bring a child into the world. I was panicked about visiting the same misery my mother had rained on me. I was particularly scared of having a girl and, maybe, if there’d been a way of guaranteeing I would only have a son, I might have gotten up the courage. My mother was fine with my brothers, her sons. Do I have regrets now? Yes, because I am different than I was 20 years ago. And now it’s too late .

  ~Deidre, 46

  While the question of whether they’ll mother well is what haunts many daughters, if they’re aware of how they were wounded, they already have the requisite consciousness not to repeat their mothers’ behaviors. If they decide to become parents, these women actually become good ones with practice and effort; alas, the daughters who still normalize their childhood experiences and really don’t see the connection between childhood and their own deep-rooted unhappiness are most at risk for repeating their mothers’ behaviors at least until they grow more aware. Eleanor, now 59, recounts how she thought “a baby would fix everything” and how she really didn’t think about the decision much at all; she was 19 when she had her first child. Her children are now 38 and 36, both have failed to thrive in various ways, and she is loaded with regrets: “Now that I understand how emotionally neglected I was, I understand that I didn’t have the tools to be a good mother. I’ve talked to my children about it, but my guilt is HUGE. I feel I did them a disservice by bringing them into my shambles of a world.” When I asked her what advice she’d give to other women, she wrote: “Deal with your own demons first. Remember it’s not just a baby; it’s a human being you’re responsible for. Realize that you will need a ‘village,’ whether it be your partner, close friends, or family. Don’t expect children to fill up the hole in your soul. If I’d been self-aware enough to realize I’d been emotionally neglected and the life consequences, I don’t think I would have had children.”

  Lizbeth, a 43-year-old professional, is childless by choice. But the question was one she struggled with her whole life. She’s felt the burden of societal expectations keenly but long wondered about her own maternal capabilities. “I remember babysitting girls and watching my friends’ younger siblings play with their dolls, and all the nurturing behavior they play-acted. I never knew what to do with my dolls, except to display them, sitting on my bed.” By the time she was ten, she figured she was different somehow and started telling her friends she’d never have kids.

  But of course, it wasn’t as cut and dried as all that. Her own recognition of how she was neglected and emotionally abused in childhood was slow in coming. “Perhaps, if it hadn’t taken me almost 40 years to recognize how I’d been affected, I might have started the healing process sooner and that might have led to a different choice and outcome.” Instead, she married a narcissist, who treated her as her parents did, and it was only escaping that marriage and going into therapy that permitted her to see the patterns in her childhood. Still, when she reached the age of 40—what her doctor called the outside limit—she and her second husband once again talked about whether to have a child. And once again, she chose not to, with her husband’s full support despite his contention that she would make an excellent mother. As to regrets, this is how Lizbeth answers: “I do think it’s the right choice for me, despite it being an unpopular one in society. I don’t feel like I have a hole in my heart by not having them. I know, too, that if I ever feel I am missing out by not having them, we have the option to adopt. I strongly believe that there are many kids that need good homes if I ever want to take on that challenge.”

  Another woman and her husband—both with distinctly negative childhood experiences—immersed themselves in parenting classes and reading up on child development for six years before they finally felt that each of them was ready. All these years later, they are the parents of two young adult women and satisfied that their children were well loved, supported, and tended to.

  Other women report changes of heart over the years. One confided that, by the age of 14, she knew she didn’t want a child and during her twenties actually consulted several doctors about having a tubal litigation; they all refused her. But by the end of her twenties, she’d changed her mind and describes her daughter’s birth “as the moment I was born” and she became “the mother I wanted and needed.” For some women, having a child feels like an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and to become proactive about shaping the future.

  Everyone’s story is different, and the decision whether or not to become a mother is highly personal, even now when it’s no longer considered a stigma not to have children. Indeed, many women and men live very happily without them. What unloved daughters need to remember is that much of one’s success as a parent has to do with being emotionally present, no longer burdened by the automatic responses and emotional baggage of the past. That’s what permits us to hew to what Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell call “the high road” in their book, Parenting from the Inside Out , arguably the best book on the subject ever written.

  When you’re on the high road, you’re very aware of the emotional baggage you have in tow and what triggers your own worst responses. You work at being present and rational, committing yourself to thinking things through rather than being reactive. High-road processing tends to present different possible responses to a situation, and keeps you in the driver’s seat. Imagine that your child suddenly starts crying when you’re in the middle of something you need to get done, and it’s irritating you. You register your feelings of annoyance, push them away, and then think, “I need to find out why she’s crying. I have to stop what I’m doing and spend a few minutes helping her calm down.” High-road processing effectively invites your best self in as your child’s parent.

