I remember when my daughter was born that I started seeing my mother in a new light. I knew, logically, that she had birthed me and raised me as a baby but hadn’t really understood what that meant until I had lived it. Birthing and nurturing a baby is one of those life experiences that needs to be lived to be understood. There’s no vicarious substitute, and no, having or losing a pet is not at all like having or losing a child.
I was not naturally maternal, and for many years was sure I would never have a child, but having changed my mind I determined to be the very best mother that I could be. I researched and read and pondered and agonised over my choices.
My mother emerged permanently traumatised from an abusive childhood, as did my father. They made a shared commitment to avoid the parenting styles they had been raised under and to develop something kinder and non-violent. Having no clear role models for mothering or fathering, they did their best to overcome this. They got a lot of it right and some of it wrong, as we all do.
When I had a child of my own I recognised my own psychological deficiencies and resolved to do whatever I could not to pass them on to my daughter, while still acknowledging that there were likely to be epigenetic factors, and things beyond my control.
It’s only been in recent years that I have come to understand the importance of attachment and the significance of attachment theory to my psychology. As a baby, I was sent to live with my grandmother for a while. The reasons and details are unclear but I expect it was either during the time when my mother was pregnant with my sister, had recently given birth to my sister or both. She would have already had two children under three. I don’t remember living with my grandmother, and didn’t find out about it until I was well into my fifties, but it does help me to understand my broken attachment to my mother and the strong bond I felt with my grandmother. It is also possibly the seed of a life-long animosity between myself and my younger sister. I was literally displaced by her, and for her part, I suddenly appeared in her life as a competitor for our mother’s time and affection.
My fifties was a big decade. I also discovered I was autistic, a fact that was, it seems, glaringly obvious to everyone else. I think this gave me an advantage as a parent because I felt no need at all to conform to current societal standards or to accept without challenge the advice of self-proclaimed experts (predominantly childless men with university degrees). There was undoubtedly a lot of overthinking on my part and the inevitable regrets and mistakes but I was reasonably confident that, for the most part, I’d done a fairly good job of raising my daughter. When she was pregnant I reassured her that I would never be offended by her rejecting anything I had chosen to do, and that I was open to talking through anything she found upsetting or confusing. I have made a commitment to never judge her choices as a parent. I resist the desire to offer unsolicited advice. I am completely confident in her ability as a mother, more so than I was in mine.
Recently my daughter became a mother. I watch how joyfully she and her husband have come together as parents and I see my pattern of vigorous research repeated, but she is happier and more capable than I was. Their baby is surrounded by safety and unconditional love. Both parents face the tiredness and challenges of parenting with cheerful resolve and occasional dismay, but the foundation of all of this is a rock solid love and an unbreakable attachment to this tiny human. He will grow up never doubting the great love that surrounds him.
I think this is actually the best possible measure of my success as a parent. My Mum told me when I was a teenager that the job of parents is to do a better job than their own. As a parent, I added, “and to make it as difficult as possible for your own children to improve on your performance.” My parents improved on the past, but some of the trauma was passed on, in spite of their best efforts. Recently I’ve gained a deeper appreciation of how heroic that was. I don’t see deficiency, but incredible bravery. It would have been easier to accept the parenting default they were handed and continue the pattern. Breaking patterns is hard, especially when so much of that pattern is subconscious.
When my daughter was born I finally understood love. Until then it had felt transactional. You gave some and you got some back. If someone didn’t give love back you stopped loving them. Unless they were your parents, because there’s a social obligation to honour them, even if they don’t love you, or don’t show you the love they feel for you. My attachment to my own mother was not well formed, but formed enough for me to love her, and to improve upon past patterns. My daughter’s attachment to me is strong. She knows she is loved. She taught me how to love in return.
When I held my baby daughter for the first time I was overwhelmed by love. I had been in labour for 23 hours and I sat up in bed all night, holding her and staring into her tiny face, in awe of my sudden transformation. I knew that I would always love her, that there was nothing she could ever do to change that. I also feared the power this gave her. What if I failed as a parent and she rejected me? I decided to risk it.
This week my daughter acknowledged that while my own attachment was dubious, that wasn’t the case for her. She’s been studying attachment theory and epigenetics, and feeling strong about her decision to avoid “sleep training” because of the damage it might cause her son. I tell her son that he has the best Mumma in the whole world and my daughter says, “Well, second best!”. It takes me a beat to realise she is paying me a compliment.
We have good conversations about attachment, and epigenetics, and parenting, and how babies co-regulate their emotions with those that care for them because their pre-frontal cortex isn’t fully formed yet. I visit every week to play with the baby, help with housework and to watch her navigate the challenges of parenting. I am in awe of her. She is really, REALLY good at this!
In between we catch up on messenger and send each other links to good articles. We muse endlessly on what good parenting really looks like. Last week, she sent me this:
“…it also struck me as being pretty amazing that you raised me with very high nurture despite not necessarily having that for yourself …. you definitely managed to change that epigenetic pattern….”
