How To Manage Your Mother

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Introduction

How This Book Works

When I started seeing patients as a psychotherapist many years ago, it did not surprise me, after all my psychoanalytic training, to find that they talked about their mothers a great deal. But since I had the good fortune to have creative people as patients, I believed then that it was mainly artists and people who had sought therapeutic help who talked so much about their relationship with their mothers.

I was wrong. Gradually over the years I realized that all the people who told me about themselves focussed on their mothers. So often when I fell into conversation at dinners, at drinks parties, on trains, in aeroplanes, in social situations of all kinds, out the subject came. It seemed as though there was a button just below the heart, which, when pushed, caused an outpouring, a stream of consciousness – almost a confession – about mothers. And I also realized that relatively few of these people told me that their relationship with their mother was really good. Even when clearly they loved their mother, they usually seemed to have problems with her.

In a perfect world, as our childhood ended we would separate from our mother psychologically and move on to a mature relationship in which we would communicate with our mother as adult to adult. But it seems that this is rarely achieved. Most people told me the opposite: how childlike, or childish, they sometimes felt in the presence of their mother, as though this relationship was somehow stuck in time, with the result that they could not escape from this outdated pattern into something more appropriate for an adult. They felt also that their mother was always criticizing them and they could not please her; that she interfered in their lives too much; that she said they did not see her often enough, or call frequently enough; or that they did not love her.

These issues seemed to me so important, so crucial to our lives, that I began to wonder if there was a way of writing a book, from a fresh perspective, which might help people to gain insight into their relationship with their mother and contribute to their getting on better with her.

I discussed the project with a close friend and colleague, Brian Bates, who teaches and writes from the perspective of humanistic psychology. He too had found the issue of mothers to be central to many people’s lives, and felt that there was a need for a book dealing with adults and their mothers. We agreed to research and write it together.

We were convinced that the fresh approach we were looking for would stay close to the experience of the people we wanted to help. So we decided to interview a wide range of people on their experiences with their mothers – not my patients or Brian’s students, but people specially interviewed for the book. We devised a set of standard questions to give the interviews structure (which is included in the back of the book in case you would like to answer the questions for yourself about your relationship with your own mother). I interviewed over a hundred people in depth, and a further group completed a questionnaire. These interviewees ranged from close friends to total strangers aged twenty to ninety-eight, in all sorts of occupations, mainly in Europe and North America. Their stories form the basis of this book

Many of the people we interviewed have allowed us to include their real names in the narrative. The stories are not invented case studies to illustrate existing theory, as is so often the case, but form the research data from which we have derived the ideas of the book. All the people who gave us interviews, whether or not we used their particular stories in the narrative, contributed to the data pool, and we are most grateful for their help. In some cases, where our interviewees’ accounts touch on events, or express opinions, which might hurt the feelings of or offend their mothers, we have replaced their name with a pseudonym. The people who gave interviews are listed in the acknowledgements; names mentioned in the book but not in the acknowledgements are pseudonyms for the people listed there.

When we had compiled the interviews, Brian and I immersed ourselves in the stories and the meaning which, rather like folk tales and great fairy stories, they seemed to carry.

Clear themes began to emerge: among them the fact that many people receive much of their mothering from women other than their mothers; that the sacrifices mothers make are an important part of how we see them; that the associated guilt causes rifts in many of our relationships with our mothers; that our efforts to meet our mother’s expectations are often misconceived, because they do not expect from us what we think they do; that secrets which mothers tried to keep from us during our childhood play a surprisingly influential role in our lives; and that our attitude towards our mother’s eventual death seems to go through quite distinct phases.

Because of our belief that most of us, even when we love our mother, have some problems with her, our aim has been to use these stories, and the themes they reveal, to understand better our relationship with our mother, and to present ideas about what we can do to improve that relationship. If you feel frustration with some aspects of your relationship with your mother, and want to do something about it, this book is for you.

