On Mothers

Reflections on Mother-longing and attachment

This week marks 30 years since my mother, Pamela, died. And even now after all of these years my feeling, call it mother-loss or mother-longing, does not quite resolve easily into words however long I circle round it.

Mother is the first home we know. Before we had language, before we had any sense of being a separate self, we were held inside another person's body, and then held again outside it, cradled in an atmosphere of warmth and attunement, or sometimes its absence. Donald Winnicott, writing in the middle of the last century, spoke of the holding environment, that early ground of physical and emotional care in which an infant first begins to exist. He said that there is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and someone, meaning that a baby cannot exist without someone to care for it, extricably binding our existence to our carer. Daniel Stern, working much later with close observation of mothers and infants, described attunement, the small, often unconscious matching of rhythm, gaze, and voice by which a carer lets an infant know they are being met. Whoever that someone was for us, and whatever quality of attunement we received, this laid down something that operates in us now, beneath our awareness, shaping how we breathe, how we rest and how we reach out to others.

I think this is why approaching the idea of mother can feel harder than work around father. Father seems more visible, more external and our relationship to them formed in a space we could more or less observe ourselves having. Mother, by contrast, was the ground we stood on before we knew there was such a thing as ground, our everything. Melanie Klein understood this atmospheric quality in her own way, describing how the infant's inner world is populated from the very beginning by figures of the mother, sometimes felt as nourishing and good, sometimes as frightening and withholding, long before the child can hold the idea that these are the same person. Much of adult life, in Kleinian terms involves the hard work of bringing these split images together, of coming to feel that the people we love are whole, imperfect, and still loveable.

John Bowlby’s attachment theory, now absorbed into a great deal of contemporary therapy, traced the ways we carry the patterns of our earliest bonds into adult life. Whether we tend to reach for closeness, or to push against it, or to swing between the two, often has roots in what it was like to depend on the person who mothered us, and what happened when we needed them and they came, or did not.

To turn and look at our mother now is often to try and see what we were looking out from. Because the mother is not only a person we had a relationship with. She is also, in some sense, the inside of our own experience of being alive. For those of us whose mothers were attuned and emotionally present enough, this ground can be a source of sometimes unrecognised security. Winnicott's phrase, good enough mothering, was always meant as a corrective to perfectionism, a reminder that what an infant needs is not flawless attunement but a sufficient, reliable presence that can also tolerate its own failures. The sense that the world is a place we belong in, where we have a right to take up space,and that our needs are not shameful links back to this ordinary, ‘good enough’ holding. For those of us whose mothers were absent, struggling, unwell or overwhelmed by their own lives, what was laid down might have been different. There may be a quieter disturbance in how we occupy ourselves and maybe an uncertainty about whether we are allowed to exist in the way we do.

It is also worth saying that the figure of the mother does not exist outside the world she lived in. Adrienne Rich, writing in the 1970s, drew a careful distinction between mothering, that is the lived relationship between a woman and her children, and motherhood, the institution, the cultural demand, the weight of expectation placed on women to be endlessly available, giving and responsible. What our mothers could not give us was shaped by what was asked of them and what was unavailable to them. Holding this wider field in mind can be part of the work, not to undo what is missing for us, but perhaps loosening it by changing the register of our experience from a singular private story and to a wider structural one.

Grief about mothers, whether they are living or no longer here, moves in these deeper layers. It is not only grief about the person who was or was not there. It is grief about the self that grew up in that field, and the self that might have grown up in another one.

What I have learned slowly and with many returns since my own mother died, is that grief does not proceed in a straight line. It circles and it layers, each time asking for something slightly different. At first an acute daily absence and then later a quieter yet still persistent sense of loss. And it returns at every threshold of my life and each time there has been something new to meet. Not the same grief, but the current version of me meeting the current absence of her.

In Gestalt therapy we speak of unfinished business, situations that close incompletely and go on asking for our attention. And Mother-grief can be layered with unfinished business in this sense. Working through does not mean arriving at some final resolution where the feeling is gone. It means being able to turn towards what is still alive in us, and giving it the attention it was waiting for. Klein would have called this reparation, the impulse to make good, in the self and in the inner relationship, what could not be made good in life.

What I notice, both in my own life and my work, is that the relationship with mother does not end when they die. Something continues and the inner conversation goes on. We can keep discovering them, and keep being discovered by them, through the people we become, the way we relate to our own children or clients or friends and in the small moments when their voice surprises us by coming out of our own mouth, sometimes gentler or sharper than we expected.

references
Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1975) Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press.
Rich, A. (1976) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton.
Stern, D. N. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.