Episode 1: Deconstructing The Mother
Welcome to My Mother’s Trauma, a podcast exploring feelings about families, what to do with what’s passed down to us, and how to break the cycle for more justice and liberation. I am your host, Kim Loliya. Let’s take a moment to breathe.
Welcome to our first episode. I can’t even tell you what a process it’s been and the number of things that have gotten in the way of me sitting down and recording this podcast. Honestly, if I went through everything it would take probably multiple episodes. It’s been absolutely wild. It’s been literally
nine months of labour, full of twists and turns and starts and stops, it’s really just the average creative process, kind of messy and complicated. But what matters after these nine months is that I’m here, we’re here, and I’m so excited and I’m relieved as well, finally.
to get to this place and to be able to share these episodes is a real joy and it’s also really scary, I wanted to name that, it’s not easy but I’m still grateful so thank you for being here, thank you for joining and let’s dive in. The intention for this podcast is to have
a bunch of liberating and liberated conversations about intergenerational trauma, ancestral trauma, family wounding and anything else that intersects with these themes and to do it in a way that gives us permission to honour who we are, to understand who we are more deeply.
and to maybe understand each other as well if we want to and if that feels possible I really want to normalise that family wounding is a really common experience especially within the context of marginalised communities because we don’t really talk about it much and it’s still seen as really taboo so
I wanted to name that out of the gate and welcome those who have lost their families or part of their families whether that’s through estrangement, colonisation, bereavement, immigration, choice or anything else that’s caused a separation. When it comes to family wounds
I don’t believe that all problems can be fixed and actually most of the time it’s really difficult to resolve the wounding because it often depends on other people and the behaviour of other people but what I do believe is possible is that we can all move towards offering ourselves
a tiny bit more compassion, that we can understand each other more deeply and understand our nervous systems so that we’re not triggered as much and that we can make choices about how we live today from that place regardless of what happened yesterday or 15, 20 years ago.
Maybe it’s because I’m a therapist but I’m kind of allergic to these quick fixes that some practitioners offer within the field of trauma, these promises that you’re going to go somewhere, do something and that all your issues will be resolved after a retreat, after a workshop, after a session,
And I’ve seen so many people get hurt chasing these quick fixes and then rebounding really deeply back into their old patterns after the session, the workshop, the retreat, whatever. And that in and of itself has been traumatic and they felt re-traumatised in addition to the original trauma.
So we’re now dealing with multiple layers of trauma and with old symptoms and old patterns that come back up as well because it feels so unsafe, so instead of doing that I’d like to offer for our space the intention of moving at the pace of our nervous systems and that space to also
give ourselves time to move forward, time to move back, move sideways, time to rest, to try things out, to fail, to get distracted and to do life messily as well, imperfectly. That’s what it means to be human and trauma work doesn’t happen in a vacuum and
Most people can’t take a year off to do an Eat Pray Love trip and most people still need to keep their jobs, they need to support their families, they need to support friends, partners, support organizing efforts, community efforts, it just wouldn’t be feasible
that our lives just stop because we’re doing trauma work or because we’re unraveling or processing strands of intergenerational wounding or issues. So I’d like to propose that we do this work alongside our lives and in a way that isn’t so intense that we need to put our lives on hold or
in a way where we can’t function or can’t go to work. That seems like a really distressing place and I don’t really think that that’s a place where we can heal in inverted commas or grow. So let’s imagine feeding this work into our lives almost kind of like a tapestry
where we have our day-to-day life and we have this work happening alongside it and the two are kind of interwoven and coexisting and interdependent and symbiotic I hope that makes sense and I hope that it’s a useful frame for working with trauma so let’s start from the beginning this is episode one
I wanted to start from the top and for those who know me, I guess you probably know that I love defining things, I love language and the kind of meaning that words have and the meaning, the deeper meaning that is encased by words as well. Of course, this podcast is called My Mother’s Trauma.
So before we go any further, I wanted to at least try to define mother as a label and as an identity. It might sound obvious and you might be thinking why, why is this? Why are we here? But actually, the more I thought about it, the more confused I got. And I got to this place where
I literally sat down and asked myself who is a mother? Beyond the dictionary definitions, who is this person that we call a mother? Who gets to claim that identity and who doesn’t? And who decides? So who’s policing this term?
and who isn’t or what is policing this term. So I thought I would consult the modern day Oracle that is Google and I found a word association website which I’ll link to in the show notes in case you’re interested. This site basically has a software that uses literature
to offer words that we collectively associate with other words. So I searched for mother and 38 associated words came up and it was a really interesting list so I’m going to highlight a few themes but if you’re curious to see every single word feel free to go on the website and have a look.
The first theme was around mother being associated with reproductive functions. So the first word that came up was surrogate and there were 10 other words that were all about reproduction like womb, fetus, birth, childbirth, offspring, etc.
And then I noticed in the list that there were quite a few character traits that are associated with the word mother like confessor, tenderness and nourishment and then I noticed some possibly unrealistic associations with the identity of mother like empress, goddess, Gaia
and Devi which is goddess in Sanskrit but it also means heavenly, divine and anything of excellence but then I also noticed the word alcoholic so overall we have this weird mix of associations when it comes to how we understand motherhood and that pretty much
sums up how confused we are in society and how that label carries so many expectations and so much praise and so much judgment and assumptions and how everything is really wrapped up within that term so in a way it’s quite a loaded label and a lot of people who have claimed it
who do identify as mothers talk about that, they talk about the pressure of what it means to be a mother within our society. Not all mothers can or want to be self-sacrificing, self-denying, pure in inverted commas, endlessly giving, or these Madonna-like figures.
who are perfect all the time. It’s just not realistic. And we need to find a different way of talking about motherhood that isn’t alienating for folks who want this term and that doesn’t involve placing our mothers on a pedestal with a bunch of expectations that they will never
realistically be able to meet and if our current language doesn’t support this work because it doesn’t offer nuance to describe motherhood then we can always create new words, new phrases and new ways of talking about what it means to be a mother and sadly it’s not just about the words that we use.
