Mother’s Day’ for many, is not a happy time and is for more than we would like to think, a deeply traumatising time. Perversely, I would love to turn the front of Estella’s book ( see image below) into a Mother’s Day Card. It would not sell. Such a card would challenge the massive investment which goes into maintaining the saintly Madonna archetype of ‘mother’. Try challenging this and you soon discover just how heavily defended the associated beliefs are. For those who have endured and traumatised by a monstrous mother, society seldom offers a reference point.
There are those on ‘Mother’s Day’ that cannot take resource in denial. There are those each ‘Mother’s Day’ who know from witnessed or actual experience that mothers do sexually and physically abuse, that mothers do torture and murder their children and that mothers can inflict over many years sadistic emotional and psychological abuse. The number of mothers convicted of such crimes is not as insignificant as is often argued, but since when did minimal numbers lessen the lived experience of even just one victim.
Denial for the victims of a mother’s crimes is always a double trauma with its own particular symptoms and destructive impact on life. For mothers who have committed crimes against their children, then the denial that surrounds their existence is nearly always a triple trauma; the unhealed trauma that has informed their own harming behaviour, the trauma of what they have done and the trauma of themselves not having a reference point. During the years I worked in HMP Holloway, I met many mothers caught in this immensely painful trinity.
Remaining wedded to the saintly image of motherhood, even on ‘Mother’s Day’ serves no one well.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
