i'm on fire

Mothers aren't inherently good.

The narrative around a mother's love has always been heavily played up, and that's because we live in a society that benefits from women's unpaid labour and suffering, so of course, the PR around motherhood has always been airtight. There is no mothering bone; there is no single gene that makes all women extra nurturing, safe, or capable of the love a child needs. There is socialisation, and a person, and that person has her own internal weather, her own wounds, her own limitations, her own unmet needs, and sometimes that person cannot rise to what is expected or required of her. And if you have a mother like that, you have probably spent your whole life building your identity off her limitations.

As a child, your parents are giants. Even when they are terrible, they are giants. Your entire nervous system and your entire way of seeing the world was filtered through them. And the residue of that experience is that most of us grow up in age but not in our psyche. We are still children standing in front of giants, asking them to finally see us, begging them to heal us.

Listen - going back to the source of the wound to fix the wound will keep you stuck forever.

Decentering your mother does not mean you hate her. It does not mean you cut her off, okay? It means you deplatform her, you remove her from the platform that society placed her on and that your child self needed her on. You look at her as a person, relieve her of the supposed tos, and you place yourself at the centre of your own life instead. You platform your authority, your ability to go out into the big real world and build your own view of life, to build a view of yourself.

I decentered my mother years ago. I have a relationship with her that works for me. She is just another human being I am in relationship with; she's not a giant, and she's not a source I keep returning to, looking for something she was never able to give.”

What we call 'personality' is, in many ways, the residue of a child's best efforts to manage the impact of another's mind. The adult is followed by both sides of this asymmetry and spends the rest of their life trying to work them through without re-experiencing the old injuries.”