The Day After Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day comes and goes every year with the hope that for some, one day it’s going to be different. The day after Mother’s day can be a wake up call for many mothers.  For some, Mother’s Day may often feel like any ordinary day.  The voice inside of you often demands you keep doing your part of getting all the tasks done and you try to forget complaining about it. You often think, “no one in your family listens to you anyway” or notices your cleaning efforts. You may want recognition for cleaning but then again, you question the merits of this one simple act.  You may get a  “thank you” from your spouse, but you notice you often don’t respond with “you’re welcome.”  Somewhere, resentment builds and you stay silent.  The repetitive demands of chores, checklists, and chaos has you reaching for who you once were before all this.  You are likely a steadfast mother with an ability to continue placing others’s needs despite your own needs.  Your children’s tiny faces with their helpless voices on the repeat of “mom” will motivate you to move mountains.  You try to focus on the positive and realize that motherhood doesn’t mean you give up your entire identity. You know these high expectations of motherhood keep seeping through your life and it leaves you wondering what it will take to make the change.   

The change of feeling more respected, more heard, and more understood in a world that places women on a pedestal to get married and have babies.  That same world knocks you off the pedestal because the peak of recognition for women is in pregnancy and then after birth, mothers are forgotten, left to fend for themselves.  Giving birth can be traumatic but so many women head back to work quickly thereafter.  To arrive in motherhood is to barely be respected once they are there because you are left to figure out childcare, cleaning, social activities, groceries, medical appointments, cooking, and the list goes on and on.  The blunt reality of motherhood is that you are going to like this role, raise children with a shoe string support system, and do this for years.  This blog is about the day after Mother’s day and how the day to day winds up being something you question in how you ever got there as a survivor.   

Mental Load

Effective communication is all about how two adults talk in simple conversation, how they resolve conflicts and how they both have openness as well as respect to grow with a partner toward the same goal.  Your partner may see a need and they simply do it.  They may not, depending on your partner’s past.  Example: The table needs to be set every day for dinner and he just does it while you prepare for dinner.  Maybe he forgets every evening.  You’ve asked this partner to do this as the kids have been with you all day, they run wild wishing for too many snacks and feeling hangry.  You may not have this type of partner that sets the table without you asking.  You may have a partner that needs reminders and you strive to be patient.  This isn’t rocket science, it is routine day to day.  

At first you notice it but then as the years go by you realize how you are the one to start laundry for the last 9 years of your marriage.  You question yourself why this is true but hesitate to bring it up to avoid conflict.  You may have likely tried your best to bring it up but your spouse has fallen short of simply listening to your words.  You wonder why you are the one to initiate scrubbing toilets and why your partner waits until 5pm to figure out ideas for dinner plans.  It can be making dinner or even just making plans to go out to dinner.   

It’s easy to just carry on as the default parent that bears all the responsibilities, and literally noticing all the details of the home like how the kids’ socks have been laying around for days.  Resisting the urge to pick them up and instead trying to teach them to pick up after themselves can often be the hardest thing.  Laundry is somehow designated to you since you were living with your spouse and even before you got married.  You’ll be lucky if you find a spouse that actually places his laundry in his laundry basket. 

This mental load includes things like feeding the fish as you somehow can hear he is starving, the cat meowing first thing in the morning, and the baseboards that are screaming to be cleaned.  Dust appears on top of dark dressers and you have to be the one dictating chores when the kids get home from school.  Let’s be real, sometimes kids listen and sometimes they roll their eyes.  

Then, it hits you like a load of thousand bricks.  A core memory is recalled of how your own mother would do it all.  You have a vivid memory of looking at your diligent mother preparing dinner every night and hearing your father complain about whatever his criticisms were because he was rarely thankful for all she did in all her exhaustive efforts.  In this memory as a child, absorbing your mother’s role and imprinting her actions, as this was all that you could do as a child.  You feel helpless as that memory triggers yet another one when you witnessed your father becoming lethally violent.  You stop yourself and suppress that memory as you know that won’t help you right now.  You bury it in your mind for another time and hope it doesn’t wake you in a nightmare again. 

Generational traumatic patterns

As a mother you fully realize the patterns but you are lost in isolation getting all the tasks done.  Motherhood becomes a defining part of your identity because you want to be a “good mom” like you dreamed of once becoming.  These dreams were likely escapes to run away from your childhood trauma of having a narcissistic father and a passive mother.   You thought you would be happy creating a life of your own as a mother, spouse, and of having a successful career.  

