On Remothering

and tending to the site of my wounds.

motherhood self-portrait, 2022.

Each of our childhoods set the tone for the way in which we comprehend and show up in this world. Our experiences — be them emotional/mental, physical, or even spiritual — are largely informed by the way we were raised, based on the information we received from our parents, guardians, primary caretakers, or any constant influence during those formative years of our lives.

Following that thought, I would say that my current state of motherhood has largely been around remothering myself. So much of my mothering right now is about tending to the child within that felt neglected, abandoned, made small, and not afforded space to navigate and feel her emotions.

Hard as they tried with what they knew, my parents weren’t a constant source of emotional safety or support throughout my childhood. More specifically, my relationship with my mom was rough terrain. Though we have a much better connection now, I had been carrying a mother wound for years that went unnoticed and unnamed. Exploring that wound, I believe, is a part of my remothering process.

While I can acknowledge both my parents’ humanness and extend them grace, especially now as a parent myself, I have also established that there are many ways in which I was raised that I don’t want to raise my child. Not having an emotionally available parent is an experience I do not want my son to endure throughout his childhood. I want him to find safety within me.

When I think of the site of the wounds I carry, many of them weren’t directly formed from the specific incident during which they were created, but rather from an occurrence in my childhood that produced a sore spot for that incident (years later) to break skin, to bruise.

So when I think about my son’s childhood, I am met with a responsibility to heal the wounds of my own. First, as a commitment to myself, but then, in order to minimize the sore spots that may become a part of his childhood and in order to set a healthy and loving tone from which he is able to comprehend and show up in the world and navigate his experiences.

Another thought that came up for me is that for the longest time, I thought about remothering as tending to the unmet needs I had as a child in order to give my son those exact things. But as I’m reshaping my understanding around it, I realize that it’s less about giving him the childhood I never got to live and more about making sure his childhood is catered to his individual needs.

In remothering, I am tending to the needs that went unfulfilled when I was a child and in doing so, I am in a more healed capacity to show up as a mother who is attentive to my child and the tools and space that he requires to be his truest self.

Being able to show up in a more healed capacity is one of the importances around remothering. I have to tend to all of my trauma because if I don’t, I’m transferring it to my child, rewounding.

When I say rewounding, I mean the act of passing on the hurt. When we carry a pain point that’s left unattended, it’s easy to fall into the act of rewounding — whether in mothering or in our platonic or intimate relationships — when we haven’t tended to the hurt within ourselves.

I recognize that it is my responsibility to release myself from my wounds in order to show up as a loving and responsible and decent human being and mother. That’s what remothering is to me. If I don’t do the work to heal from my trauma, there’s no way I can expect to really mother in a way that teaches my son to tend to himself, regulate himself, and be responsible and accountable to himself and his needs, and to also strive in this calloused world, despite the hurt he may experience.

I don’t want the site of my unattended wounds to become the source of my child’s wounds. I took this relational trauma background quiz, which really helped me reflect on the needs that went unmet during my childhood and the wounds that were created due to those experiences. Now, as I mother from a more conscious place, I can observe my traumas and ask myself: What is the need that went unmet here? What is the sore point that created grounds for this wound to form? How does it affect how I show up today, especially within how I mother?

I owe it to myself to heal and now, as a mother, I also owe it to my child. And I owe it to my lineage. When we fail to heal ourselves we perhaps fail to heal a thousand generations.

From one mother to another,
Mariah Maddox

---

Reflect with me:

-What does remothering look like to you?
-What sore points were created in your childhood and what incidents were able to break skin because of them?
-Do you come from a relational trauma background? How has it affected how you comprehend the world and show up today?

Extension of gratitude:

A brief moment of gratitude extended to

ẹniafẹ isis

, because her most recent open journaling session around an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory really got me thinking about the site of my wounds and emotional memory. That journaling time is the space from which this essay flowed.

---