(m)othering
I didn't mean for all my writing to be about my mother, but here's a long piece otherwise titled: "mymother,again." In which a framework begins to appear, I bring to you the (s)(m)othering spectrum!
Imagine a number-line. Or a spectrum. Imagine a spectrum that would spatially map the following 3 words:
Smothering Mothering Othering
Smothering being too close, so close you can feel their breath on your face and othering being too far. Just about far enough for you to recognise what's happening but not have access to it. It's like hearing the kids in the pool when you've just removed your tonsils.
I believe we all have some kind of mother wound. Be it due to othering or smothering or one of them with a sprinkle of the other. Perhaps one of our jobs in this world is to awaken to mothering.
You see, mothering is biological but it is also an archetype. It can show up in a moment with people who aren’t your own children.
Like a glimmer.
M-othering.
These moments are often moments of generosity, or pure giving. You're not really thinking when something takes a hold of you and you surrender and it works through you.
I like to call this the sacred M. It's what swirls into the scene and shifts something in an instant. Changing the trajectory, leaving everyone involved changed, forever.
This piece started out as an attempt to offer all the things my mother did to me a space to be expressed. I’ve spent my whole life trying to both run away and hide my words from her. Literally and figuratively. And still, whenever I set out to write, she shows up in my writing.
There is some mention of harm and abuse woven throughout this essay. So, if that is triggering for you, please feel free to move on.
I've received the worst beatings, conditioning, life advice and parenting from my mother. I say “parenting” because I don't think I received any mothering from my mother. What I've mostly received is othering. I use the present tense because it still happens.
Even as an almost 37 year old mother of two, my mother finds her own ways of othering me. This piece is about me and how I feel and not really what my mother’s intentions could be.
I try to find excuses for her just so little Sara can try and make sense of the pain my mother put me through. Adult Sara knows this is not okay and never will be.
Let me go a bit into my origin story for some context. I was born when my mother was 22 and I have 3 younger siblings. I was born in the late 80s in Cairo, Egypt to a young doctor of a father and a graduating senior of a mother, married two years before. It was an arranged marriage.
I was told that I was crowning when they pushed me back inside to deliver me via c-section in a hospital in Maadi, a neighborhood by the Nile in Cairo. My origin story became:
My mother was tired of pushing.
My first experience in life was that of intrusion and interruption. (two very stubborn companions that continue to haunt me.)
My mother developed an abscess and couldn't breastfeed me. I now know it could be due to engorged breasts because no one showed her how to breastfeed.
Maybe my mother was a bad mother because she was never mothered.
At the time, it was trendy to get c-sections and formula feed - what backwards woman would want to stretch her vagina and have a baby suck on her breasts??? ARE YOU GOING TO PULL OUT YOUR BOOB IN PUBLIC???
My mother was raised in the Gulf and came back to Cairo to attend the only private university in Egypt at the time. Perhaps she just wanted to fit in. I try to regard her as a human who was married off too early and never really got a chance to live.
I try to regard her as my grandparent’s only child. Born to people in their late thirties in the sixties. In a foreign country with no family. I try and I try to make it make sense but it still doesn’t.
I don't know when the screaming and hitting started, the abuse overshadows any good memories I have with my mother. I remember her stare - my mother has big cow eyes - I remember her shrieks, shaming and threats at various degrees, in various places and different times.
When we were little, mother’s favorite threats included:
Say a bad word and I will wash your mouth with soap
Say a bad word and I will fill your mouth with Tabasco
Stay up after bedtime and I will call on the big bear to come get you (she had us convinced that a bear family lived in the AC vents)
As I write this, two incidents stand out from childhood. I can remember them quite clearly except for a few details here and there.
Incident One: My sister and I are arguing, “I hate you,” she says. We're both very young, born 18 months apart. Mommy is mad (again) and suddenly we’re in the car on our way to teta.
My mother packed us in her Peugeot and was on her way to Maadi, where my paternal grandmother lived.
