Know When You're Doing More Mothering Than Lovering in Your Relationship!!
In this episode, Kirti and I break down the systemic reasons why this dynamic occurs and how to break out of it.
No ONE PERSON is at fault.. the cycle perpetuates.. but we as one person can come into the awareness and move differently to create the transformation.
A snippet from my newsletter on this topic (subscribe now at NatashaEdwina.com if you like content to elevate your mind/body/spirit health and your relationships!):
Before little girls are even out of diapers themselves, they are handed a baby doll, and are culturally shaped to mother and nurture others.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with becoming a nurturer or mother, as long as long as she is first taught how to take care of herself and prioritize her needs so that she can be a healthy mother.
This is the part that we often skip over.
Perhaps it is because in the original iteration of marriage, women were owned as property and intended to provide a service for her husband to further his prosperity, land ownership, and lineage. This I suppose would be a very basic example of what we mean by a society organized by patriarchal values or perspectives.
It didn't get tons better as women were given more social and financial mobility in the paid workforce. Their expectations to mother and nurture and serve the family remained as they began to also take on traditionally masculine provider roles.
While this was a huge step in allowing women to escape emotional, physical, and sexual violence in their marriages when it was occurring… a version of the same energy vibration of domination, control, ownership in the original versions of marriage…. it often meant that she would now be tasked with running a household solo by splitting her energy between home and work, unless she had the support of her extended family or community.
The 70's and 80's brought the first latch-key generation, and the biggest divorce boom. Again.. this was an important step toward liberation. And yet there is still a price to pay for freedom.
And not only for the exhausted women, the female children who needed to take on adult responsibilities of mother in the home, but also for boys becoming men.
There is a whole generation of men raised by single mothers, with absent or inconsistently present fathers. While these men can often be more emotionally sensitive and aware of the plight of women, they were not always well-prepared to be part of the solution either.
They were often, like the daughters, tugged on by the mothers to step into a fathering or husband type support role too soon, out of sheer necessity, while they were still moving through the stages of child development.
They often had to pay for the sins of their fathers as the only masculine eyes and ears present to see the struggle and pain of their mothers. Or hear the complaints. (As a therapist and single mother myself, who shares 50/50 custody, I can see all sides of this struggle. It's an impossible situation to navigate alone.)
The boys often held their own rage and disgust for their fathers that complicated their developmental process of becoming a man.
They have often also developed complicated relationships with their mothers that included fierce protection of her, yet a deep (and many times unconscious) resentment of her for leaning on him too much and suppressing his development or being overinvolved in his life.
It's often said a man must divorce his mother before marrying his wife.
This is true even in “intact” traditional families. This means he must go through the developmental life cycle stage of placing more importance on his own family and offspring than that of his ancestors. He must show up with personal responsibility for breaking generational curses (intergenerational traumas) while continuing on the healthy cultural and family rituals and practices.
When a man hasn't yet divorced his mother (come into his own developmental sovereignty or individuation), he will be prioritizing taking care of his mother's needs, while simultaneously looking for substitute mothers in his dating partners. Women to care for and feed him, get him out of trouble, help him with his bills, and be an unconditionally loving “soft space” to land.
Some signs there is a parent-child dynamic in your relationship when you begin to lose sexual attraction for your partner, one partner is doing the heavy lifting, and/or you feel like you are always nagging/correcting the other partner or them you.
If you are seeing these things, get into some couples therapy fast!! (Or work with Kirti or I!)
Remember, even with divorce, when you share children you will still always be a family. You get to choose what that family looks like, and how healthy it is.
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Host: Natasha Edwina, M.A., LMFT
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CoHost: Kirti Srivastava
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