Motherfull
How Healing the Mother Wound Supports our Sensuality
Just in time for mother’s day… Psychedelics have so much healing potential. The following poem is based on an experience I had with mushrooms which fundamentally rewired my orientation to my mother. The mushrooms released me from a long-held angst against her. Like they so often do, the mushrooms illuminated all the blessings that had been present where I had perceived only lack. I had been so focused on her shortcomings and my resentments for so many years, that I missed all the bounty. The mushrooms illuminated all of the positive space, where I had perceived only negative space. I have been becoming more and more aware lately of how privileged I am to have had such a loving mother. I am becoming more and more aware of the phenomenon of abusive mothers. Something I was so naively oblivious to for so long. I am not ready to talk about the rape academy… about the website called “Motherless.” Mostly, I am exhausted. But recently, I inadvertently found myself the target of scorn and derision in the comments section of an Instagram post. The post was a video of a woman talking about how “we” have failed men… placing unrealistic expectations on them, and making it unsafe for them to express themselves. I commented that men are the primary ones doing this to themselves. I couldn’t square what this woman was saying with the heaps of men that fall apart in my arms, confiding all the violence they experience at the hands of other men… coaches, abusive fathers, frat brothers, bullies in the locker room, and military higher-ups. And the many conversations I’ve had with girlfriends about the burden of also being therapists, best friends, and total emotional support systems to our male partners because they can’t find the safety to be vulnerable with other men. The same male violence I have experienced so much of at the threshold of my sex, is the same male violence that is hurting them. But my comment unleashed a fury of hostile comments from men about how shaming, rejecting, and abusive mothers and girlfriends are the ones to blame (and also that I am stupid misandrist.) Although I do think many comments were from fragile subs of the manosphere, it did give me a deeper appreciation for the phenomenon of abusive, malignant, narcissistic, and absent mothers… something I have been regrettably oblivious to until late. I feel a deep sadness for the people who experienced abuse at the site of maternal nurturing… this most natural site of organismic development and body-soul integrity. When I think about it, all of the men I have experienced real harm from have had huge, unhealed mother wounds. I don’t think I’ve ever even dated a man who had a strong, healthy, and intact mother, whose sacred feminine virtues were deeply integrated into how he walked through the world. I’m sure this reveals something about me. (The attraction between men with mommy issues and women with daddy issues is something I plan to write about in the future.) I don’t know how to heal the bottomless crevasse of harm and pain between the sexes, but I do long to come together and communicate between us, rather than just point fingers. In the meantime, I want to share this piece of appreciation for maternal love. I hope you can imbibe this synesthetic transmission. That it may help your animal… your soma, rewire and re-attune to a motherfull love that is innate and bountiful. Perhaps for anyone who may have not had a biological mother who was able to nurture in such a way, I hope we can all reclaim our Mother Earth... who is overflowing with this kind of nourishment and eager to share it.
The deer laid me down in the tall grass I drifted down, landing on my soft belly. As natural as their kind, bedding down at twilight. The deer taught me presence… How to dissolve the figment of my fear... Its structure of hard edges and doubt My offensive posture, armed and poised to strike… It taught me how, In the midst of my anguish, In my tragic aloneness, fighting the world, I could suddenly unwind and unravel, And inhale infinite air. Partake of the endlessness, that hung in each molecule, awaiting my trust fall. Every particle exhaled with me, and I expanded. Every cell wall gave way, To a flowing river of gentle exchange… To a fluid oscillation, of fireflies and incandescence. It was here at the grassroots, where the soft stems sprouted up from the new earth, In the presence of this tender deer spirit, that I remembered, my mother.