You built your career forgetting that motherhood would be one of the biggest pressures you’d face in becoming.  Motherhood would eclipse any other role that you prepared for and you were blinded by the fact that you no longer were first.  You question every metaphor that you heard before becoming a mother like “place a mask on yourself” like flight attendants demonstrate on airplanes, in order to continue caring for your child.  Which essentially means to take care of yourself before you take care of others.  You remember that you barely have any social support and that you are winging it every moment as a mother.  What mask? There is no safety net and you are in the free fall of motherhood.  The other wound comes that even though there are family members living close to you, they don’t reach out because they are also caged in their own emotional wounds of isolation.  

Yet one step at a time you may begin to awaken with a good therapist and you notice that you need to do your homework of journaling your generational trauma that has been passed down to you.  You fully realize that the old patterns no longer serve you and  that they never truly did.  You begin to unfold this renewed sense of compassion and grace for yourself as you get triggered with your children of your own childhood past violence memories.  

You don’t want to expect perfectionism of yourself or your children. Those values come from an oppressive system that only upholds a patriarchal system.  You want more for your child.  You want them to never experience what you went through and your ancestors are rooting for you to keep going, as you have come so far.   

Trust no one and have no needs

You may have experienced abandonment and betrayal from both parents. Your biological mother and biological father long ago may have abandoned their own needs while being raised in poverty.  You begin to notice your parents’ vulnerabilities as immigrants but it seems too late.  You cannot save your parents anymore and never could do that as a childhood wish washes over you.  You swear that you would never repeat their mistakes but acknowledge you are a work in progress.  You want something better but know motherhood is a marathon and a daily practice to work on yourself.  Yet you fully recognize that if you were wounded by two of the closest people that were meant to protect you, you could never ever trust another person.  You stand guard to your heart and wait patiently, hypervigilant when you might be hurt again.  You have one foot in and one foot out the door.  You prepare yourself to run away because you promised to yourself that it would never happen again.  Trusting others is a risk you run because it leaves you open to being vulnerable.  

However, you slowly start to realize that standing on this island of isolation is no longer serving you.  You know that thriving is not about merely surviving what you went through in your family of origin.  Thriving is about trusting others despite feeling vulnerable and stepping into your power even though it feels so nebulous and scary.  Every opportunity of a possible alliance is to salvage yourself from the ruins of your past childhood. 

Therapy is the Corrective Emotional Experience

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, you may remember that you were once a child with many needs.  You may often notice that your strength was in using your voice but that you were taught to dampen it down for the sake of surviving all the chaos in your family.   Secrets were weaponized against you as a way to safeguard the perpetrators.  

Now, you may begin to understand that talking is your strength and memories of your childhood talking in class or laughing at a funny classmate come racing back to you.  Many survivors may have various strengths such as being talkative, being reflective, noticing every detail and yet somehow the adults in the room overlooked you.  This time, the roles are different and now you are an adult and you want to fiercely advocate for your child.  You have learned that communicating about boundaries is about understanding what you prefer or want in your life.  Now, you get to model this for your children, and your goal is for your child to develop a sense of their voice.  Your child gets to have agency and sharpen their observational skills.  You as the parent get to help your child hone in on identifying their boundaries and being able to articulate them.  This takes time to practice boundaries setting with yourself and teaching them to your child.  If you never had a parent that did this, you may not know how to establish boundaries and articulate them to various people in your life.  Here is where therapy is the healing balm that will make all the difference.  

There is real truth in your fear that your child may become a victim of childhood sexual abuse.  You know that there are things you can do but you are unsure.  Therapy here looks like being able to understand more in depth about your experience  in your childhood memories with EMDR therapy.  You don’t have to go through all the details.  Childhood memories stay buried until you are fully prepared to start healing.  Childhood memories may keep coming up, suppressing them may seem easier at first. I am here to tell you there is no ideal time.  Come as you are and you get to heal just as you are, as so many children wish to feel seen and heard now still as adults.  I specialize in working with mothers that have suffered in childhood sexual abuse and are yearing to heal their wounds. Stepping authentically into motherhood means unlearning patterns that no longer serve you.  Motherhood enables you the opportunity to learn something new and create a better future for your child.  Children deserve the best version of their mother and you want to protect them from your child becoming another statistic.  Your children deserve a place on earth that feels welcoming, healing and safe.  To start therapy with a free 15 minute consultation book here, email me here, or call 803-573-0279.