A Mommy Story

(Here comes another messy post. This is such a hard topic to wrap my head around, so bear with me.)

Her Bad Mother had a beautiful post about the intense physical love she feels for her daughter, and asked if others feel this way also.

I have two takes on this, from the position of a daughter and from the position of a mother.

My mother’s family is what you might call “cold” upon first meeting them. Everyone is very nice, very pleasant to talk to, but there is a noticeable lack of emotion. We can carry on intelligent, engaging conversations, but at the end of the day, little is said about love, about emotional bonds, or about caring for others in our family. “I love you” is never spoken, and hugs are not exchanged. Love is something that is just understood – it is not expressed. And emotions are considered, especially by my grandmother, as something to deal with and force down, and not something to wear on your sleeve for all to see.

Somehow, I did not get the same genetic make-up that everyone else had. My mother and her sisters are like this, my grandmother is like this, and yet I was not. I was gifted with the intense, passionate emotion from my father’s side of the family, a family of people who love and hate with a fire that is hard to extinguish (gotta love Irish passion). They hug, they kiss, they express their feelings openly and without fear of those feelings being dismissed.

But I was raised by my mother and her family, and so I often found myself conflicted. I wanted to be hugged, I wanted to be told I was loved, but I was raised with a hands-off approach. I watched other kids having warm, loving moments with their parents, wondering why my mother and I didn’t behave that way as well. I knew she loved me – at least, my logical side assumed she loved me since she did so much for me. But any physical affection and touch was lacking.

However, the nurture side of the equation came into play also, so that when anyone did hug me, I felt awkward and embarrassed. I felt like it should be OK, but it wasn’t done in my family, and so it was foreign to me. Add in being molested as a child by a high school boy, and you’ve got a confusing message about touching others in a loving way. When my teen years came along, I was a ticking bomb of emotion, sometimes going off loudly, other times withdrawn and quiet. My poor mother didn’t know what to do with me – I was practically screaming for her to hug me, touch me, or show me that she loved me in some way, but would then dismiss any attempts she made. The physical aspects of love were short-circuited between us.

Once I was in college, the raging hormones of puberty behind me, my mother and I reached common ground. She realized that she had always been distant, because that was the way she was raised. She confessed to me that she never wanted to be so cold, but didn’t know any other way, since it felt so unnatural to her to want to hug me, stroke my hair, or touch me in any way. My teen years made it clear to her that I was not like her or others in our family, and that I needed more, and now that I was an adult we were able to discuss it openly.

To this day she’s still only told me once that she loves me (when I was getting ready to board a plane to go to England for a summer), but she does routinely hug me goodbye each week, and she tries to be affectionate with Cordy as well. I know she’s trying, and I can only imagine how hard the struggle must be between her natural feelings of motherhood and her upbringing.

For me, the first moment I saw Cordy, I had every intention of smothering her in love. I wanted to hold her little body close to mine, kiss her tiny hands and feet, and make sure that she realized every single day how loved she is. I was ready to break with the tradition of being physically aloof from a child.

There was just one snag: Cordy seems to have picked up the family trait.

As much as it pains me to acknowledge, Cordelia was not and still is not a cuddly child. As a baby she enjoyed being held in a sling, but didn’t care much for being touched. Any attempts at a kiss were met with a turn of the head or resistance. Trying to snuggle her resulted in her making her body rigid and pushing away with a cry. She rarely fell asleep on my chest – she was much more interested in pushing her head up and looking around.

The thought of having a child I couldn’t cuddle made me sick with depression. It felt like a big, black hole in my core: here is this child that was grown inside of me, and is half of my biological make-up, and now this part of me is outside of my body, but I can’t love it the way I want to.

Somewhere around 16 months, though, she learned a new game. The “beeeeah” game, which is essentially the hugging game. She would walk back and forth to Aaron and I, collapsing into each of us and saying “beeeah” as she sort-of hugged us, and then walking to the other person and repeating it. I don’t think I could have been happier, even if she had spontaneously said”I love you, mommy.”

While she still doesn’t like to be kissed or hugged that much, when it is on her own terms she will allow it. And right now, I’ll take what I can get, while slowly pushing for a little more affection as time goes by. After all, this period of life goes by so quickly. It won’t be long before she’s a teenager full of hormones and emotion, and I’d like to lay the groundwork for our physical love now and get in all the hugs I can before she reaches the point where she is embarrassed of me.

What you can’t see in this picture is the swing she took at me after this was snapped.