Grieving my Mother’s Unlived Life
By: Rosjke Hasseldine
Tags: Gender Equality, Mothers, Feminism, Mothers And Daughters, Golden Globes

I wrote this blog about 2 years ago and it is extremely relevant after Glenn Close’s Golden Globe acceptance speech for her role in “The Wife”.

We need to understand how our mothers lost their dreams and identity in their role as wife and mother, and how harmful this loss is, both to women themselves and society.

The truth is — Mothers are People First. This is one of the main solutions of the Mother-Daughter Coaching Model.

It was the first anniversary of my mother’s death recently and I found myself reflecting on her life and grieving for the life she never got to live. My mother, like many women of her generation, did not get to be the person she dreamed of being when she was a young girl. I know that she wanted to travel as an archeologist and uncover clues about how people used to live centuries ago. Instead she became a teacher because that is what the women in my family were. And when she married she stopped teaching and spent the rest of her life caring for her family.

Though there is essentially nothing wrong with caring for your family, I know that the traditional role of selfless, self-sacrificing mother did not fit my mother very well. It made her feel guilty if on a rare occasion she took time out for herself to read a book or paint a picture. And I know that deep down she resented the lack of rights and visibility she had as her own person.

My mother’s identity was defined by what I call “The Culture of Female Service”, which is a catch-all phrase for all the ways mothers in particular are denied their voice, their needs, and their identity as people. My mother had internalized this belief system and she had inherited her mother’s belief that as a mother you are supposed to be self-denying and self-sacrificing. And I know through my work listening to women from around the world that I am not alone grieving my mother’s unlived life. Countless daughters grieve their mothers’ unlived lives, including how their mother never got to feel fully loved or emotionally supported. There is an ocean full of grief being hidden away that tells the story of the harm gender inequality has done to women and their potential to shape the future.

In my mother’s day there wasn’t the call for women’s leadership as there is today. And I cannot help but wonder how different my mother’s life would have been, and how different our world would be today if the women in my mother’s and grandmother’s generation had been given the human right to be people first and an equal voice in the choices their community and society made. Would we have had all the wars we have had to fight? Would the economic depressions have even happened or would they have been different? Would the environment be in better shape? Would the Arab Spring have been necessary? Would there be an epidemic of sexual assault in American universities and society? And what about ISIS and today’s terror threat, what difference would my mother’s and grandmother’s generation have made that would have created a much safer society today?

I think that it is fair to say that we have the world today because our mothers and grandmothers had little say in how it was shaped, and today’s call for women’s leadership is essential in creating a fair, humane, and safe world. And I also know that had my mother been allowed to live her life on her terms, my relationship with her would have been much easier. I would not have had to meet her unmet needs and provide the emotional support she wasn’t given by her husband, family, and wider community. And she would not have secretly harbored jealousy about my freedom to claim my dreams and realize my potential.

I see this dynamic over and over again between mothers and daughters today. Our mothers’ unlived lives create conflict, jealousy, and emotional disconnection between mothers and daughters — as daughters remind their mothers of the dreams that they have had to forget. And this is exacerbated when a mother’s grief and a daughter’s grief about the mother’s unlived life is not voiced and given the healing balm of understanding and empathy. And when mothers hide their jealousy about their daughters’ freedom away in silent shame because society does not want to listen to or acknowledge the harm it has inflicted on its female population.

Reprinted with permission from Huffington Post