“If I only could make them happy…”
My inner journey of healing and discovery is reaching a turning point. For the past 5 years, I’ve been digging and going deeper and more inward like it was my job. And it was my full-time job – I’ve taken this task of nurturing self-understanding and awareness so seriously, it became my primary focus and priority. Layer by layer, I’ve been stripping old programmes, paradigms, and conditioning. I was determined to get to the core of things, to the root of all pain and ailments, emotional and psychological. Last year in September, I stumbled upon one piece of the puzzle – my mother had suffered from a mental condition and…
How trauma and codependency in childhood can cause toxic mommy guilt
I often question why I feel so much guilt as a mother towards my little boy. It’s not only crippling my own experience of being a mother but also sending inaccurate messages to my son which shape the way he views himself and the world. I feel stricken with guilt every time I feel the effects of my trauma. I blame myself for not being able to shake off the sadness or depression I feel, for the anger that sometimes I can’t hold or the negativity that my critical mind is keeping me a captive to. I feel shame every time I’m not at my best for letting my son down. When…
The shame around being a “bad mother”
Sometimes I resent being a mother. That is not to say that I don’t love my child. Unlike my mother and some mothers who can’t love, I do love my son. With all my heart and soul, always and forever. I believe all mothers have moments when they resent motherhood. I believe that the contemporary expectation to be a non-stop happy and vibrant mother is not only unrealistic, it’s also severely shaming and stigmatising. It makes natural temporary feelings of dissatisfaction or unfulfillment fester into gnawing guilt. That makes me think how terribly unprepared and largely delusional so many mothers enter into motherhood, including me. I wanted my child with…
On grief: the missing relationship with the mother
If you ask me how my life has been the last couple of years, I probably wouldn’t say it has been full of grief. It would be one of the first things to cross my mind but I wouldn’t say it. I would probably divert to being a mom and looking after a household, which is true but it’s only half of my world. The grief and everything it brings – I’ve put aside in the back pocket of my mind. It wasn’t until I started listening to the audiobook Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, that I felt how much grief I still carry in me.…
Year 2015: what it brought to my family and what it taught me
I am going to talk to my son’s teacher tomorrow. My son, Sylvian, is nearly 3 years old and he is going to a Montessori preschool. I prefer to call it just “school” and the people taking care of him there – teachers.I want to talk to her, I will call her Jackie, and give her some background information. But let me give you some information about my son first. He started at this school in late September and he’s going 5 mornings a week for 3 hours. At the beginning he was thrilled to go there. It was a new place that’s not home and is full of toys…
