The Other Side of the Mother Wound

Imagine a Vivacious Flamingo

by Shelley Karpaty

We love to pick on the Mother: for any issue regarding their child’s behavior, addictions, mental health, failures, physical health, basically the lion’s share of care that backfires due to lack of societal support and infrastructure due to the patriarchy. You can read about society blaming the mother here.

But beyond calling this out, that’s not what I’m writing about.

I want to tell you that there is something on the other side of blaming the mother. The reframing of what motherhood could look like for us as a society beyond the patriarchy.

During periods of our lives, we blame our parents for the problems we have, for the way we are, for the wounds playing out, for our unmet needs, and for the poor relationships. There’s a whole body of psychological work about the Mother Wound. It names the narcissistic wounds a primary caregiver creates when they don’t provide the unconditional love and fulfill all the needs of their child. Sometimes it’s not as extreme as having a narcissistic parent, but an emotionally unavailable parent or a controlling parent. I’m sure many can relate to those last 2. While Father Wounds are more focused on the core wounds of “I am not capable or I am not protected,” the Mother Wound is focused on “I am not enough or I am too much.”

What I’m trying to say is ENOUGH.

It’s time to grow up and look at the victimhood these narratives create. We have a duty to ourselves to see it, name it, tame it, and reframe it.

What’s beyond the victim?

We all have a choice to change, not our parents. The Mother Wound theory and discussions are universally explored throughout therapy offices, and I often wonder if there is any compassion given to the person’s mother. I also wonder about the skill of a therapist to uncover the victimhood wound in a way that guides the person to their real pain to find the deep self-compassion underneath as a road to healing this wound. This wound can be passed down for generations, and it can be the narrow lens through which we see the world, causing pain and repeated fractures in relationships.

It is a natural progression of our personal evolution if we choose.

I know my own daughter, at age 20, is now reflecting on her Mother Wound as she is away from home exploring life. I’ve been on the receiving end of her therapy discussions at times. I can choose to share my personal experiences or allow her to find out her own truth, and maybe someday, I did the best I could. It’s that whole awakening at that age when you realize, “Oh my parents are people…”

These wounds carry over into our lives through the lens of reality we see the world and our responses to it. These wounds become part of your personality, and the grooves are so deep that you will begin to wonder why you keep having the same relationships with the same problems that feel like déjà vu.

What if you can be your own witness to your life, away from the wounds you’ve held onto?

Not only do our children blame the mothers for their misgivings, but it also shifts into our whole society, with the root of it in the patriarchy.

Bethany Webster, who has written extensively on the mother wound, makes a compelling case that the patriarchy is a primary engine of the mother wound at a collective level. Her body of work is a great place to begin the journey of healing, should you decide to explore. In fact, I urge you to leap off the couch.

For centuries, women have been systemically shamed, diminished, controlled, and disempowered, and in turn, those feelings have to go somewhere, most naturally to the children.

We all come from the mother, which I have explored in other essays.

And yet we don’t all have a mother wound, but I don’t have the stats on that.

While I’ve transformed and healed my mother wound with my own mother, I can now explore and discover what’s on the other side. I think it’s important to transmute this category of Mother Wound that is so pervasive. I do not discount the multiplicity of grief, anger, relief, and guilt that can plague many people’s psyches, propelling us to embrace our victimhood.

There is another side to this victimhood. Victimhood is a path to awakening when we meet the feelings beneath it bravely and honestly.

An extreme and public example of blaming, rightfully so, the mother is told in Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 book, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” where she shares the path of survival from a deeply complicated relationship with her narcissistic and controlling mother.

After reading Perdita Finn’s new book, coming out at the beginning of May, Mother’s Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of our Ancestors, I had her on the podcast to discuss this reframing of the Mother.

