photo from the Stewart Falls Trail, Sundance, Utah
I was born in Pennsylvania on a snowy day in March to a 15-year-old mother. I have never stopped to think of how my mother must have felt that day — a child expelling another child from her still-growing body. How scared she must have been. What it must have been like to have only my often-stoic grandmother there for support.
It’s just another instance of wounded, traumatized women raising the next generation of wounded, traumatized women— a cycle that is no one’s fault and everyone’s doing. A cycle where we are all left holding our anger and shame and disappointment with nowhere to lay it down; nowhere but upon the heads of those we tuck in at night, kissing their innocent little crowns, promising to do better and having no idea how.
The mother wound is the circular path in the woods where we begin as children, learning to walk the well-worn trail. We walk confidently, thinking we are forging our own way. But we soon find we have already passed this tree, and that rock, and this is the same root snaking across the path upon which we’ve tripped before — the very same root our mothers tripped upon before us. But we carry on. We birth our own daughters on the circular path in the woods, and lead them confidently in what we think is a different way. But then we find we are pointing out to them this same tree as we pass it again, that same rock, that same snaking root — and we watch as our daughters trip, just as we tripped. We are angry — at them, or at ourselves. We are frustrated that they did not know better, that they did not somehow sidestep the obstacle no one before them was able to sidestep.
Our own mothers die and we lay them to rest in the trees just off the path, and we walk on, renewed in the desire to lead our daughters another way. To not let our end be that end. But around and around we go, heartbroken and soul-weary, wondering if there was ever really a possibility of another way.
What we need is a path where the journey is clear. What if what we are destined for is a way out of the woods altogether — where mothers and daughters congregate in an open field of freedom, where there is no path and every path.