Week 6: Christina Lukban

Week 6

In the reading My Mother Not My Mother by Professor Valverde, we discuss this week's theme of giving life and life giving through our own professor's experiences and relationship with her mother. Through this reading I thought a lot about how powerful a mother-daughter bond truly is. Whether it be because of our ideas of a societal/family norm, a scientific psychological/biological bond, or a spiritual bond, mother's hold such high responsibilities and expectations in fulfilling their duties of ideally taking care of their child. As a child, it is often difficult to view your mother as just another human being. At the end of the day, mothers are just people too with their own history and struggles but it's hard to feel this and completely understand the sacrifices they've made and decisions revolving around their child's life while also pursuing their own lives. It's very hard for mothers to balance this and also difficult for a child that only longs for a mother's love. In Professor Valverde's story, her feelings of abandonment, pain, and being unwanted was all she really associated with her mother from not being there a part of the beginning of her life, but she still truly desired having her mother's presence and that type of love despite already being cared for very well by her grandparents. 

What Professor Valverde's mother went through and what she went through herself as a child is beyond anything I feel that I could ever deal with. Professor Valverde states "I feel for my mother when I hear this story and many more stories expressing her love for me. They are often murky when compared side-by-side with my own experiences with my mother" (pg. 360). Putting myself in Professor Valverde's situation, her mother's situation, and even thinking about my own mother's situation, the mother-daughter relationship is extremely complex. I have very strong beliefs of "everything is meant to be" regarding to all our experiences, struggles we go through, decisions, and people in our lives, including our mothers. I believe our mothers are our mothers for a reason in shaping who we are but that doesn't necessarily mean that when they became mothers, they were meant to fit in this specific role for their child's life. 

But my question is, what really makes this mother-daughter bond so strong and desirable? Why is the longing for a mother's love in children so powerful? Is it because of our ideas of a societal/family norm, a scientific psychological/biological bond, a spiritual bond? What is it truly?

Image: https://www.readitforward.com/essay/article/7-books-that-explore-mother-daughter-relationships/