She says she doesn't want us because “she birthed no kids who express hate towards each other”
She wants me to say sorry. It's not my fault. She said she hated me, I was only playing. I'm not the bad sister, she's the one who said a bad thing.
My sister eventually apologized and my mother made a u-turn after we were more than halfway there.
I was scared. I wore a defiant grin on my face, my favorite armor.
My son uses the same grin when I revert to my inherited tools of “if you don't ___, I will ____” but the only difference is that I told him: if I ever say this, know that I don't mean it.
Incident Two: “S, let's get on the bus and go to Said and Hagga’s without telling mommy. She'll never agree anyway…”
“Sara, she'll get mad.”
“Don't worry she'll come pick us up when she's done.”
My sister and I went to the same school my mother worked at. She taught older students which meant that she had a longer work day. One day I had this crazy beautiful idea to take the bus to my grandparents house and not wait for my mom to finish work.
This was before cell phones. My mother finished work and looked for us all over the big, big school with many hiding spots.
She eventually called my grandparents to see if we were there. And there we were, little kittens snuggled up after having eaten and enjoying the warmth of our grandma and grandpa.
She was angry.
After she took us home, my mother had me crammed underneath the dining table trying to hide from her frantic hitting. I knew she wouldn't reach me there but she went for the broomstick and started poking me instead.
There’s nowhere to go. My back is to the wall, I’m trying to shrink the space I’m taking so as little of me is exposed to the hits. If I tell her I’m not in pain, she’ll stop because she wants me to be in pain, right? Maybe if I run to the dining table? Yes, mommy is big, she can’t reach me there.
There I was, in my little over-medicated body (one way she exerted control over me was to convince me I was too weak and so close to death, I was just a kid with bad tonsils) trying to take up as little space as possible underneath that wooden table, brown and heavy. But there she was, my monster mama, in a full fit of rage, nothing would stop her.
I didn't die.
Instead, I (relatively) rebelled. She went through my journals and hired people to follow me. Actually, she sort of bribed them into it, they already had jobs. My mother did hire someone to spy on her own father, however.
My mother mastered the art of passive aggressive harassment, and I, the art of gaslighting myself. I began to disregard everything she said unless she directly addressed me. She made up songs with lyrics of things I wrote in the journals and text messages she snooped in on. My sisters sometimes joined her. It was their moment of connection, my mother bullied my sisters too. She fat shamed them and slut shamed me.
In my 20s, I had a fit and strong body that I liked to flaunt because I put so much effort into creating it. I made enough of my own money to buy clothes that felt and looked good. To my mother, this was always for “easy access” - whenever I showered before going out, my mother would make one of her songs to imply I was doing it to lure the men in.
A shower.
Shaving my legs.
Getting dressed.
Exercising.
My mother assumed everything I did was for men. That’s the very same person who would yell at me as I rode my bike, wouldn’t have me go horseback riding and wouldn’t have me do any sports because it was a threat to my virginity. Hymens come first, your life second.
When I got married, my mother wrote me a letter to explain to me how to prepare for sex and how to do “aftercare”
“I got you this oil, put it on your thighs, it will smell nicer.”
“Keep a small towel in the room.”
I don’t remember what else it said but it was a long letter. I need to mention that my mother screamed at me (not yelled, she literally screamed) the first time I found blood in my underwear. I was pretty excited and that’s my memory of my first period.
When I got a divorce, she said nothing.
I never laid a hand on you. - my mother.
I know my mother needs therapy and that her narcissistic tendencies stop her from seeking therapy because “it's too late, this is how I am.”
During my first pregnancy, I started obsessively going to hypnotherapy to heal the wounds my mother had left. Hypnotherapy created space for some compassion towards my mother. Yet, at times – most times – it has created even more frustration.
If it's true that she didn't receive model mothering, neither have I, and I use that to become a better mother.
Why did my own mother never do the same?
It’s unfortunate for me to have experienced this through my own mother, yes, but I feel we’ve all experienced different versions of othering through different people and contexts: friends, systems or partners, to name a few.
