molded Soma Mama was a broken woman. She was born to a mom who loved her, but passed along the rejection she experienced from her own mother. See, my mama's mom's mother hated women. Hated her own daughter so much she left her out of her will and gave everything to her brother's son. Thought women were worthless. So when mama grew up, nothing she ever did was good enough. Her mom didn't want raising a daughter to be the same as her mother did, but she couldn't help it in some ways. She fiercely loved my mama, that's for sure. But she loved her so hard and wanted so badly to prove her own mother wrong that she pushed my mama to prove that she was always visibly worth all that love. And well, mama bucked back at that pressure, and sabotaged herself a lot because she felt deep inside the rising panic of knowing that it wasn't enough and that would mean she wasn't worth all that love. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I learned about the kind of wild things my mama did. Mama swore six ways from Sunday she would do better when she had her kids. But all that swearing', well, she still couldn't help who her mom had molded her to be in some ways. She fiercely loved me, but she wanted so badly to protect me from the harm she experienced as a kid that she unintentionally left me unmolded and soft as the day I was born. I was her vicarious youth and her long-craved source of love, safe from all harm, safe from the world, who would never need to work hard because mama would just take care of me and love me so long as I just loved her and told her she was enough. But soft little babies have to grow up, and mama, despite how much she loved and thought about me, never thought about more than that baby. I think when she looks at me, she still sees that baby. Maybe all moms and mamas do. So mama didn't see how much being soft would hurt so much more the further and further away I got from being that baby. At some point I realized it. I felt that pain in every nerve that ran through me. I felt that rising panic inside me of knowing that I was mama's ideal childhood, only I would never be mama because me and mama are separate people and so I would never be enough and never do the things mama expected of me. And at some point, that made me hate mama. And I hated mama so I hated me. I left home at 17 and fought tooth and nail to never have to see or talk to mama ever again. And when I was old enough to drink alcohol, I swore up and down on that first drink the thing I had felt for years. An affirmation to all the gods that never existed and all the power inside myself that I would never be Mama. I would never be a mama. That I didn't know what I needed to do to not be either but that starting there was the best first step. Then I found online that there were other people who were hurt like me, and had lived through horrible things like I'd lived, and they said it wasn't supposed to be like that. Life wasn't supposed to feel that way. You weren't supposed to bend and fold and use people like that. You weren't supposed to merge your own self inside the self of someone else. All that knowledge didn't fix it all though. I hurt people, and I hurt people, and I tried and tried to change. Codependency was so reassuring and warm. I was so soft, so soft, unmolded and with no confidence that without mama, I would ever be able to do anything. It was so fucking hard. Then one day, I helped a friend. A friend who I loved because I saw something of my own youth in her. A hurt and a pain that I wanted no one else to ever have to feel. But in the end, despite all my love, she held up a mirror and showed me who I was. All that running, but mama was right there behind me in the mirror. Her hands still guiding me all this way. I felt everything in my world came crashing to the ground, and in many ways, my entire world did fall apart that day. My own mind finally splintered. I was watching one of those kids movies when it all clicked into place. They said "one often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it." At long last we saw the problem for what it was. All that running, but I never really faced the problem. Mama was part of me. I had to learn to love the ugly part of me that I didn't want. I hated her. I had kept her locked up in a closet, and the scared little me and the scared big me had collectively agreed that we could get by on our own. We never saw how much of what we did was to keep mama locked up there. We had learned so much from mama, and we locked it away. We never learned to unlearn it. We never learned to look at it. We were just too afraid. But, I suppose, after all it makes sense. We were soft, and so so scared of pain. We were small. It's understandable. It was only when I loved her, that we could stop being us in my head, and finally be me. I could let go of what mama taught me as a parent, and decide what I wanted to parent myself about instead. Now, after years and years of therapy and countless books and hard conversations acknowledging my failings. After so much unlearning, relearning, re-parenting, processing. After so much of falling down and messing up and then brushing myself off and trying again... I can finally say and mean it that I love my mama. And I love myself. And mama's finally doing the work that took me all my 20s to do, for herself, because we talk. I could have never done it on my own. Therapy makes it all so much faster, because you have someone else to look at you and help you understand the shape you are. I will always be this shape. After all, I was molded by another in my early days. But I know the shape I am, so I don't need to try and be anything else. That doesn't justify anything. It gives me grace and awareness, and the choice for how I interact with everything around me. I love you, mama. 240114 what's it to you? who go blather from