  Then there’s low-road processing, which has you forget about your emotional baggage and become a quivering mass of emotional reactivity the second your kid starts crying because, dammit, you have stuff to get done . Low-road processing hijacks your conscious thought process and ability to be empathic. You just let whatever you’re feeling rip, either yelling at her to stop or screaming, “Go to your room now. If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  By confronting your past experiences—and reading this book—you’ve already committed to being on the high road. That’s a fine start, whether you decide to have a child or children, are already a mother, or not.

  REBUILDING: BREAKING OLD PATTERNS AND LEARNING NEW ONES

  As you begin to move in new directions, you will need to continue to hone your emotional intelligence skill set. If you are still having trouble identifying what you
’re feeling—most particularly in times of stress—you need to refocus, using your journal to explore what’s going on. If you’ve become more adept at naming your feelings, the next step is to begin using them to inform your thoughts when you’re making a decision or choice. This may feel uncomfortable at first, making you wonder whether you can really trust your perceptions, but just keep pushing through. It takes time to become comfortable with being in command of yourself. It’s new, after all.

  Start using your emotional intelligence to fact-check whether the direction you’re heading in is the right one and whether the goals you are setting will make you happier and feel more fulfilled. Among the questions you may want to ask yourself are:

  ♦ Is the hesitation or anxiety I’m feeling a function of unfamiliarity—I’m trying something new—or am I reacting because I’ve fallen back into old patterns of behavior?

  ♦ Am I able to manage my emotions and reactivity as I set new goals, or do I need to refocus on self-regulating?

  ♦ When I get frustrated or experience a setback, do I revert to the self-critical tape, or am I able to use self-talk and compassion to get myself going again?

  ♦ Am I creating a support system for myself during this period of redirection? Am I letting close others in, or am I acting in old familiar ways?

  FINDING YOUR BEST SELF

  Perhaps the hardest part of this journey is figuring out who you want to be when your best self shows up. Or when you finally are a grown-up, out from under your mother’s influence. While I genuinely hate all that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” stuff and I’m always quick to say that I would trade everything I learned in childhood for a loving and supportive mother, there are some aspects of self that are forged in positive ways. You might not have seen them before since they were buried under the muck of unhappiness and unhealthy patterns, but they are there, along with the bad stuff you have to get rid of. As you work toward redirecting your life, hold on to the pieces of yourself you actually like.

  And have the guts to imagine yourself as you always wanted to be. Why not? You have the tools.

  In the next chapter , we’ll be looking at what it means to heal and why recovery is an ongoing process that takes time.

  CHAPTER NINE

  RECOVERY AND WORKS IN PROGRESS

  When will it stop hurting? Will it ever stop hurting?

  ~Annie, 53

  M any daughters—and I include myself in that number—stumble over the word “healing,” which means “to make whole or sound, free of injury or ailment.” The word raises expectations that are difficult to realize. “Why is the healing so slow, so unreliable?” one woman emails me. “I think I’m over it, and then something triggers my feelings and I am so not over it.” “I’ve had no contact with my mother for three years,” another writes. “And while it’s certainly better being free of her, I’m still hurting.” Another remarks that “I’m still so sad, after five years. Will the sadness ever end?”

  REDEFINING HEALING

  The idea of wholeness restored spurs on the kind of magical thinking that many unloved daughters indulge in, beginning in childhood when they fantasize that their “real” mothers will show up to reclaim them, as I did. This may include hoping for that moment when everything suddenly changes and they are embraced by their mothers fully and completely with love and nothing needs fixing. Daughters sometimes think that it’s only then that they will be made whole, and alas, that is unlikely to happen, and even if it did, they’d still have to heal from their experiences. But perhaps it’s not just about expectations and magical thinking; perhaps the larger problem is how we think of healing and wholeness.

  That brings me to the Japanese art of kintsugi , which takes a very different view of things that are broken or cracked than we do in the West. When something precious is damaged—whether it’s Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch,” Michelangelo’s “David,” or a family heirloom—we do what we can to restore it to its former pristine beauty. We want the repairs to be seamless, the cracks or slashes unseen, the object to be fully made whole so that, to all appearances, nothing untoward ever happened to it. Kintsugi takes a very different approach, one which we can apply to healing .

