I have been gifted with a loving mother.
It felt heavy at times. As a child, I was terrified to lose her.
I remember using my magical thinking to cope with that awful fear, which could be summed up by: “two steps forward, one on the right, and she is going to stay alive.” Besides making me look like a strange hyperactive kid, that triggered some new angst within my psyche. What if I fall? I was quite an anxious child…
The most extraordinary thing with her is that she did not inherit this from her own mother. Not at all… My Grandma was an unfathomable cold fish, looking a bit like Little Red Riding Hood’s granny after she’s been eaten by the wolf. She excelled at creating rivalry and discord among the members of her progeny. She was not talking much, but often when she did, you wish you were deaf. From the outside, you could think she had done a few good deeds and was a kind old lady. So, I remember people praising my grandmother to my Mom. That always made me nauseous, because I knew how mean she was to her. I witnessed her belittling and torturing my mother so many times. It is complicated to find the right answer to these well-intentioned laudatory speeches and keep your integrity. Because the truth is you feel ashamed to have an evil witch in your family… she was her mother… Also, if you say anything, people might just think you are an ingrate naughty girl. Trapped in this insoluble conundrum, each time, my mother remained silent, and I could sense her aching.
My mother tried many times to set proper boundaries with her. But it always failed one way or another. There is a reason why Baba Yaga is living on her own in the middle of the forest. You are not meant to visit her often. She is just there to teach you a lesson.
When something was not going the way she wanted, my grandmother played the victim, putting all her efforts and siblings in line to make my mother feels guilty. Usually, when you get an evil witch in your family, it unfortunately comes with a bunch of other trolls. My grandmother was born in a very dogmatic Catholic family, the kind of family - when you get a vibrant heart and a sound brain - that made you lose faith. She might have been lacking a bit of both and her faith was weird. In that family, what I felt the most is the scarcity of Love. There was an intense energy put into keeping its collective narrative bright and clean. In this epic drama, there were the folks that have been granted the victim status to whom you had to show bowels of compassion. They also established a cult of some relatives’ saver figures. With the unfolding of some family secrets, I happened to learn that these super-folks had been more inclined to rescue persecutors and covered their wrongdoings than to really take care of the harmed people. And the closest to church they were, the greatest their villainy was.
As my father once wisely said to me with a mischievous smile: “Always beware of those who go to church too often, they have something to blame themselves for.”
I think the tragedy for my mother lied in this lurking and painful doubt about her own mother’s love for her. Until the last breath of that old lady, she gave everything to allay it, in vain. I wish she knew that evil witches are bottomless pits. You can endlessly fill them with tendresse, but you will never draw a drop of affection from those wells. That hole in my mother’s heart made her more vulnerable to mistreatment in all the areas of her life. That made her path to self-love more challenging. She could not rely on her siblings either, because my grandmother leaned on the cultivation of this Love desert to maintain her grip on her children, by fueling tensions among them through lies and calumny. Instead of showing love to them, she kept on criticizing them to one another.
I was so angry at my mom for all the time she wasted caring for that crone. As an act of rebellion, I decided never to return in the middle of the forest to pay this trickster a visit. I just broke that vow once. It was three months before her death, at Christmas time. My mother had compassionately told me: “You know, it’s just a poor old lady now and she is suffering…” So, I went… It felt awkward. She welcomed me with a wide smile, then I think she remembered what I had already witnessed of her, and that I knew her dark side. She didn’t need to fake it with me. She could be her whole self. We did not have much to say to each other. My mother told her she had talked to her sister. And to soothe the heart of this poor old dear, she added: “We are seeing each other now and our relationships are better.” The latter quietly replied: “I preferred when you were mad at each other.” I did not think she could surprise me with her meanness again. I had underestimated her as always. She did, imposing to us a last time her very personal approach of “Christmas truce,” her Christmas truth. She was still alive enough to shock me, offering me her last gift in that breathtaking moment. DEEP CLARITY. Without a shadow of a doubt, channeling love was not why she had been brought here for.
Sometimes death is a blessing. It’s been the only healthy boundary God found to spare the life of my mother. During my grandmother funerals, it was striking to see how the church was divided into two coteries, both clearly not moved by the same narrative. I did not shed a tear. I had already buried her many years ago with my illusions of nurturing hearty and sane relationships near her. In the aftermath, I recall a cartoonish conversation with one of my cousins, where we were wondering: Why was she so mean? My coz suggested that she must have experienced something very traumatic and painful in the past to be like this. Indeed… but we will never know exactly what and why. And that would not be fair for all of us and for the free will human being she was to cage her in the narrow victim cell. One thing is for sure. She left behind her a leaden legacy: the toxicity she instilled like a poison in our familial bonds remains. And I prefer to start fresh in a glen where Love can truly flourish and be shared.
My greatest strength lies in my mother’s unwavering love for me. I feel it, I know it in my heart, in all my cells. Not even once did it come to my mind to question this. When I grew up, I began to just take it for granted, not realizing how lucky I was and how precious that was. Worse, when she was giving me high and nice compliments, I always dismissed them: “Mom stop, that doesn’t count, because you love me.” Often, I could see tears in her eyes, and she concluded with: “I just wish you could see what I see.” How wrong I was… I don’t even know how I made up this foreclosing rule. And it sounds so silly. I mean receiving compliments from haters is unlikely to happen in a lifetime.
