My body felt restless, on edge. The anxious cascade began.   

Who am I? 

What is my calling?

Am I doing the right thing?

Questions that send me on a familiar quest.  Trying to understand who I am from an outside source.

Can’t someone just tell me?

Facebook quizzes, personality tests, and podcasts.  Not to mention the money I have spent on numerous coaches, books, intensives, and seminars over the years.

The promise… “Discover who you truly are.” 

We all experience feelings of self-doubt from time to time.  That is perfectly normal.  For me, it seems to run deeper.  It is more than a lack of confidence or taming Gremlins.

It is also healthy to occasionally evaluate where you are in life.  Yet, perhaps more often than others, I find myself accessing if I am doing the right thing.  “Is this what I am supposed to be doing?” “Is this who I am?”  “Is there something else?”

Just this week I found myself thinking, “Robyn, you just haven’t found the right coach.”  I’ll admit that I even did the ‘flip your Bible open and put a finger down’ method hoping for a personal message.  Although I have been blessed often by this method, it rarely has provided guidance to my questions. 

Maybe I need to get my PhD. 

Oh my gosh… What?!?!

I can even start diagnosing myself.  Maybe I have ADHD and just can’t stick with anything long enough. Which by the way is not true, I can be responsible to a fault. But it feels like it might be true in the cascade. 

“Good grief Robyn, stop it!  What is wrong with you?  A woman of your age should already have this down.”

One thing I do know, being harsh only makes matters worse.  There has been a lot going on in my life.  My anxiety was trying to tell me something. 

Can I just get a little guidance please!

And there it was, my answer as to why I have these ongoing questions.

As a daughter, I watched my mother for clues about how to be a woman. 

Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like, and the maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.

― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger

I remember loving to watch her get ready for special occasions with my father.  Leaning on the bathroom counter my little feet balanced tippy-toed on the toilet seat… every sweep of her lipstick tube and tease of her hair filled my hunger.  I watched with giggles at the “girdle grunt,” that would ease her curves into a form fitting dress.  My father’s help with her zipper, feet adorned in heels, and the tilt of her head with every turn in front of the mirror.  All done in precise order. 

I didn’t miss a thing. 

Fingernail polish, makeup, bras, girdles, stockings, dresses, perfume, high heels,  jewelry…  She was beautiful.

And I just knew that the day I got to wear red lipstick would mean I had become a woman. 

Yet, I don’t remember having much guidance from my mother about being a woman… much less a girl.  Maybe she just didn’t have the tools for loving guidance. 

Oh, I had plenty of parental rules designed to control my behavior and how I presented myself/our family to the world.  Even before my mother and stepfather were married, he added psychological control to the mix.  

But control is not guidance.  It only teaches compliance and fear.

In my family of origin story, lack of guidance is compounded by the lack of maternal nurturance and protection.  My mother’s men were abusive – she was too.  So, this isn’t an easy one, two, three fix.  Healing has been a nonlinear fluid process.  There are many layers that I cannot include in this brief post. 

As I grew, I needed someone to nurture, protect, and guide.  Someone to provide healthy affection and tenderness.  Someone to have my back.  Someone to teach me by example how to be gentle and strong, to love others without giving myself away, and to care for my female body. 

It’s way more than red lipstick. 

Over the decades I waited and hoped for my mother to act like a mother.  Even with ample evidence that change was not coming, I held on and put myself to task.  If I said the right thing and did the right thing she would change.  Many years of trying to figure it out myself.  Afraid I was doing it wrong, which was the cause of abandonment, betrayal, and lack of love.

Waiting and hoping helped me survive when young.  It helped me endure the unbearable feelings of maternal abuse – even as an adult.  It also kept me in a heartbreaking cycle of pretending I was okay – when I wasn’t okay.  Sadly, all that pain just oozed out in other relationships.  Avoiding pain never works long term. 

It was life changing when I understood that I did not need my mother’s change or apology to heal.  But it sure would have made things a whole lot easier. 

At times I have reacted to life with the mind of someone much younger and afraid.  This is the legacy of abuse; not something wrong with me.  I need care, not shame.

Attachment injuries are painful.  They can keep us searching many years for a way to fill the ache.  Healing begins when we know and name what we are missing.  For me, it has been the difficult process of uncovering many layers of harm. 

Even as I write I am aware of words my mother spoke over me as a young wife.  “You will be just like me marrying young.  You’ll never finish college and have babies right away.”  There was more said that day about my future state as a woman who married young.  None of it offered the care that I needed.

Hmm… I am curious.  I wonder what agreement with her words  I made that might be affecting the here and now?  Does it have anything to do with my restlessness?  An attempt to find the new thing to prove her wrong?  Maybe…

There’s not a whole lot of support out there for the loss of maternal care and love.  As a culture we expect people to quickly brush off emotional pain.  I experienced loss that has not always been appropriate to openly acknowledge. 

We can’t heal what we don’t know, and if we can’t talk about it, we can’t do much with it.

― Kelly McDaniel

I know I am not alone.

I’ve spent a good bit of time naming and grieving lack of nurturance and protection, while finding ways to reclaim that care.  It’s time to honor the lack of maternal guidance in the same way. 

Because the truth is… even at my age, I still need a trustworthy motherly guide.