We have found that in ‘managing’ our mother it is best not to wrestle directly with current areas of dispute with her, but rather to concentrate on how we feel about the many remembered experiences we have from our shared past; in other words, to re–examine the fundamental way we think about her, and about ourselves. Thinking through our attitudes to our experiences seems to affect our behaviour deeply and directly, and so leads to a closer and more positive relationship with our mother – much more so than trying to get her to change, or making new resolutions to behave better towards her ourselves.

In writing the book, we wanted to let the interviews speak, to use the stories to carry the ideas we wished to convey. For this reason the book is anecdotal. We realize that some of our professional colleagues might wish for more psychoanalytic theory or empirical research literature; but we believe that telling stories is more likely to affect our readers’ emotions, and therefore their attitudes and behaviour, than merely giving them information for their intellects.

It felt awkward to keep referring to ‘we’, especially since I have also introduced quite a few experiences I had with my own mother and with other people. Brian and I have therefore written the book together, drawing on both our researches in psychoanalysis and psychology, and our professional experience, but as from my viewpoint, to make it a better and easier read.

We have necessarily concentrated on our problems with our mother. But this is not at ‘mother-blaming’ book; on the contrary. We know many excellent mothers, and that almost all mothers are very good in some ways. We hope this book will help to repay some of the good work a mother does, by helping her adult children to understand her better and to have an improved relationship with her as a result.

Chapter 1

She Loves Me

Because the summers were so hot in Oklahoma, where I lived as a small child, my parents would get up in the cool of the dawn to work in their garden. When the rays of the early morning sun began to slant across the fields, my mother would come indoors to wake me. I remember clearly, as she leaned over my bed, the sweet smell on her of roses, and the earth, and the dew. She smelled so good. Happy memories like this are like the best days of summer: warm and bright.

Our earliest recollections of our mother, whether good or bad, tend to be made up of such sensory fragments; these images of how she looked, what she felt like, the sound of her voice, and her aroma, are wrapped together in our memory with a feeling tone, a sense of the original emotion that we felt at the time. As we grow up, these memories and feelings gradually build up, in our heart and mind, into the attitude toward our mother that we have as an adult. This attitude is like a guiding image, and it is absolutely crucial in determining how we get along with her today. For this reason, rediscovering our memories of her and understanding our feelings about them is the key to unlocking the door to a better relationship with our mother.

Understanding Early Memories

Of course, our relationship with our mother is about today. But it is a relationship that’s different from any other in our life. She was the very first person we formed a relationship with, and that relationship continued all the way through our childhood to the emotional roller-coaster of adolescence and beyond. Therefore, everything to do with us and our mother now is infused with this shared past, a history that colours the present with everything from the warm hues of love to the dark shadows of trouble.

All of us have both happy and sad memories of times spent with our mother, although since happiness presents us with no issues to wrestle with and no problems to solve, happy recollections do not stay with us as persistently as negative memories. Even those of us who get along well with our mother usually suffer some painful legacies: misunderstandings, wrong things said, right things unsaid, heated arguments, and, for some of us, frustrations, regrets, and bitter feelings toward her.

No matter where we fall on this scale of emotional response, there are ways we can improve our relationship with our mother. But how do we go about accomplishing this?

Many self-help books present their maxims as if we could read them one day and start living differently the next. But we are not machines that are simply in need of missing nuts and bolts. We are complex, organic beings, and for the lessons of a book to really make a difference to our life they must connect with us deeply. The stories and ideas of a book need to resonate with us, like a piece of music, for the medium of the psyche is akin to music; and in trying to improve our relationship with our mother we are trying to recompose the lyrics and retune that relationship.

We need, therefore, to begin not by calling to our minds all the problems, the blocks or the frustrations, but by establishing first a positive resonance with our mother. We can do this by recalling some happy experiences with her.

Starting with Happiness

I asked my interviewees for their earliest pleasant memories of their mother. Their responses, often no more than sound bites, give a feeling, a taste, a sniff, the barest glimpse of the origins of the positive aspects of their present view of her:

Looking up into her face. A feeling of love that came from her.

