Unraveling generational patterns

Of mothers, daughters, and making my own mistakes.

My little girl is babbling away in her room, evidently not too upset by the hysterical fit that seized me earlier and caused her to be unceremoniously scooped up and placed into her crib for an untimely morning naptime — which I already know will not happen because it’s been months since she’s transitioned out of her mid-morning sleep. Meanwhile, I am lying sideways on our bed, drifting in a pool of guilt, irritation, and confusion. “Why is it that everyone seems to know how to be the mother of my child better than I do?”— I ask my fiancè, who’s witnessed the events of the morning behind the closed door of his office room and has now come to rescue me from shipwrecking in the depths of my own emotional whirlpools. Either I am very predictable or he knows me too well. “They don’t. They just think they do”.

A rewind to the hours that preceded this moment would reveal a(nother) sleepless night of frequent visits to her room to check on her temperature and monitor her cough, followed by a frantic morning spent spinning around trying to tend to every need and whim of my ill baby, who’s feeling as contrary as humanly possible. She’s been under the weather for a couple of days and by Tuesday afternoon I am certain it must be at least Thursday evening already. What really tipped me out of balance today, however, was not my daughter’s erratic behaviour — although that did not contribute to the general mood. No, what threw me off the edge was being caught at a low in front of the audience I fear the most — my mother and sister.

So this morning, in a moment of weakness during yet another spur of contrariness, I reacted exactly the way I was expected…which is precisely the opposite of what I have been trying to do in the past two years, since I welcomed my baby into this world and into her new family. Nothing criminal or out of the ordinary — instead of choosing to work calmly with my child through this challenging minute, I let my guard down and, with a roar of frustration, I cried “Time out!”, grabbed her against her will, and flung her into her bed, shoes and all, slamming the door behind me a little too vigorously.

“I told you you should have sent her to daycare anyway this morning, she’s well enough and you’re too tired” — my childless sister’s placid comment. “Are you sure you want to homeschool them, it’s going to be like this every day…” — my mother’s warning. I am sure each of them is trying to help their own way — a way which, however, I have more often found disheartening rather than helpful in the past 29 years. Right now, with their eyes on me and their voices wrapped around my brain, I feel like the ropes of faith — faith in myself, in my beliefs, in my personal approach to mothering — that were keeping my precarious balance together have come undone and now my bones don’t know how to keep my skeleton together. Months of personal development have just disintegrated and, once again, I feel like I am being invited to put down my dolls, stop playing wildflower mama, and get back to the “real” world, where normal people live normal lives and raise their children in normal ways.

Without falling into the unnecessary and unfair archetypical clichè of victims and oppressors, I grew up in a family that did not know how to handle me. Over the years this truth was acknowledged in various shades and degrees, although to this date the baseline agreement remains the fact that I am the weird one and they are the normal ones. I was raised primarily in a household comprised of only myself, my mother, and my younger sister, whose personalities are extremely similar and compatible. So you can see how easily a majority can be established and how an arbitrary belief system can become the accepted norm, without anyone being deliberately evil, unloving, or cruel.

By the time I was two years old, the age of my own daughter right now, my mother had already nicknamed me Rhododendron, a shrub/tree whose name in Italian sounds uncannily similar to the expression “rodo dentro”, which means something like “consuming oneself from the inside with spiraling thoughts”. To her, it perfectly highlighted my precociously intricate inner landscape. Accidentally, the Rhododendron bears impossibly delicate flowers that fall apart at the gentlest touch while also being an incredibly resilient plant that, when it finds itself in the right environment, can grow into a glorious, lush, strong tree. My mother is not one for floriography or botany in general, so I am not sure her choice of nickname for me went past the fitting double meaning of its sound, but the image of this delicate yet stubborn tree through the years has always held a magic charm for my own sense of personal identity.

Growing into a woman, our differences have become even more glaring — although I am only recently becoming aware of the extent to which my adult personality is still tied to my attempts to fit into their dynamics as harmoniously as I could. This leaves me wondering who am I, really? Since becoming a mother myself, I have embarked on a deeply emotional journey that, over the past two years, has brought me to examine myself in order to find the authentic seed that I still carry inside to finally allow myself to bloom my own way. To be my own version of myself. To be my own version of my daughters’ mother. Not just a self-fulfilling prophecy based on someone else’s impression of me, unconsciously internalized, blindly normalized, and then dutifully realized with my daily life choices.

This journey has led me to shed many sedimented beliefs and behaviors, picked up over a lifetime, many of which I am not sure to what degree actually belong to me, if at all. It has led me to unlearn many of the ways of being, seeing, thinking, speaking, acting, and feeling that I carried inside for years. It has led me to pause in the heat of the moment to retreat inwards, trying to snap out of auto-pilot and instead observe what alternatives my intuition offers, if I just allow myself to listen. This journey has led me to question, peel off, and reject layers of identities, values, narratives, and perspectives that, I can see now, are the fruit of conditioning and not necessarily the truth. Most certainly they are not the only truth. Quite possibly, they are not even part of my truth.

From the beginning, my own approach to mothering has been different from the way I was raised. I believe my child carries a deep inner wisdom of her own, so I often let her guide me as I grow into my motherly role alongside her. This means she experiences fewer rules, less top-down authority and, as much as my flawed human nature allows, fewer tell-offs. Because I believe in giving her the freedom to experiment and develop a sense of responsibility, I value opportunities for her to learn her own way and chances to deal practically with the consequences of her actions, I trust two-way communication and transparency. I know my own mother shared and applied, in her own ways, some of these values to an extent. But, even then, my methods can often seem airy-fairy, especially compared to the traditional Italian/Mediterranian/Latin upbringing, where children are children and adults know best.

