The Mother Wound

It’s been 30 earth cycles around the sun without the loving gaze, warmth and sensuality of my mother. The remembrance of this anniversary is often heightened between the 2-week window of 24/09 - 07/10 every year, between the birth and death days of my mother, more than ever this year being in Egypt - in my mother's birthplace.

I had been left with abandonment, trust issue and all sorts of distortions of reality from my conditioning since her departure. Childhood fears turned into a chaotic youth of criminality, recklessness and living on the streets until I finally left home bang on 18 years young. In the 22 years since, have been experimenting with healing and unraveling my conditioning through relationships with flatmates, false and real- friends, lovers and bosses who got too close and many other pseudo-care-givers and surrogate mothers who I attempted to use to fill the gaping hole of the mother wound.

I moved a lot, and eventually traveled a lot under the guise of embracing change and the unknown though, it was often just escapism glorified into something more meaningful.

The last 2 years have been really crucial with me finally choosing to stop running, distracting, non-committing and all the various shape-shifting methods I used to continue to escape myself. I was terrified of actually healing as I always knew there was an avalanche of wounds that were far away from becoming scars that I kept plastering over year after year. All had roots in my childhood and the collective but deeply personal- mother wound.

What is the Mother Wound?

It's the energetic pain body and wounds left behind from our distorted unhealthy relationships to our mothers. How she treated us - how and if she gave love, how and if she nurtured us, how and if she created bonds of trust, how and if she really saw us, how and if she created a safe space - all deeply affect how we in turn, treat others. Our mothers are after all our life-givers and original caregivers - however brief or inconsistent that care may have been - therefore the upward or downward spiral our lives traverse on, IS set by our mothers. No matter how much time and space has passed we always remember our childhoods and our mothers.

What I have since realised - in very recent reflection over the past year - through deep nourishment, self-care, forgiveness and mothering of myself is the following;

*A mother's love is beyond time and space, her words and actions continue to create samskaras (ripples of conditioning ) outwards into the rivers of your lives. Therefore the sooner you seek help - professional or otherwise - to dive deeper into unpacking that conditioning, the better it will be for recognition of your own ingrained distortions and beginning to heal them. Getting help is not taboo, it's necessary for creating balanced healthy humans.

*My mother was -thankfully- imperfect and full of flaws. Christianity and my remaining family members who did care seemed to think that in glorifying my mother as a saint high on this pedestal; immortalising her as a perfect being, was what I needed. Very unrealistic. In recent years - since my move to Egypt- I have learned stories of my mother that have downright shocked me. Seeing her in other roles, as a sister, cousin, aunty and most importantly a woman BEFORE she was my mother has allowed me to fully re-humanise her and actually see her through the eyes of a friend rather than the narrow, wounded inner-child eyes. Which is obviously transformative!

*We do always become like our mothers. This is inevitable and rather than something to fear or run from, should be embraced. I always saw my mother as a sick, frail, poverty-stricken, tired victim of the many layers of oppression she was born into. This judgment took away her power, autonomy and freedom of choice. My mother may have been all of the above-mentioned things but she was also wise, compassionate, intuitive, flirtatious, charismatic, and an independent traveler who left her country of origin alone to try a different life in another sunny part of the world. That screams ME all over...so when my Aunty tells me I'm like my mother - now it fills my heart with joy.

*Mothers leave a legacy that always includes some level of responsibility. This is a big one for me, as while I've been heavily responsible since age 10 -because I had to be to keep the family going- later on in life whenever possible I would shy or run away from responsibility at every single opportunity there was to step up. However, very recently I've been questioning my beliefs and conditioning around responsibility and realise that I severely dislike it because the people who did step in to be responsible often fell very far short of what that means. Abusing responsibility, not being consistent or emotionally mature enough with the power that comes with responsibility did distort my view of it as a rubbish quality or trait to have.

Now I know better and see that these irresponsible and mentally ill people who stepped in to be my caregivers abused responsibility of themselves, so it's no wonder that they couldn't show up in their power for me either. Understanding this has allowed me to reframe my relationship to responsibility; being consistent, emotionally mature and generous with my responsibilities is how I roll these days.

Last but not least; a mother shows me that the microcosm of the individual mother also represents the macrocosm of our collective Mother Earth. A mother is creative, grounding, calming, nurturing, regenerative and life-affirming. She is also circular, cyclical, seasonal and full of creational power, sacred rage, and that the wrath of the mother should never be messed with. They are both powerful forces that show us the Birth, Death and Rebirth process so clearly; a process that is now attempted to be co-opted by the toxic masculine.

The Mother Wound right now is not just being examined in my own psyche on day’s like today, but is very much being re-visited as a global theme as we see how the huge imbalance of toxic masculinity has affected the planet with greed, ill health, poverty, racism, sexism, ableism and all the systems of oppression that begun under the guise of progress through Patriarchal Capitalism.

Now IS time to return to our inherent nature and back to balance through the feminine wisdom of our mothers and Mother Earth herself.

RIP Yvonne Shoukry Aziz - Om el Dunya.