Dear beloved one,

I am writing with a note to you, daughter or son of a mother.

If the mother experience you’ve had in this life has been a perfect one, this letter is not for you.

This letter is for those with a mother wound. A mother loss, mother pain. Mother scars.

Which, I would say, is all of us, actually. 

Why? Because mothers are human; there is no perfect parent. There’s always a gap between what we expect or needed our mother to be and what our mother can actually provide for us. Even with the “best” mother.

Mothers mother within a life context. What was your mother’s circumstance when you were born? Was she living with mental or physical illness, financial stress or poverty, marital or relational challenges, addiction? Was she very young, or in older years? Did she have several children? Was she very devoted to her career? Under a lot of stress? What was her relationship like with her own mother? 

How old were you when you realized that your mother – who you might even consider your hero – was just another imperfect human being trying to figure out life as best she can, just like you? 

Maybe you didn’t get to know your mother; maybe your mother is a question. Or a compilation of brief stories other people have told you about her.

Maybe you do know your mother and still, she’s a “question,” like a puzzle you can’t figure out, or something very far away.

One of my teachers says that our relationship with our mother is our most significant relationship in life, that there is a spiritual umbilical cord that tethers us to our mother forever in continuous relationship. That it will always be a connection we have inside, and that we can work with that cord, transform it, shape it – whether our mother is alive or no longer in the physical, whether we are in actual relationship with her or not.

For most of us, that invisible cord of mother connection will have some pain in it, some loss or wound, like most relationships but this one cuts much deeper. One of the most important things we can do is to realize that no other relationship can address that wound or substitute for it. 

Most of us will try to do that, find a substitute; the mother wound is so painful and so potent that it will send you out in the world searching for a balm to heal it without even realizing that’s what you’re doing. 

But what you (hopefully) discover is that doing that is like trying to make a rectangle fit into a circle. Except, imagine that your rectangle is the only one like it in the whole world. Not only will the circles not match it, but you could search the world over and you’ll never find a match for that specific shape. 

The mother place in us is an extremely specific shape. Even the most amazing friend, partner, spouse, or child will never be a replacement for or solve what you need in that area. Neither will even the most fulfilling job or achievement, success, or anything else. We need to talk about this wound, say this tenderly to each other more often:

Trying to get those other circles to perfectly fit this particular rectangle will only make you experience double the heartbreak. Your pain will be multiplied, and you’ll become drained of your power and soul force.

Even the healthy ways you try to love yourself must be done with the knowing that those things won’t make that wound or pain completely disappear. The best you can hope for is to become very familiar with it; let your heart become known to yourself in that area, and allow yourself to grieve. Light will inevitably come to shine in that dark place, and the wound will change – not go away, but change.

The work is to grieve. Let yourself become aware of what is real and true for you as far as your mother story. Some people will need to grieve a few times, some will need to do it for years, and some will need to reach out for support because the well of their mother pain is quite deep and maybe even ongoing. Whatever you need, it is okay.

One of the hardest things about the mother wound is that it can feel like a place where you’re all alone. Precisely because it’s so unique to you and it’s not something that can be easily addressed.

Here’s the good news.

The mother wound is a doorway straight to a relationship with the sacred, if you allow it to be. It’s a pathway to the revelation that not only are you not alone, you are in fact profoundly companioned, sustained, nurtured, held, and nourished.

By what? By God and by all of life. In ways that might surprise you, if you let them.

Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst and scholar of the divine feminine, said,

“Individuation begins with the painful recognition that we are all orphans. And the liberating recognition that the whole world is our orphanage.”

Individuation is the process by which you become your own person. It’s about forming your own identity, being who you truly are – which is a sacred, spiritual process. It’s the journey to your inner light. Woodman says that its starting point is the recognition that we are all orphans in some sense. And that freedom comes when we realize that the world is full of resources that can nurture us. That we are “orphans” isn’t the end of the story. This is good news for mothers, too.

The courage to face these truths opens you to the revelation of God as mother, and that will manifest as an actual experience in your life of being mothered by divinity.  If you look for it, you will find it, because it is already there. The Great Mother who birthed you forth in your mother is still holding you in her womb now.

May Light shine ever brightly on your pathway,
Tiffany