Resurfacing from the Depths: Mother Wounds, Dementia, and Death Nesting

I haven’t written anything that I’ve felt like publishing the past couple of months or so. Why? Because my elderly mother suddenly took a turn for the worse and I brought her home with me to keep her safe, well-fed, and as comfortable as possible for an 84-year-old healing from a hip fracture.

I’m not one to beat around the bush or paint rosy stories of half-truths. It’s honestly been one of the hardest and most intense adventures of my life.

I had been asking the universe for another growth experience, and goodness did She deliver! I should have been more specific. 😂

The past two months have seen us beginning to build a death nest (twice now), to pack it away for later because my mother had recovered once again. My mom is keeping us guessing, as she rides the roller coaster of ups followed by deeper downs, with dementia mixed in for some extra intense adventures.

It’s been full of contemplation for me, as I have brought a woman into my home who was my once-abuser but also my loved primal attachment: my mother. 

It’s been tenuous for my children, as they aren’t sure how to interact with a woman who is so unpredictable and erratic (and hasn’t been kind to or very interested in them for most of their lives).

My children have also been my rocks, kept me sane, made me laugh, and have been so incredibly patient. I’m so damn lucky.

I have 6 half-siblings who are quite a bit older than I am and were raised mostly by their father, in a far different way than how I was raised (they were raised with wealth and I was raised by a poor single mother). I’ve been interacting with them more suddenly after years of mostly silence, and that has been its own bizarre, exhausting journey that I’ll be processing for a while.

Lots of Mother Wound contemplations, sitting with my ever-unraveling Good Girl complex, and observing others as they are also doing this work in their own lives and in their own ways, in places near and far from me.

I’ve tried several times to write more poetically about this experience, until I realized I’m just not to that point yet. I’m still in the muck of it, processing as much as I can and stashing the rest away to be processed over the next few years (as all useful grief and wrapping-up-loose-ends experiences tend to go).

I have so many damn thoughts and insights about the ubiquitous Mother Wound that I can’t wait to share. But it feels very forced to do so right now. While I’ve been working on my own wounds for over 20 years, this feels like a new layer of the healing spiral…clawed open and deeper, inviting me into the broader depths of women’s pain for all of human history. 

I’m being initiated into the realm of holding the heaviness of mother-daughter toxicity for the many generations before me. I’m letting it wash over me as a kind of ancestral medicine.

I’m taking deep sighs and inviting it all in, knowing some days will be more light-hearted and hopeful, and other days I won’t be able to wait for the day to be over. (The past couple of weeks have been full of the latter. I’m blessed with friends who will listen to me rant about every detail).

Our nervous systems are grown and then informed by our mothers. The ways in which we see the world begin as our bodies are grown in a sea of amniotic fluid, lying in wait to find out what kind of world we are emerging into. 

Nervous system patterns are then made more concrete by how our mothers held us (or didn’t) in our earliest years, and that informs our whole approach to this world we live in, creating wellbeing or dysfunction - typically both.

We can spend our whole lives avoiding those triggers created during womb and infancy formations, but they will always lie in wait for us to reclaim, hold, and explore...one day (if we so choose).

I’m over here cautiously and slowly pulling open the wounds, witnessing my mother’s no-longer-deeply-hidden and always-loudly-expressed wounds, communing with my maternal line (and the few generations with available stories I can still explore), and seeing as the puzzle pieces float into view and start to click together. Some parts will always be an enigma, and that’s okay.

Being the meta-thinking human that I am, I’m always conjuring a greater view of the red thread of pain that many (if not most) women in our world are woven into. My quiet little nest of contemplation is simply a mirror of the thousands (perhaps millions) of women who are doing the exact same work right now.

I watch my mother’s patterns every day, up close and in detail…and uninhibited, as dementia pulls back the curtains of social convention. I watch her get stuck. Watch her get unstuck for a day. Then watch her dig herself right back into her familiar hole, where she can be a porcupine and keep the danger (and people) out. Rinse and repeat.

I am quietly observing…myself and her. Sometimes I am stomping out my feelings on a 4-mile walk. Occasionally, I get to wander through the woods, touch the trees, and remember that I am made of the dust of the universe.

A decade or so ago, an author was giving some sort of inspiring speech at our university campus, and she said (paraphrased), “Why do we always wait to tell our stories until we’ve triumphed and given everyone a happy ending? Why don’t we tell our stories when we’re in the mess of the middle?”

That thought has stuck with me all these years, as the messy middle is often where I go to explore. It’s why I’m drawn to birth, death, collapse, transformation, liminal spaces, and the things in life that cannot be solved. The loud, the messy, the uncivilized, the hidden, the taboo, the abandoned. I like a good mystery, have made friends with uncertainty, and allow life to flow through and around me without needing to always control everything (this is a conscious daily practice, as I am human and freak out too).

So I’ll be slowly sharing, in ways that feel right and enough for me….

• The mess, the Mother Wound, and absolute shitshow that end-of-life caregiving is in a society that doesn’t value the womanly art of care, and that doesn’t see fit to offer many truly useful resources (and dangles the truly good stuff on carrot sticks leading to places only accessible by the wealthy or stealthy).

• The ways in which family members often dodge responsibility and can’t offer truly useful support, because end-of-life scares them too much and they have too much emotional baggage to be helpful (pro tip: do your healing work while you’re young, people).

• The epidemic of elders who are more like wounded teenagers and less like the wise mentors that humans have evolved to become over a lifetime lived in right relationship with the land, other humans, and all beings.

• The intensity of being on a ride with no clear destination, trajectory, or timeline (and no how-to guide or manual).

• The ways in which end-of-life mirrors birth, and the ways in which it doesn’t.

• The industrialization of birth and the industrialization of death, which both occurred at roughly the same time (I am forever a history/anthropology nerd).

• The ways in which both birth and death have been stolen from The People, and how we can reclaim community and re-village our ways of relating to one another (before our world is even more lost than it is currently).

I’m taking some quiet time away from the chaos of social media, pouring my energy into reading nourishing books, rekindling piano compositions I wrote and recorded 13 years ago, dusting off my fiddle and playing more Irish tunes, taking lots of long walks, and soaking up every moment with my family that I can (including my fluffy dog who is truly my nervous system co-regulation buddy).

I’m trying to navigate this bizarre new adventure with grace, love, strength, and vulnerability. While still being a beautifully flawed human being in the process.

Cheers to being fully awake and alive, showing up for whatever life decides to hand us, and coming out of it with more clarity and wholeness.

I wish growth experiences for you that you’re ready to adventure through, peppered with plenty of rest, good food, and love.

XO,

Sarah

PS …

I highly recommend reading Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel, even if you have/had a pretty good relationship with your mother. The Mother Wound is an epidemic in our society, and we could all do a bit of healing and growing in tending to the mothering we needed that our mothers didn’t have the tools to give us (most mothers don’t have all the tools, even if they love us very much).

In addition, those who work with women absolutely need to understand the Mother Wound, and this book might help those with healthy attachments better understand those with disrupted attachment patterns. Highly recommend.