Childhood Memories
There is something peculiar about mother-daughter relationships. They seem, all too often, to be fraught with misunderstandings, with suspicion and jealousy, with grievances. No relationship could be closer, and should be closer than that between a mother and her daughter, and sometimes they are. But all too often, there is a screen of unspoken hostility residing deep within the psyches of mothers and their daughters.
Manifested by a sense of distrust, of unease, of rebellion and control, when the daughter's personality too closely echoes that of her mother. But of course it's far, far more complex than mere observations of familial closeness, genetic sharing of character traits, since the exposure to one another over years of maturation of the relationship forms the basis for either an enduring bond or an enduring psychosis of disavowal.
As no two people are alike, shaped as much by their genetic endowments as by their primary and differentiated exposures to life through a multitude of experiences and various types of nurturing - or a notable lack of the kind of nurturing that infants and children require to enable them to form firm emotional bonds - so too exists multifarious differences in relationships between mother and child.
Not by any means restrained to that of the mother and her daughter, but also the relationships that gradually emerge and consolidate between the mother and her sons. There is something special, though, about the mother-daughter brace that spells either success in bonding, or failure. Some critical emotional support at critical times has been lovingly rendered or icily withheld.
And inevitably the result is long-lasting, with a festering resentment and a plethora of questionable memories that time embellishes and polishes and will present, when the time is right, transformed into bitter revelation. In the case of a grown man who has become an example of a severely socially withdrawn outcast - criminally and sometimes inclined to the vile - blaming the failures of his mother.
Case in point: Josef Fritzl, the notorious Austrian man who kept his daughter as a sex slave in a dungeon under the home he shared with his wife - his daughter's mother - fathering six children in his incestuous brutality. This man, it was also revealed, kept his old, ill mother locked away in an attic, before she finally died. His mother bears the brunt of his blame for his self-proclaimed sex-addiction.
A profound infantilization of personal responsibility.
And then there are the countless instances when daughters of famous - or infamous - mothers have written autobiographical accounts of their pitifully painful childhoods, amply detailing the neglect or abuse or disinterest by their mothers toward them. The pain of their relationship marking them for life with an indelible hatred, and the need to somehow 'get back' at their mothers.
Who really knows the truth behind these unfortunate revelations of neglected and abused childhoods? Did a mother really tell her daughter she was ugly, leaving a lasting impression of unworthiness and abandonment in her daughter's mind? Is that sufficient to stand as an example of child abuse, comparable to the mother who, incapable of coping, or without the ability to empathize with her children's needs, beat them?
Yes, I suppose it would, all things being equal. For it is a mother's obligation to her children to imbue in them a sense of comfort that they are loved and valued and cherished above all; failing to perform that mother's vital role throughout a child's neediest emotional years can have psychologically lethal effects on that emerging adult's self-regard and ability to love others.
Out come the memories, those recalling only the childish disappointments, the slurs real or imagined, the rejections, the firm 'unfair' discipline, the hurt of the confused, rebellious, unhappy child. For these unforgiving daughters of failed mothers, emotional maturity takes a back seat to a repressed longing to be held dear, to be cossetted, to be firmly emotionally supported.
If the relationship is not initially invested with genuine love and guidance, no lapse of time can restore what was never there.
Manifested by a sense of distrust, of unease, of rebellion and control, when the daughter's personality too closely echoes that of her mother. But of course it's far, far more complex than mere observations of familial closeness, genetic sharing of character traits, since the exposure to one another over years of maturation of the relationship forms the basis for either an enduring bond or an enduring psychosis of disavowal.
As no two people are alike, shaped as much by their genetic endowments as by their primary and differentiated exposures to life through a multitude of experiences and various types of nurturing - or a notable lack of the kind of nurturing that infants and children require to enable them to form firm emotional bonds - so too exists multifarious differences in relationships between mother and child.
Not by any means restrained to that of the mother and her daughter, but also the relationships that gradually emerge and consolidate between the mother and her sons. There is something special, though, about the mother-daughter brace that spells either success in bonding, or failure. Some critical emotional support at critical times has been lovingly rendered or icily withheld.
And inevitably the result is long-lasting, with a festering resentment and a plethora of questionable memories that time embellishes and polishes and will present, when the time is right, transformed into bitter revelation. In the case of a grown man who has become an example of a severely socially withdrawn outcast - criminally and sometimes inclined to the vile - blaming the failures of his mother.
Case in point: Josef Fritzl, the notorious Austrian man who kept his daughter as a sex slave in a dungeon under the home he shared with his wife - his daughter's mother - fathering six children in his incestuous brutality. This man, it was also revealed, kept his old, ill mother locked away in an attic, before she finally died. His mother bears the brunt of his blame for his self-proclaimed sex-addiction.
A profound infantilization of personal responsibility.
And then there are the countless instances when daughters of famous - or infamous - mothers have written autobiographical accounts of their pitifully painful childhoods, amply detailing the neglect or abuse or disinterest by their mothers toward them. The pain of their relationship marking them for life with an indelible hatred, and the need to somehow 'get back' at their mothers.
Who really knows the truth behind these unfortunate revelations of neglected and abused childhoods? Did a mother really tell her daughter she was ugly, leaving a lasting impression of unworthiness and abandonment in her daughter's mind? Is that sufficient to stand as an example of child abuse, comparable to the mother who, incapable of coping, or without the ability to empathize with her children's needs, beat them?
Yes, I suppose it would, all things being equal. For it is a mother's obligation to her children to imbue in them a sense of comfort that they are loved and valued and cherished above all; failing to perform that mother's vital role throughout a child's neediest emotional years can have psychologically lethal effects on that emerging adult's self-regard and ability to love others.
Out come the memories, those recalling only the childish disappointments, the slurs real or imagined, the rejections, the firm 'unfair' discipline, the hurt of the confused, rebellious, unhappy child. For these unforgiving daughters of failed mothers, emotional maturity takes a back seat to a repressed longing to be held dear, to be cossetted, to be firmly emotionally supported.
If the relationship is not initially invested with genuine love and guidance, no lapse of time can restore what was never there.
Labels: Health, Human Relations, Realities
posted by Pieface @ 5:29 PM
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