Leslie D. (Week 6) Mothering the Sense of Self

Professor Valverde’s creative non-fiction piece My Mother Not My Mother influenced me to reexamine how knowledge about valuing the self and taking care of the self (as forms of giving life and life-giving forces that can sustain the daughter) transfers from the mother to the daughter. In a healthy mother-daughter relationship, the mother teaches her daughter how to care for her own body, mind, and spirit as integrated systems of upholding one’s health. For instance, an example of knowledge that protects one’s health is traditional postpartum practices that combine “Buddhism and animism,” natural elements as life-giving forces, and folk medicine” (Ekter, 1.) In the context of the mother-daughter relationship, the framework of rural Thai women’s traditional postpartum practices pressures us to understand childbirth as an naturally, incredibly exhausting experience that throws the mother's’ body (such as her “mind-heart and energy”) off balance with the universe (Ekter, 1.)

At the same time, the maternal teacher (the mother of mothers) can also train the daughter to recognize traditional postnatal practices that cause intergenerational harm, such as antibiotics abuse, chemical reactions from seemingly natural substances that injure the newborn’s skin, and swaddling’s correlation to hip dislocation in newborns. An ideal mother-daughter relationship is also where the mother passes down her observations of post-natal care techniques and their true effects on newborn baby’s bodies to her daughter and future generations, which leads to improves of these traditional practices rather than the complete elimination of them by orientalist researchers and outsiders of rural cultures (Abuidhall, 285-286.) After all, why should “orientalist outsiders” and even “orientalist orientals” have the complete authority and decision to unilaterally eliminate certain practices without the mother’s consultation and letting the mother make the final decision? (As a side note, Professor Valverde has coined the term “oriental orientalist.”)

After thinking through on the concept of “mothering” and the roles of the ideal mother, I could finally pinpoint why the last sentence of My Mother Not My Mother “Then I died” stood out to me the most (Valverde, 362); the ideal mother also helps her daughter recognize the red flags of toxic behavioral patterns from other people (such as co-workers who seem genuine and helpful in the beginning but secretly elaborately plan their colleague’s failures), supports her daughter in political dire times, and teaches her how to diplomatically defend herself while protecting her health from self-destructive reactions to stress. Yet, when there is a lack of communication and mutual respect between the mother and the daughter, cultural practices that protect one’s health and self-defense techniques dissolve and become lost in social conflicts, neglect, and parental bullying against the child.

The transfer of knowledge between the mother and the daughter that teaches the daughter to value the self becomes disrupted. Referring to my own personal experiences with my mother, I argue that the dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship can also psychologically condition the daughter to devalue her health from childhood and self-worth, thus intensifying the daughter’s self-destructive patterns and making her feel “crazy” for exposing the mother’s irrational, toxic parenting to law enforcement and social workers. If unresolved and left to worsen, these experiences can throw the elements within the daughter’s body off balance and out of tune with the universe.

Questions
Therefore, my questions are: what are the traditional, spiritual practices that have helped the daughter heal from abusive relationships with her mother? What cultures have uphold these practices for hundreds of years, and how does the daughter seek refuge from toxic relationships with their mothers in these cultures? Within these cultures, what evidence and documents can activate laws and legal protection that defends the child from verbal abuse from their parents and removes them from toxic household environments?