The imagery and iconography around motherhood is also problematic. In an article by Marjorie H. Morgan called ‘Other’ Mothers: Motherhood and the African Diaspora, the author says it has been proven that human civilization started in the African continent, yet
Despite this, most canonical art images of mothers depict white women in a saintly, nurturing role, and positive images of Black motherhood are generally obscured.
Black mothers were traditionally viewed as others and not quite human. You can find the article in the episode notes if you’re interested. So there’s quite a lot to unpack here about the role of white body supremacy in policing who dominates this image of motherhood and this idea that motherhood is white
thin, blonde and inherently feminine and I’ll talk about this some more in future episodes but it felt important to bring it in as we talk about definitions because often we use these words in a way where we think that we’re all talking about the same thing or the same person but actually we’re not
Moving into another systemic dimension when it comes to gender not everyone who claims the identity of mother also identifies as a cis woman some mothers are trans non-binary or genderqueer some mothers are cis but they haven’t given birth either because they don’t want to carry a baby or it’s not possible
due to mental health, chronic illness, infertility or millions of other reasons. Some mothers embrace and celebrate femininity while others feel that it’s uncomfortable. They reject it entirely or want to use a completely different lens from which to think about their parenting.
Some mothers aren’t mothers at all and that’s really common especially in the diaspora and countries in the global south. Some people were raised by their grandmother who was like a mother to them. Some people had aunts who stepped in and mothered them when their mother was busy or at work or looking after other children.
Some people were mothered by family friends or by people they admired, whether that person knew that they were mothering or not. I felt mothered by people like Harriet Tubman who embody a fierce and nurturing energy as well as so many other qualities that I really admire and we’ve also got blended families.
step parents, adopters and foster parents and folks who have stepped into that role and as with biological parenting and biological mothers sometimes children feel huge love, care and support within their blended family or adoptive family.
and sometimes they experience harm, neglect and sometimes a mixture. Motherhood is complicated and imperfect most of the time and trauma is an inherent aspect of being a mother whether that’s birth trauma, ancestral trauma,
environmental or systemic trauma. It’s really not possible to exist as a mother completely trauma free because the world isn’t trauma free. When we talk about the trauma of our mothers we’re not just talking about their immediate lived experience, it’s really about
the wider community and all the systems that press, that stress and that create undue pressure for mothers. Mothers aren’t traumatized in isolation. They also experience capitalism, racism, sexism, colorism and shadism, ableism and so much more.
I’m not going to suggest that we have to forgive harmful mothers because not everyone wants to do that or is even ready to do that but sometimes placing some of these behaviors within a wider context can help make sense of them while we grieve the harm that these behaviors have done to us.
Regardless of whether we want to be a parent or not or whether we end up being one through the traditional sense of the word, we can be a parent for ourselves, for our inner children, our inner critic, our scared and vulnerable parts. We can parent ourselves the way that we’ve always wanted to be parented.
and it will probably not be the same as receiving that parenting from an actual parent but it might still be really healing and really reparative so if you don’t have children and maybe you’re struggling to relate to this idea of being a parent, being a mother, have a thing
about whether you’ve ever nurtured a project at work, listened and guided a friend through a difficult time, babysat a neighbor’s kids, these are all mothering and parenting skills in action and whether you claim that label or not is completely up to you, feel free to pick it up and drop it
anytime you like, reject it entirely if that’s what you want to do or you can use it in certain contexts and not others and that’s the freedom with language is to only use these words if they help and substitute them when you need to and I really invite you to do that with this podcast
I may use some words that you can relate to or I may use some words that aren’t exactly a good fit for you and that’s okay, feel free to let them go. And the other big word that I haven’t talked about much so far is trauma. I won’t be talking about trauma in a lot of gory detail because
that’s just not who I am and I don’t believe it’s safe practice. There’s plenty of trauma porn out there and I don’t feel the need to add to it but I’m probably going to refer to quite a lot of systemic trauma and oppression because that’s really the lens that I’m using to look at intergenerational trauma.
Occasionally I might refer to some incidents of interpersonal trauma, but I’ll try to keep those general and brief.
Please move through these episodes with as much care as you can giving yourself plenty of permission to stop, pause and completely park this podcast if that’s what you want or need to do. Sometimes things just aren’t right or sometimes it’s just not the right time. Well,
That’s brought me to the end of episode one, time flies when you’re talking about trauma. Thank you so much for listening in and for adding your energy to this collective birth of this creative baby. It really does take a village as they say and I so appreciate you being here.
Thoughts and feedback are welcome and my contact details are in the show notes. Thanks again and I wish you a soft and spacious rest of your day or night. Take care.
If you’d like to learn more about intergenerational trauma, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive ways to heal, check out blackpsychotherapy.org. We offer classes, programs and talking therapy for individuals, couples and groups. If you’d like journal prompts, decolonial musings and special discounts,
You can sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes, where you can also find a link to submit a question for me to answer in a future episode. I super look forward to connecting with you again and take care.
