We are our Mothers' Children

The first people that screw you up in life are your parents, there’s no doubt about that. They are the people that teach you how to walk, talk and shape your views before you gather enough information to contemplate them on your own.

Things that we do or believe in, even after we are all grown up, often come from something that our parents taught us when we were young. Even a certain avoidance to eat mushroom stems because they were never present in your household, still carries on, regardless of the fact that you’re well in your twenties or thirties.

We especially have the tendency to carry the things given to us from our mothers. Whether you are a son or a daughter your mother has had more influence on you that you realize. Maybe it’s the fact that there will always be an invisible bond connecting us to the fact that she is who brought us into the world, or maybe it’s just that no one makes you regret doing something quite like your mother. The possibilities are many but the fact of the matter is that you will never escape being your mother’s child.

Our mothers are the original sources of warmth, kindness, support, drama and mood swings. As much as we may love them, they are women and it’s a rare find to meet a woman that doesn’t share these qualities. Because of that, our mothers are guilty for having a plethora of faults in their parenting history.

A mother’s love doesn’t compare with anything in this world, and because of that love they will always make great mistakes that can restructure the child’s entire being in a second.

For example, a mother wants her child to be strong and independent. In order to teach those valuable traits to her child she needs to show the child that it shouldn’t expect her to be there to save the day all the time. However, this stops being a lesson on discipline after a while and becomes a significant amount of distance and fear between the two.

We, as children, lose the capability to open up about our troubles, only because our mother taught us that we should learn to deal with them ourselves, and our mothers are left not knowing exactly what is going on with us. She cannot know or comprehend the context between her child’s troubles and that leads her to only fearing her child. The kind of fear that usually comes from the unknown; and to her that child has become something unknown.

You are no longer the little child that used to run to her whenever there was a thunderstorm, the one that would ask her why someone got angry and how to fix something when it was wrong. This grown-up shares a lot of her features but she cannot, for the life of her, understand where some habits came from.

Our mothers shouldn’t be blamed though, that’s the way they were brought up and they follow what they know to be right. The feeling she gets when her mother couldn’t understand her is so passed her that she can’t ever remember feeling that way.

It’s a cycle unfortunately, there’s no instruction manual on how to be a mother. And, as humans, we are definitely going to have some fuck ups along the way. We can’t avoid the truth that, as hard as we will try not to be like our mothers, we do end up exactly like them.

In some aspects.

She has that look in her eye whenever she says or does something that deep down always makes you believe that she’s right. Like those countless times she told you to take an umbrella even though the sun was shining outside and soon enough, it was pouring.

So if she was right about the rain, and right that you have to stand up and be your own person, there has to be a good reason why she did everything else, right?

Yes, your mother is a source of inspiration and strength, it’s undeniable. She is a magnificent woman despite her faults. But it’s high time we broke the cycle and start admitting their faults rather than idolizing them.

You are your mother’s child. You began to carry her fears and doubts she had in certain moments and you unconsciously absorbed them. Think about it for a while, and there’s no shame in admitting it – but learn from it.

If there’s one thing our mothers want for us more than anything, it is for us to be better than them and prove to them that it didn’t all go wrong because they just didn’t know any better.