She invites us to reimagine our mothers not merely as biological parents, but as a vast, enduring, and invisible “pantheon” of support that includes ancestral, spiritual, and earthly figures. For example, if we look at the maternal wisdom from the vast array of cultures, from the Buddhist Mother, Kuan Yin, to Christianity’s Mother Mary, to the Ennead of the Egyptians, to the Hindu Goddess Durga we can learn to embody their benevolence as part of our culture.

Often, when women become mothers, the isolation and entrapment that go along with it are not discussed. The need to be mothered as a new mother isn’t discussed, and the wobbly legs begin to find a way to provide the child's basic needs. I remember being 3k miles away from my own mother, a choice I had made 5 years prior, partially because of my own mother's wound I was working through and because of the locale of the man whom I married. I felt like an adult who was still in high school, with my maturity level still developing. How was I supposed to nurture my child when I was still a child, even at 30?

I thought I was intentionally doing things differently than my own mother, who had me when she was 21, and while she had an Associate’s Degree, she was a homemaker who worked in administrative office roles; there was no dream that I was aware of beyond this. Hence, an example of traditional societal roles left over from the 1950s. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but what about her dreams and desires beyond this? No one asks who she is beyond these roles?

I had dreams of working in publishing, but NYC felt overwhelming. I didn’t have the guidance, nor the thick skin, street smarts, and tenacity needed to survive in the city I admired from afar. I moved to California when I met my husband, whom I knew was the one, yet with a big leap of faith, I saw my ticket out and away from the pain of my parents’ divorce. Compounded by the fact that I no longer had a family home to land after college, and the earnings as a book seller would not pay my rent. My dream was to work my way up at the bookstore and become the events manager, bringing authors to the community. Moving across the country at 24 seemed like a good option, followed by marriage at age 26.

The mother wound followed me.

When I had my first child at age 30, I still didn’t know who I was. I didn’t even know that my feelings were simmering because I both wanted my mother and didn’t want my mother around, and I had no mother-in-law. Finding true self-compassion beneath the mother wound is no small feat when you have the swirl of motherhood and all its components vying for attention. It was a long 10 years of therapy and journaling to peel back the layers, and to see my own mother as a human with her own struggles and challenges, which only came to me when I was around 40.

Perdita’s book is primal as she urges the reader to remember the mother in her entirety, her body, the food she makes, and her ties to all the ancestral mothers of her lineage. She weaves folklore and stories of legends from the dead while blending the aliveness of nature, giving us signs everywhere, from the church you passed a million times, to it serendipitously comes into view, and you decide to stop the car to climb the hill to check it out. The unseen mothers are always at work, guiding and nudging us; we only have to be curious enough to see the messages.

In one of the exercises of the book, Perdita invites the reader to remember their mothers as an animal as the first protector of you as a child. What would she look like? What are her personality traits? She weaves this animist exercise to explore what it might look like to embrace the delightful ways an animal is free to be its truest self. For instance, would you see the characteristics of a bird in your mother who could support you to fly, soar for your dreams? Or perhaps a mother who can protect you with her venom like a snake? That nature itself is our mother there to support us and envelope us with her vast strengths and playful nature.

It was enjoyable to imagine my own mother as a flamingo. Beautiful, proud, communal and also with the desire to stand out. Strength, courage and beauty are characteristics of my own mother. Flamingos experience a duality of motherhood within it. Both joy and depletion as they undergo a profound transformation as they become mothers themselves. This transformation of fading a mother’s bright pink feathers when they care for their young symbolically represents sacrifice and love. They let go to give of themselves to nourish their young while they lose some of their own vibrancy. In a similar way that flamingo mothers give to their babies so do human mothers giving their time, energy and essence into their children. Mothers quietly give parts of themselves away in honor of their children to make room for a child’s growth. The choice is inevitable to transform in our own ways alongside this process and it isn’t that easy at times.

Perdita’s book invites us to ask ourselves: What do you want? What do you truly, madly, deeply want? What seeds are in your heart that want to spread, and grow and bloom?

I hope you will tune in on Sunday to hear the full conversation.

Thanks for being here to explore, unravel, and excavate with curiosity along with me.