Motherloss
Puffy-eyed
and nose-stuffy, I chew on the layers of meaning that seep like
bittersweet honey through my consciousness, letting the tears flow. You
know how sometimes movies shake you to your core? Slice like an arrow
deep into an unknown festering wound... well that's what Secret Life of
Bees did for me tonight. It was moving and emotional to watch on so
many levels, and hit so many deep places that I found myself bawling my
eyes out in the car on the way home, not really knowing why.
The word that keeps coming to me is motherloss.
A word that I feel from somewhere deep down that it brings deep
wellings of grieving tears to my eyes just to speak the word. My own
motherloss. The motherloss of our culture... the way the patriarchy
wreaks so much havoc and pain in the lives of people: minorities, war
"enemies," women and even men, each in its own horrible way.
Watching
those monsters beat the nanny as she went to register to vote – I was
so enraged. Fiery hot tears burned trenches down my cheeks as I wanted
to jump into the movie and fight for her, with her, against the angry men beating her. But I was helpless, like the little girl with her, unable to
help her, unable to change the past or the injustice that my country
was built upon. Yet her strength in the face of the roaring monsters -
who abused her and threatened to kill her - awed me. She refused to
give in, to break down or apologize. And I have to ask myself, where's
my inner strength in the face of much lesser threats than that, and yet
how often do I cower and give in to their demands in order make life a
little easier in the short run.
And the little motherless girl, carrying the grief and guilt all her life of having accidentally killed her own mother. With a tortured monster of a father, raped by the ravages of patriarchy's war, who couldn't love her, who told her her mother had abandoned her, she was convinced deeply that she was unlovable. I look back to my own story and grieve at how I symbolically killed my own mother by being forced to choose sides and not choosing her. I aligned myself with the father. The good father's daughter. The authority pleaser. The good girl. Fitting into patriarchy's mold to the "T." And yet with the rejection of and by the mother, a deep seated feeling settled in that I hadn't even known existed until tonight... unlovable. I mean, if your own mother can't love you, who can?
And
yet this little girl found a safe haven among the very folks her
culture despised. She found strong women who worshiped an image of the
Sacred Feminine, and she found the strong, compassionate and fierce
heart of the Great Mother.
While
I grieve for my personal motherloss, I know I am also in the process of
healing the motherwound - that empty place that no human mother can
fill, the wound that patriarchy has inflicted by killing the Mother for
us, banning us from any powerful mother figure to cherish. Slicing her
up. Splintering her out of our collective psyche until she is a
caricature of femininity: picture perfect pagent girls smothered with
fake smiles, plastered with makeup, prancing perky bodies down catwalks
with the universe gawking and drooling. Or leave-it-to-beaver's mother,
all docile, ready and waiting for the king to come back to his domain.Or the perpetual Virgin, a splintered image, wiped clean of any sinful bodily contamination; cleansed and holy. These are the versions patriarchy has left us.
It's time we find the real Mother in all her love and fierceness, in her dark earthiness and primal sexuality. It's time we women embody that for our children and stop the tragic rewounding of generation after generation, deprived of real mothers. Deprived of the Great Mother. It's time to stand up in the face of the patriarchy and scream back from the deep centers of our beings and say I will NOT give in! I will NOT let you slice me up, manipulate or control me, put me in my place or wreak your vile injustice on beautiful souls who may not fit into your rigid belief system.
And
then we can find Her compassion to heal the brokenness, to mend the
wounds inflicted on our own souls and on our collective soul, to begin
to heal the splinters and splits and chasms between us that patriarchy,
with its legacy of racism, oppression and abuse, has left us.
We
may grieve Her loss, but She isn't lost forever. Indeed she is
reawakening within us, remothering us. Sometimes it takes a movie to
remind us of the wounds, but also of the hope.
PS... Go see the movie, but if you are anything like me, remember to bring tissue!
.