I cried. I realised that some anxious part of me had doubted my ability to break a generational pattern. The clouds inside me blew away and the sun came up. Something clicked, something opened. Small things can be huge. To the wider world I have achieved many things. I have been professionally, financially and socially successful, but there is no greater achievement in my life than knowing I have broken a generational pattern of trauma.
While my daughter’s life moves into mothering my own mother’s health is declining. She will be 89 this week and it’s becoming hard for her to remember things, like when to take medication and whether or not she’s eaten. It’s sad to see this brilliant woman struggle to remember what she had for breakfast and fascinating to see her recall in great detail events from many years ago. Our fractured attachment has meant that our relationship was not always easy, and that I have often acted out of obligation rather than love. I have tried to be a good daughter. It was harder than being a good mother. Now I’m honouring the enormous effort it must have taken her to raise three children, with eighteen months between each of them.
My daughter notes the similarities between her son and my mother. Perhaps they are both co-regulating: relying upon the emotional state of others to regulate their own emotions. I notice that if I visit Mum and stay bright and cheerful, her anxiety seems to settle and she becomes more lucid. I wonder if my challenge now is to take the lessons in love that my baby daughter taught me and to apply them to my relationship with my Mum. I love her, but I have not loved her unconditionally. Now, as she approaches the end of her life, can I learn to do so?
If the first part of healing epigenetic trauma is to break old patterns when we parent our own children then perhaps giving our parents the love that they didn’t feel as children is what closes the loop. There’s a challenge here, because our parents may have been unkind, deliberately hurtful or abusive and it might be too much to ask, but for those of us whose parents did their (sometimes reluctant) best it seems like important work.
I used to feel frustration at my mother’s inability to commit to treatment for her childhood trauma. It could have made such a difference to her life. She made a number of false starts at therapy and gave up. Now I am in awe of her. She pulled herself out of a pit to become a wonderful teacher, parent and friend. She made beautiful gardens and beautiful art and performed on the stage in amateur theatre. She was the first person in any generation of her family to attend university and she did it part time and externally through Armidale while raising three children. When we were teenagers she completed her Masters Degree. She didn’t heal her trauma but lived a good life in spite of it. Like many trauma survivors, she gave the love to others that she craved for herself.
I love her. I admire her. I recognise that much of what I know about gardening and teaching has its foundations in things my mother taught me.
When I got the message from my daughter it occured to me that parenting might just be the most important job on earth. This is how we evolve. When we make decisions to do the hard work involved in healing our own trauma we also make decisions about not passing it on. I thought about that for a couple of days and decided the second part was the gold at the bottom of the pan. The decision to do the work to heal our own trauma is probably the most important work we can do. It not only heals us, it also heals our relationships with others, including our daughters and our mothers, our sons and our fathers. It changes how we show up in the world and how we interact with others.
This work is hard. If you make any effort at all in that direction I think you deserve recognition for your courage. All progress should be celebrated. At 62 this has been a lifetime of work for me, and I feel like I might actually be getting somewhere, but deciding early on that there was no upper limit to how evolved I might become was the key. I’m always trying to be my best self, and always acknowledging that there’s room for improvement. Progress is more important than perfection.
This journey towards healing trauma seems to be a universal one. It’s rare to meet anyone that hasn’t experienced some form of trauma, although not everyone chooses to acknowledge it or to do the hard work to heal it. Sometimes, as in my Mum’s case, the best you can do is to live with it and be the best person you can in spite of it. In some cases we find ways to heal our trauma. In some cases we make the choice to live with our own trauma and to find ways not to pass it on. Both are worth doing but this second one might just be the single bravest thing that any of us can do.
Does any of this have anything at all to do with permaculture? I think so. I think a lot of the planet-destructive behaviour exhibited by our species has its foundations in trauma-based thinking. Our sense of lack causes us to accumulate more than we need. Our lack of firm attachment causes us to form attachments with pets and objects (like cars, or obsessive collections of things) and our failure to receive the love we needed as children can result in self-gratifying behaviours with no thought for the consequences to anyone or anything else.
So much of our over-consumption is a consequence of aggressive marketing and so much of that marketing leverages trauma: if we can just own that (insert thing here) then we will be happier, more successful, more loveable…. This pattern has escalated with the growth of social media. Those that feel unloved, or inadequately loved, seek validation from strangers in the form of emojis and likes while the dopamine hits and cortisol flooding set people on a tightening sine wave of emotional extremes. Triggering has become leveraged. Leveraging is now called “weaponising”.
Permaculture teaches us that natures patterns occur at different scales, and I wonder if the smaller pattern across the generations of my family would scale to something relevant to our species. What would the planet look like if humans evolved beyond trauma? This feels like a good question.
SMARTER THAN CROWS 