My self-love path has been quite tangled too. I encountered new tricksters. As many people stamped by the Christian culture and deluded with the mistaken belief that martyrdom is glorious and a proof of love and worthiness, I followed the Way of the Cross to the letter. Driven by my naïve inner child ambition to erase suffering from earth, to save the world, I let myself be tortured and crucified by my PhD supervisor sorceress. I can still recollect her saying: “if you want your work to be of value, you must suffer. The more you suffer, the best it will be.” Gosh, how bad I listened to her… how I miserably sacrificed myself to get that social and moral approval… to finally just feed my wounded ego with a small piece of paper attesting that I was smart and kind. I gave away my core. I dismantled the whole ME for that. With the loss of my integrity, dropped one after the other my autonomy, my agency, and my dignity. I fork over my health…
How ironic… I almost killed myself trying to imagine new legal ways to provide healthcare access to all, trying to envision how to make these beautiful values I tossed for myself real for others… My brain sounded so damaged at the end I thought I would never be able to think things through again. And writing, what I had always treasured, was akin to torture. But even in these darkest moments, there were lights, fairies and angels in my life. My Cancerian mother named after Mary brought me support all along. I wish she never had to see me in such highly distressed states… She soothed me as much as she could on this hellish journey. Finally, two brave and generous men helped me to get out from under this dragon lady’s thumb. One became my new supervisor.
However, that was not a happy end as we see in movies. What had been lost was lost forever, mourning all my dead from the descent, grieving these wasted young years and their aborted dreams, that’s what was truly at stake. It took me a while… years… to come back from the dead, because I was so full of guilt and shame. And I was overwhelmed by sorrow. Why had I done that to myself?
This is only at the end of my healing journey in November last year that I started seeing this darkness with new eyes. A very dear friend of mine offered me a place to stay in the Auvergnat mountains so that I could make a last retreat before my comeback. During that precious time withdrawn from the busy world, I read a lot. One book particularly moved me. That was a stunning novel untitled Thirst and written by the divinely inspired and gifted author: Amélie Nothomb. In this new title, this wordsmith undertook the narration of Jesus’s final days in a first-person voice. I had heard her talking about this new creation when it came out to the world four years before, and I was very intrigued by it. She expressed the great admiration she had been cherished for Jesus from a very early age. Her reverence for the latter was as high as her incomprehension of his ending. Why on earth—with all the power in his hand—had he let all these people cruelly tormented and killed him like this? Indeed, just a glance at the state of the world today suffices to show that the redemption argument does not wash. Worse, sacrificing one’s life as a gesture of love to save humankind, when you yourself are fleshly recognizable as human, what a terrible example to set for the world! You should love your neighbor as yourself, isn’t that the greatest Christian command of all?
As Amélie Nothomb pointed out, we only got the potentially very worship-biased apostles’ views on the Way of the Cross, and no direct testimony of the Christ. What if there was a hitch in the current widespread narrative? She felt ready to shed some new light on this story we’ve been told for centuries and penetrate the mysteries peppering it. Through big embodied magic writing, using her genius and creativity, and out of love for this amazing biblical figure, she decided to get inside the skin of Jesus during the most aching time of his short life. She said that this creative venture had been a real ordeal for her. But that was the price to pay to get subtle and intimate insights about his experience of the Passion. What she discovered from this very sentient son of God was quite luminous to me. At the end, one of his greatest struggles was just to forgive himself for the pointless and sadistic mise-en-scène of his death. By a twist of fate, the quintessence of Love painted and ever since promoted by the Christian culture was in fact the biggest mistake of his human life. After all, for his divine spirit to have been eager to embrace human imperfection and wear the highly sensitive skin-cloth which comes with it in a very challenging earth school, wasn’t it already the most striking proof of love for humankind he could offer?
For this transgressive Messiah she portrayed, the ultimate and deepest human form of love lies in Mercy and Self-forgiveness. His loving mother may then have played a key role in his resurrection. Besides never having let him down, she would have instilled enough peace and safety in his inside world to make him able to complete these very demanding inner processes. Or maybe, he would have found other ways to strengthen a stable inner Love through the course of his life to conduct it. We don’t know. All we know is that he made it back and forth from the sky. By accepting his human perfect imperfection and freeing himself from guilt and remorse through this inner divine unconditional love, he rose from the ashes. He finally got to love his neighbor as himself.
When I closed the book, I realized that the journey I had just undertaken was akin to a resurrection path. Along the way, I reconnected with the wide spectrum of human feelings with nuances of fear, anger, surprise, joy, sadness and love. My vulnerability and sensitivity were at their acme, but I was feeling fully alive again. It sounded as if I had recovered an essential part of my soul. I could handle my sorrow with my open heart. And I was able to see where my strengths lied in. I had started forgiving myself for my mistakes.
The following months, I came to experience such a deep gratitude for the special bond I have with my mom. She has always been there for me, and I think I have been for her too. Once we were fighting, and I had the sensation to be facing a very young child. That three-year-old was terrified that I would abandon and cease to love her. I could see that in her eyes. I stopped the argument: “Mom, before we go on, you know that the love we share for each other is unbreakable, right? And disagreeing with you and sometimes getting mad at you does not mean that I am not loving you anymore, or that I will stop loving you. We are just two different human beings with divergent views and perspectives sometimes. But my love for you is unalterable. You know, that’s what really matters.” In French, “Il n’y a que ça de vrai.” That’s what my mother used to say like a mantra every night, when she was embracing very tightly the little version of myself and kissing her good night. She came so many times in my bedroom with dark circles under her eyes. I could sense her exhaustion and worries in my belly. But thanks to this magical embodied spell, all this darkness was instantly dissolving. And both of us felt this Deep Truth radiating in and around us. That infinite and unconditional LOVE surrounding us. I was asking for her to come back again and again, because I didn’t want this god-spell—the MUSIC of LOVE—to stop pouring my heart. And most of the time, she showed up because it was also good for her to return to this mysterious SOURCE we were touching in our embrace.
With a love like this, you can rise endlessly and start writing again.
<3 Sending you lots of love from France et des bisous <3
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I do hope this piece of writing touched your heart, dear reader friend.
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