My mother raised us under her legs. Mommy long legs that stretch out in the summer sun She raised us in the convectionary warmth of those legs Amidst the tall dry grass of conservation lands Nestled in warm swamp pockets, of rural Massachusetts. Where the deciduous trees burgeon like our libidos in the summer, Big lush maple leaves absorbed sound and stilled everything. Maple leaves laid a soft palm over all our doings… Hung heavy over the street and safely ensconced us in their sanction. So we could pedal our bikes through the streets undetected and concealed, as we let our loins drive us, to illicit natural pleasures. The two maple trees out my window were my witness, Like my botanical parents, big and heralding in each season, As I passed through the rotations of my teenagehood… turmoil, upheaval, beauty. I discovered myself, driving through secluded groves of trees with the heat blasting and the windows down, following my drunk downstream without precaution ‘til I found myself in the lap of some dysfunctional relationship… Dysfunctional and exquisite in its adolescent quintessence, The inextricability of pain and beauty… like two sides of the same coin. Gnats dancing on stillwater in summer evening, That was my mother. Kayaks low on the Charles River, Inconspicuous and making no waves… As we weaved through backyard cocktail hours, Like spirits passing through a dream… Eavesdropping on hushed conversations, While beads of sweat condensed on rocks glasses… That’s my mother… She loves the stagnant heat and sweating for no reason. She sung me to sleep with old slave spirituals She taught me to live with the windows of my life wide open, to let in the fresh air. There were things I had held against her: Like her notable absence, during the years of my fraught, sexual fruition. When I’d stumble home unsteady about what had just happened. The thing they don’t tell you about assault is, it’s rarely obvious. It’s more like a snake that slithers in through tall grass, ‘til all of a sudden, you are trespassed. And the next day you don’t quite know why you are crying, and shaking, and feeling vanquished, Amidst all of this thick grass, And the frogs ribbiting, and all this beauty. Where was she during what felt like, a forsaking? Where was she to warn me off of those particular boys? Where was she to teach me what a healthy relationship was? Where was she to prepare me when I left the house blooming and naïve in a sheer dress and bare feet?
But then, it all assimilated. Pixels of the picture percolated down, into a warm and abiding understanding. What I discovered then, amidst the tall grass, Was that although she couldn’t be there for me in certain formative ways, she gave me something else; Uncalculated, and instinctual: It must have been some limbic knowing… the way the maternal instinct weaves webs like second nature, But by virtue of her laughter and contagiousness, Her beauty and charisma, she sent out energetic lifelines. She cast a big subterranean net, A magnetic field that drew people toward us. Her personality made friends with the store clerk, Made an extended family network with the neighbors. Maybe some subconscious part of her knew that she couldn’t do it all herself, as a single mom… But by her warmth and her charm, Her hospitality and her generosity, She gathered a tribe around us.
It takes a village to raise a child, And indeed I was… Raised by a constellation: Family friends, godmothers, grandmothers… Surrogate mothers, Who all lent their hand, and raised me in their blessing. My mother’s medicine was connection. What she gave me was ineffable, Like all the most powerful medicine… Her medicine was a bodily presence, like the trunk of a tree. Not the branches, or the leaves, But in the brainstem… Mammalian, pre-verbal, Preceding the invention of words. It was often in the things she didn’t say: Letting me stray out into the grass, So I would fall and learn the clash with the hard ground. To know pain, but not fear it, And that I was resilient. Letting me eat mud and take the mineral kingdom into my body. Letting me wander off and know imagination: Find elves in tree hollows and leave food for them. Letting me find myself at home in the forest, Calm, and filled with wonder. Her love wasn’t an intellectual love, or an especially sophisticated love, It was a simple love, as love should be. An animal love that pulls in its young by the scruff of the neck. In the way her body let me crawl into her bed, And we’d feel the soft strokes of summer breeze in the cross-current. It spoke an unutterable language: The soft shuffle of her movements in the early morning, as not to wake us, While she got herself ready in the dark, to go to work, day in and day out. The tirelessness of her love. In spite of all the ways that my mind, liked to think that she failed me… What I felt then, by the guidance of the deer, was only gratitude. Where I thought there had been absence, I realized, was teeming with presence.