  The term means “gold joinery,” and the technique is used to repair ceramic objects, using lacquer and a precious metal such as gold to join the broken pieces together. It’s said to date from the 15th century when, supposedly, a shogun sent a prized object back to China for repair, and it was returned with staples holding it together. Dissatisfied, the shogun set a challenge for artisans to come up with a more aesthetically pleasing way of repair, and kintsugi was the answer. In time, these repaired objects became venerated because the visibility of their cracks and breaks testified to their history, making them emblems of resilience, the passage of time, the inevitability of change, and the possibility of transformation. It’s the transformative nature of kintsugi that’s so arresting because by flaunting the object’s history, the object becomes more than it was before it was damaged; it becomes a new object that is part of the present but also testifies to its past identity.

  I think that the way we think and talk about healing isn’t productive; we expect our recovery to render us as “whole” as someone who was well loved and tended to, which, frankly, isn’t possible. This kind of expectation fuels our impatience with ourselves when our wounds are reopened by an event or experience, or when we disappoint ourselves and act out in those old, familiar patterns. It encourages us to stay self-critical. It makes us feel that we are less than those who had loving beginnings, forever scarred and needy. It makes us wonder who we might have been if we’d had a loving mother and makes us think that who we are is necessarily inferior and flawed compared to those who were loved.

  Instead, I suggest that when we talk of healing the wounds of childhood, we bring to mind the image of a beautiful cup or bowl repaired by kintsugi , its cracks and breaks made into shining patterns of great beauty and oneness. That image may help us focus on how our past experiences inform those in the present, to better see how the behaviors we adopted in childhood to cope may animate our behaviors and choices now, even as we move away from the past. As a layperson and fellow traveler, not a day goes by that I don’t appreciate how my childhood even now shapes the woman I am, in ways both seen and unseen, good and bad. Rather than seeing them as scars, envisioning those wounds as brooks, streams, and rivers of gold, silver, or copper brings a smile to my face.

  As to filling the hole in your heart, the truth is that by changing your behaviors and focus, by bringing more light to bear on your experiences, you change both your perspective and the size of the hole. I don’t believe that hole can ever be fully filled in—I expect that I’ll be able to see the hole for as long as I live—but I can testify that I no longer see it the way I used to. Other things have filled the hole—the love I feel for others and the love they feel for me, places dear to my heart, books and words that have gentled me, the sound of the ocean, the smell of freshly turned soil, the beauty of flowers, my daughter’s laugh—in ways unexpected. I see the hole differently because I have thought deeply about its effect on me and have come to appreciate the woman I became as well as the child and young adult I once was.

  One question I often field from readers is this one: “Don’t you ever wonder who you might have been if your mother had been loving?” Actually, I don’t because the question doesn’t lead me or you anywhere productive. It’s no different from wondering what my life would have been like if I’d been blond and petite, instead of dark and tall; if I’d been possessed of great musical talent, instead of being utterly tone-deaf; if I’d been a brilliant mathematician, or a brilliant anything, instead of a reasonably smart person. We can’t change the facts of our lives. But what is productive is looking back at your behaviors in the past and recognizing the degree to which your childhood experiences drove the choices you made and the people you chose to be with. If you can do that objectively—without falling i
nto the habit of self-criticism or beating yourself up—it can permit you to own the narrative of your life in a way that you haven’t before.

  JOURNALING: CONNECTING THE DOTS

  If you haven’t been journaling, now is definitely the time to start, and if you have been, it’s a good time for a brand-new notebook to write in. Part of recovery entails continuing to refine our understanding of the pivotal events in our lives and seeing them as part of a coherent narrative. The act of connecting the dots functions the way the shiny lacquer used in kintsugi fills the cracks in a damaged ceramic object. Do journal about the present, focusing on how your current behavior is becoming increasingly separated from your past. That will permit you to segregate those recurring behaviors so you can focus on changing them.

  MOURNING THE MOTHER YOU DESERVED

  Will I ever stop feeling I was cheated of something essential?? Even at age 59, it makes me angry, and my mother died over ten years ago .

  ~Priscilla

  The road that is recovery from a childhood without a mother’s love, support, and attunement is long and complicated. One aspect of healing that is rarely touched upon is mourning the mother you needed, sought, and—yes—deserved. The word “deserved” is a key to understanding why this remains elusive for many women; they simply don’t see themselves as deserving because they’ve internalized what their mothers said and did as self-criticism and have wrongly concluded that they’re lacking, worthless, or simply unlovable.