What that has meant for me is that when my mother is around, I don’t feel safe in my body and I don’t trust her to not inject her poison in my own children. This often translates into having my guard up and being extra vigilant, which then tenses up the atmosphere for everyone.
My daughter is named after Mother Mary who was, on the very same day 2022 years earlier, giving birth to the Word of God. Mariam came with many, many lessons for me. Her brother picked our little Christmas baby’s name.
A few days before she was born, I spotted a book1 I've been looking for for so long as I was leaving the OBGYN’s clinic. Right there in the bookshop window, there she was, the strong woman.
I went inside to buy the book but I didn’t have enough money. I asked my then husband and he said he didn’t either. It was a Wednesday. I told the shop assistant I’ll come back for it on Sunday.
Mariam was born on Sunday.
I read devoured Untie the Strong Woman in the earliest days of her life.
Mariam. Mary. Maria. You don’t need to be a Catholic to know how much of a special and holy woman Mother Mary is. I practice Sufism, a path that reveres saints, ladies and prophets. A path of softening that's similar in texture to the mothering I wish I had received.
And yet, people on a Sufi path, students, seekers, whatever you might call them, are often othered. Not always by society, or their own families or communities of origin, but in the very act of loving and seeking the divine and the beloved.
A seeker stays up late at night solely for worship.
An “othered” person stays up late at night searching for all the places where they could belong. All the ways they could have belonged. All the ways they weren't allowed to belong. Loneliness, their guest, one that has overstayed their welcome.
A mother stays up at night holding young life, trying to get them acquainted with the world outside the womb.
Othering is the act of actively excluding someone. An otherer can be a person or institution - often they deny the othering. It can look like buying gifts to all your family except one person. It can be speaking to all of your class except one person. It can be to share a piece of news to a whole group except one person.
Often, othering is a form of punishment or just genuine dislike. And it's always painful.
There's some sense of solidarity to be felt among those who have been discarded and dismissed: othered. We find each other and better yet, we understand each other. It's an act of defiance, those you have discarded have found belonging. Together. We declare even if only to our own selves.
Some of us are un-mothered, due to mentally unwell mothers, dead mothers, or absent mothers, perhaps mothers who thought other things and people to be more important than their children.
Some of us tried to find their place, yearned to fit in but couldn't and they wear it like a badge of honor. These are the rebels. The broken hearted rebels who, with all their might, would do anything to not follow the rules.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I have spent a lifetime pondering this question:
What would it take for “othering” to turn into “mothering”?
As an Egyptian, I've been fed the nationalist notion that Masr is my Mother. There's a song that says: Masr is my Mother, her Nile is my blood. Her sun is in my tan and even my skin is “wheat-y” like the color of your bounty, Masr”
I've experienced pain for my mother, Masr, Egypt as deeply as I've experienced her othering of me when it wasn't reciprocated.
I've experienced it in a tone very similar to how it felt for my mother to hug me on occasions you can count on one hand: my body would stiffen and my heart would grieve that it doesn't feel good. That I can't melt into my mother's embrace.
But this is what inspired my search. While some people are always aware of the Mother's presence, I had to always be searching, yearning, reaching out.
“Have you forgotten, I am your mother” Guadalupe would say.
“If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have been” the sufis would say in praise of the Prophet.
For some it's Mother Mary, for others it is Prophet Mohamed peace be upon him - for others it might be neither - but we all have an M.
The M turns Other into Mother.
It turns Othering into Mothering.
The M whirls onto stage.
The M weaves us back into being.
The M is a dance of the heart, a skip in a step, a glittery sheen in your eyes that tells you that your child self is alive and well.
May your heart be wrapped in the mending veil that is the M, may you find love, mama.
the book is Untie the Strong Woman by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Ugh, my heart. You weaved so many beautiful threads in this piece. Powerful, gentle, and brilliant.
I love the fluidity of time in this piece, and the beautiful diction. Thank you for sharing this with us.