I remember her wonderful teeth and a huge smile.

A woman bustling around the kitchen, singing.

A woman with lots of curly hair.

Perfume.

My mother was a jumper. I remember her always jumping into action.

On a beach, in the sand, mother in the sixties, in a bikini.

With my mother, a sudden gust of wind, it was raining leaves, and I was very happy.

She had very pale skin, red lips, and very dark long hair. She always reminded me of Snow White.

Climbing into her bed; I remember the smell of her skin.

In a baby chair, being fed by my mother, and me refusing to eat my vegetables. I would only eat flying vegetables; they had to have wings.

Some early pleasant memories are fuller, like Carla Santos Shamberg’s description of being with her mother at the beach. We lived in New York City, she said. But my mother loved the ocean, and she would take me there. My fondest memory is that she would carry me in her arms into the water, and we would jump the waves together for what would seem like hours. It was wonderful. I don’t know if you have ever jumped waves, but you feel them all night long in your sleep.

Jane Bedford’s warm memories of her mother were poignant: When my dad had his stroke, we were living with my mom in public housing; the house had wooden floors. On Saturday mornings, she would let us kids polish the floor by tying dust rags on our feet, skating on the floor with the polish, and then again with dry dust rags to shine it up. Scooting along the floor, we loved that. Although this pleasant memory is coloured by knowledge of her parents’ later problems, children often instinctively understand much about the adult world even when they do not understand all the details. Even at her young age, Jane knew that her mother was having a difficult time, yet she still allowed Jane to have fun.

Some memories we can see, in retrospect, as starting points for pathways through our lives. David Pogue remembered the sound of his mother’s voice. My earliest memories of her are of being soothed. You know, I would be scared, or have hurt myself, and so my mother would sing to me. He recalled being taken as a small child on car trips, and his mother and father would sing. They would sing duets on these car rides to pass the time, and we’d be in the backseat just rapt, listening to their harmonies. As a three-or four-year-old, David began to write his own songs: My mother would write the songs down and make me feel like they were important. I had baby books full of these couplets. And now today, I’m a songwriter.

David’s pleasant sense of being soothed by his mother’s singing, and by her supporting his first efforts at musical creativity, form a memory cluster, a scene or series of scenes, together with a sense of the original emotion about them that binds the images together.

Recalling memories, especially of our early childhood, helps us to understand how our present relationship with our mother has come about; it identifies the old, deep seams that bind us together. Throughout this book, we shall explore ways of unweaving our memories – a process that will free us from the strands of shared personal history that may have tied up our relationship in knots.

You may have memories like these of your mother – of having sensory pleasure or having fun or being encouraged. A surprising number of apparently lost memories are in fact readily accessible to us if we concentrate on recalling them, and you may wish to do this for yourself. The easiest technique is simply to sit in a quiet space and allow your relaxed mind to be open to images. Picture the places where you lived and the things you did together. Looking at old photographs is a good prompt for bringing back memories. Talking to people who knew you when you were young can fill in many details. Once you have stirred the pools of memory, images may bubble to the surface of your mind of their own accord, either during the day or in your dreams. It may be useful to start a memories notebook, as if you were writing an autobiography of your relationship with your mother, to keep these recollections from slipping back into the depths of your mind.

Burying Memories in Our Unconscious

Of course, we all have thousands of memories about our mother that we simply cannot recall. These are buried in our unconscious, either because they are too trivial or because they are too important. Memories seething with potent emotions are sometimes too disturbing for us to deal with, and our mind protects us by making them difficult to recall, keeping them under emotional lock and key. We remember them only when the doorway is pried open by some particular event.

That is what happened to Paddy Ashdown. I must have been about three years old, he said, referring to the days of his early childhood, when he lived with his parents in India. We were coming down from our house in the hills to the boat for the last time, because we were going home to England. The train stopped outside a station and, even though I remember my mother’s presence close to me, I could feel fear, a sense of fear that recurred in my nightmares for a very long time. For some reason the train stayed there for what seemed to me, as a young child, like an eternity. Then it pulled slowly through the station and there was a terrible, acrid, pungent smell in the air. There on the platform, as I can still recall in my mind’s eye, was dismembered body after dismembered body, covered in blood; there had been a massacre of either Hindus by Muslims or Muslims by Hindus.