On days like this, when my baby is challenging every boundary and pushing my patience to the limit, I become easy prey to both my own internalized self-doubt and the judgment of an audience who, albeit lovingly, disagrees with what I stand for and has little trust in what I am trying to create. When my daughter “behaves well”, I feel that, in their eyes, I have simply been blessed with a delightfully tempered and easy-going child — which is true, in many ways. However, the weight of my own input is seen as negligible — my efforts to educate and question myself, my daily choices and my values, my example, and my willingness to work on myself first rather than “fixing” my child because I have decided to see her as a mirror rather than the cause of my behaviour…they don’t make a difference. But when things get out of hand, then I am to blame alongside my alternative methods — I mean, they’re obviously not working, but of course you are free to do what you want, she’s your child.

While I will not say much about the unsolicited advice that mothers are flooded with from childless friends and family, I am sure that this process is proving equally as difficult for me as it is for my mother. After enduring an unpredictable daughter whom she could not make sense of and often even get close to, a daughter who deliberately chose to leave straight after high school to put an ocean between herself and her family, my mother now finds herself dealing with a daughter-turned-mother who is seemingly rejecting everything she has done and been as a reference mother-figure. She knows what is happening all too well — she herself had come from a challenging mothering experience that left her scarred and which she tried her best not to replicate with us. Now, after all her efforts and sacrifices, I am doing the same.

If I look at every woman and mother in my family, I can see in their mothering choices traces of generational patterns being undone, whether deliberately or unconsciously, and replaced with new ones. It’s a cycle — generation after generation of mothers, the old patterns are unraveled and new patterns are woven in, all equally destined to be undone, to some degree, by their daughters. Thread after thread, every mother weaves for her children a design that, she hopes, will be better than the one she was part of as a child. Each one is brave enough to risk making mistakes, knowing that, at least, they will be their own new mistakes, rather than a perpetuation of the ones already made.

So, as I unravel my mother’s patterns and weave my own design into the ancestral tapestry of motherhood, I can imagine what she’s feeling — wavering between her eagerness to keep her self-worth intact through my failure and her wish to preserve mine by seeing me succeed. And, while it’s not easy to remember this when I get carried away by my emotions and feel like I have been misunderstood and mistrusted my whole life, I know that she tried her very best. She still does to this day, as she navigates the uncharted waters of learning to stand by her weird, unpredictable daughter while it’s my turn to find my own sails in the sea of motherhood.

And perhaps this is something I have not done yet and should do while I still have the chance: tell her, show her, explain to her that my doing things differently from what she’s done is more about proving myself right than proving her wrong. As I reflect on this, I travel twenty or thirty years ahead to when I will be in the same position my mother is in today. When my own daughters will also feel the need to unravel my patterns to weave in their own. And I hope that, by that day, I will have treasured the lessons that I am learning today as a mother but most importantly as a daughter. So that, when the time comes, I will be the mother they need by their side, as they too unfold from daughters into mothers.

I am sure it won’t be so easy that day, when I will see my own mothering being questioned and challenged, possibly even rejected. So I hope that the words I am writing now will still be around. Today, they are an oath I take for the future. One day, they will be a loving reminder.

You have done your best.
You have loved them. Deeply, truly, unconditionally, incontrovertibly.
You vowed you would keep growing alongside them, day after day. And you did.
You never stopped allowing them to teach you how to be their mother.
You have made all the mistakes that were yours to make. And you have learned from each one.
You have trusted your heart and followed it.
Now it’s their turn.
Let them experience the mother’s heart beating inside them.
Let them unravel your pattern.
Let yourself marvel at what they will weave in its place.
You have done your best. They will too.

So, I peel myself off the bed and I head to my little girl’s room. She squeals a happy “Mamma!” as soon as she sees me. I pick her up from her bed, and I try to explain what happened, apologizing: “I am sorry I lost my patience with you, bunny. Mama is also in a bad mood this morning and she’s finding it hard to keep up, especially when you keep changing your mind and putting up fights. But what I did was not fair. Can we try to help each other, today?” — she cuddles up against me, straddled across my belly (to which her sister promptly responds with a mighty kick), and starts talking about whatever is on her mind right now, which clearly has nothing to do with either my temper lapse or my apologies. I know that my mother and sister would say she’s too young to understand, that it makes no sense to speak to her as if she were an adult. Perhaps they’re right. But, although I can’t tell whether my apologies were really received today, I know they left a trace in her soul’s memory, and I am glad she got to hear me explain my reactions and own up to my mistake. And, as I hold her close, somewhere in my mind, the words for this letter are beginning to tie together into sentences, like imaginary daisy chains.

If you are a mother, I hope that reading my letter this week will inspire you to surrender to the guidance of your own heart — it’s never too late. And if you’re a daughter, I hope these words will help you make peace with your past, whatever pattern you may have been part of — the threads of your present are in your hands now.

With love always,

Julia

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This was a particularly vulnerable topic for me to write about. It certainly brought to the surface shadow and guilt, but also so much light and forgiveness.

I would love to open the comments space for this letter to read about your own experiences and learnings on the topic of being mothers and daughters.

Please know that your story matters, always. And that your words may help someone else in ways that you may not even imagine.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for reading.
And, if you will feel like it, thank you for sharing.