Today is Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012. What would you do if you weren’t worried about what your mother might think? I know you may be thinking, ‘I am self-aware! I read Planet Waves and talk about masturbation! I’m not subject to mom-guilt!” And you may be right.
But the thing is – especially in western culture – the inner critic and judge tends to be a holographic version of a parent. For most women, this is ‘mother’, and it has a tendency to masquerade as us, mimicking our voice. Sometimes it pipes up before we even realize we’ve been thinking a ‘threatening’ thought, blending seamlessly into our conception of self.
It takes a lot of work – often with professional help – to be able to catch the hair’s-breadth moment before the inner mom-judge grafts itself onto a glimmer of authentic Self trying to shine out. This is especially true for daughters. The funny thing is, mothers can be just as debilitated by their own insistence on living for their children, and insisting that children live for them, instead of living their own lives.
It’s all over the place – so don’t go thinking you’re the only one with a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Eric says he’s still counseling women in their 50s whose mothers are dead not to worry what their mother will think: “I am visualizing the skeleton in the casket in the ground and they are like, oh Mother! I can’t do that, I must get married.” And as I write this, I’m trying to figure out if I’m a selfish daughter if I don’t want to drive my mom to the airport at 4:30 am – on a workday — after sleeping on my lumpy futon in my living room, so that I can work late if I need to and she can go to sleep early, in preparation for her flight to the Bahamas. So she doesn’t have to pay for parking at the airport for 8 days.