My Daughter’s Pregnant, so Why am I Needing a Mother?

The familiar yearning about needing a mother figure has risen to the surface again. I have felt this visceral yearning for a mother figure who listens and understands many times, often when I am tired, upset, or not feeling well. I have ‘battled’ with this visceral need for a listening, understanding, supportive mother many times in my life, and I am using the world ‘battle’ deliberately because that is what it has felt like. Even though intellectually I know that it is a human need to be heard, understood, and supported, not having had a mother who could listen and support has, at times, left me struggling to normalize this very human need. As a teenager, I actively tried to shut down my yearning for my mother because it was too painful, too damaging to not receive what I needed. And as a young woman, especially when I became a mother and needed my mother’s support, I quickly learned to stop needing her.  

This familiar yearning has risen to the surface because my daughter is pregnant with her first child, my first grandchild. As my daughter and I enter this new stage in our relationship where she is a mother and I a grandmother, it is normal and necessary that we reflect on what it means to be female and a mother in our family, culture, and society. In my reflections, I keep returning to a memory when I was in the last months of pregnancy with my first child and picking my husband up from work. I write about this memory in “The Silent Female Scream”. As I sat in the car waiting for my husband to come out of work, I realized that waiting for others, fitting around others, and no longer having an identity of my own was now going to be my life.

“I become aware of an overwhelming feeling of being trapped in a life that was about waiting for others to be ready and fitting around everyone else’s routines and needs. With horror, I saw my future identity and purpose being taken over by motherhood, that I was turning into my mother and grandmother, who had disappeared from view as they molded their lives around the lives of their children and husbands as selfless servants.” (“The Silent Female Scream”)

In my family, the Culture of Female Service reigns supreme. Mothers are expected to be selfless caregivers and doing anything for yourself is considered selfish. Women and mothers are invisible as people in my family, as well as in a patriarchal society. And because my mother was not taught to feel entitled to what she needed for herself, as her eldest daughter, I was expected to focus my attention on listening to her and being responsible for her unhappiness. Survival in my relationship with my mother meant shutting myself down and focusing on making my mother happy so that she remained available to me, even if it was in a limited way.

As I reflect on how I have worked on claiming my identity as a person in my mothering role and not inheriting my mother’s and grandmother’s invisibility, as a woman I still have some work to do. I still need to work on changing my learned female behavior of over-giving and prioritizing other people’s needs and happiness over my own. I write about and teach that relationships are a like a bridge and how patriarchy expects women to take responsibility for building the entire bridge, but all too often I still take too much responsibility for building the entire bridge in my personal and professional relationships. Too often do I forget to expect and demand that other people do their half share in building their relationship with me. 

My daughter’s pregnancy has helped me see how I mothered from empty. How, as a new mother, I was surrounded by people who did not recognize that they were responsible for supporting me. And because I, my mother, and my grandmother grew up feeling unsupported and emotionally uncared for by the people around us, we learned to not need.

Normal for me has been to put myself on the backburner in my relationships and be afraid of being alone if I do not over give. And this fear of being alone is real! It is not imagined because patriarchy punishes women for being too self-focused, especially when we are mothers. And some of the punishment is meted out by other women. My mother stopped talking to me when I stopped being her emotional helpmate, and she kept up her silent treatment from most of my adult life until she died. And girlfriends have ended their relationship with me when I stopped being their ‘surrogate’ mother.

I’m excited about this next stage with my daughter, and being a grandmother, and I am grateful to my visceral yearning for being listened to and supported because it is warning me that my relationships are still out of balance. I need to recommit to myself. I need to tune in more carefully into what I need, and what is true and right for me. And I need to protect myself from the many ways women are shamed for stepping out of patriarchy’s prescribed female role of being a selfless, self-sacrificing caregiver.

By taking responsibility for what I need, I can be a stronger support for my daughter. By taking responsibility for my wellbeing, my humanity, and for how I want to live my life, I will be changing the generational theme of selfless mothering in my family. And I will be showing my daughter that even though we are mothers, we are still people first.