This appalling recollection was then lost to Paddy’s unconscious for decades, buried deep in a place safe where it didn’t disturb his conscious mind. But it came back to him suddenly, twenty years later, when he was in the armed forces, fighting in Borneo: I suddenly recognized something and then remembered that smell – the smell of decomposing bodies and my mother’s presence at that time.

Repression is the term we apply to the process of hiding those elements of our past that we do not want to deal with, by concealing them under the cloak of our unconscious. It can be extremely revealing and valuable to explore such deep memories of incidents with your mother, whether they arise spontaneously, as Paddy’s did, in response to some cue, or in dreams. Throughout the book we will give examples of how this can be done when dealing with a wide variety of issues with our mother.

Memory Is a Tricky Business

Memory is a tricky business. Recollections flash through our mind like quicksilver; the images are crystallized into a shape by the fire of emotion. But the recollections are not fixed and unchanging facts; as the years pass, these clusters of image and emotion evolve. They are formed of our original experience, but we continually update them, subtly altering details and the emotion attached to them so that the memories of our past are unconsciously shaping to fit the person we are today.

The way this works, deep in our mind, is that we link together the clusters in which our memories are stored in such a way that they form a complex attitude toward our mother. As our overall image of our mother takes shape, we process the events of our life and store our memories to fit this overall attitude. By the time we are adult, we have perpetuated our view of our mother, and the relationship becomes rigid. Problems between us cannot then be resolved.

But when we begin to examine our recollections of our mother closely, we find that they are malleable. That is not to say that the original memories are false; but what we thought were the facts of our past may turn out to be only a version of what happened to us, a take on our experiences with our mother which we fixed in our mind long ago. As long as these memories stay fixed, we are locked into an attitude, a general feeling, a guiding image of our mother that makes it difficult to change our relationship with her today. But when we recall and re-examine our memories, we realize just how constructed they are by our guiding image. So they can be deconstructed, and when we do this, our feelings about the event and our mother can change also. This is why reconsidering our shared personal history with our mother can make an enormous difference to the way we get along with her.

It might help to describe a couple of examples of how our guiding image of our mother can fix memories. Penny Charles has a distressing and difficult relationship with her mother. She was hurt by the way she felt she was treated by her mother, and has not had loving feelings toward her for as long as she can remember. But recently she saw a long-lost home movie from her childhood, showing her at age three or four. She was shocked by what she saw. There is a moment when I’m dancing, she explained. I’m holding a favourite Raggedy Ann doll and one of my mother’s hats. I turn to the camera at one point, and I’m mouthing silently, ‘I love you, Mommy.’ It was so shocking for me to see, because I thought that I’d never loved my mother. What is that about? It was as if I were watching another person rather than myself.

For this young woman, the independent evidence of the film was deeply significant. I cannot now trust my memory of events and feelings about my mother, she confessed.

However, such a realization may also be hopeful. In showing the extent to which we revise our original emotional memory in the light of subsequent experience, it suggests that this process may be reversible. If we can unravel the ways we have bound together our memories and emotions, we may be able to get closer to how we interacted with our mother originally. This is the single most important key to seeing our mother in a different light. Seeing her today without the distorting mirrors of years of reconstructed memories clearly enhances the opportunity for developing a better relationship with her.

We might assume that memories of our mother we formed later, when we were adolescents or young adults, are processed in a more mature manner, less shaped by our guiding image of our mother and therefore more reliable. But we would be wrong, as Stephen Sondheim discovered when he came across a couple of letters that he had written to his mother at the age of twenty. Their positive tone surprised him: "They are not full of gushing warmth, but they are not what my memory tells me I felt about her, either. They are much friendlier than that. My memory is that I hated her all my teenage years, but there’s a lie