Disclaimer: I hope this is not everyone’s experience but the impetus here is to highlight experiences that some women go through. It is always important to promote positivity but it’s equally important to learn and grow from negative experiences. This is a homage to all the mothers who suffered silently.
Last month we all celebrated International Women’s Day. Amidst the positivity and shout outs to our loved ones, my mind kept going to the treatment of women since time immemorial and more specifically for this audience, images of the marginalised mother who goes through so much, sometimes all alone.
Throughout our history, the female gender has been beset by patriarchy, suppression, jealousy and sadly sometimes misogyny fostered by males and other females. For the purposes of this blog, the focus is on mothers who are dealing with children with special needs including those who are neurodiverse.
Once a woman becomes a mother, she confronts a spectrum of emotions and self states: she’s filled with love, service, worry, sometimes placing her ambitions on the back burner, taking care of this person who feels like an extension of her, their pain becomes her pain, and her life is never the same. In this mix, if her child has special needs or other issues, the mothering that is hard enough becomes exponentially more complicated. There is trauma and a niggling grief that is embedded inside. This trauma is compounded if she feels alone and unsupported. To start processing grief and trauma, the pain has to be witnessed, seen, and held. This is where people around her become so important. Viewing this situation from our cultural lens, so many times we see women in our society blamed, berated, ignored, and not given the support they deserve.
Sometimes the lack of support and blame is blatant – the mother is blamed for the diagnosis, for not caring for the child properly, denigrated for being unlucky and bringing this on to the family. But other times the lack of empathy and support is more oblique. Covert messaging, relational and micro aggressions are undertaken to destroy her confidence and keep her subservient and suppressed. The subliminal message is that she should accept her fate, not complain, do all the work, without expectation of praise or reinforcement. Sometimes the mother becomes isolated by a subtle but insidious campaign against her. What a mother needs when her children are young, and especially when her child has special needs, is for people around her to support her, provide her with genuine empathy and support. She needs to be praised and respected; given opportunities for breaks and she needs to be held so that her pain is witnessed and she is able to bring forth her best possible self.
The world around this mother should understand that mothers create a family, they raise the children, they nourish and nurture everyone. If they themselves are not nourished, how can they ever support/ care for/ uplift/ protect their family??? This support is needed when her children are young, when she’s vulnerable, when the work seems to be closing around her. Empathy and recognition has to be in the moment – relationships will never be the same if the mother in her most vulnerable state felt unseen and unheard. Supporting motherhood, especially motherhood for women who have children who struggle – is the way forward, that is the way family systems succeed, blossom and grow. Please don’t just fail these mothers. Love them. Support them. Let International Women’s Day not just be about platitudes and lip service. The betterment of our society depends on it.
