Excerpt from
To Be A Woman

Remothering Ourselves

The Mother World is that realm of life that contains women and the Feminine. For women, this includes our personal mothers, daughters, and sisters, and perhaps today we might add our collective sense of sisterhood with all women. At another level, this realm contains the Mother archetype, in her positive (nurturing, sustaining, loving) aspect and her negative (seductive, devouring, destroying) aspect. The Great Mother archetype also appears as our bodily source, the earth, and as our spiritual source, the Divine Goddess.

(For men, the Mother World also includes wives and the anima, or the unconscious feminine element in the male psyche, sometimes referred to as soul.)

For women, the Mother World is the world of origin, the source of knowledge about our identities, our bodies, our futures. In an earlier era of depth psychology, Erich Neumann wrote that all egos were masculine by nature, while the unconscious was considered feminine. Today it is widely accepted that women's egos are feminine, a legacy of our mothers.

For this reason, sorting through our relationships with our mothers (both the living person and the images we have gathered up over the years) is a primary step toward creating our own distinct and independent identities as women. We can begin by trying to make conscious those aspects of ourselves that we have absorbed unknowingly from our mothers. These may include creative and useful traits, such as an artistic sense or a love of business, wilderness, or children. They may also include our mother's "shadow" qualities, excess baggage we would be better off without, such as dependence on men, substance addiction, or a deep sense of insecurity. We need to become aware of those disliked and rejected qualities in her that we have struggled to disown, which may have entered us unconsciously, because they probably continue to influence us below the boundaries of awareness.

These are the first steps in re-mothering ourselves, separating out our own identities as distinct from our mothers and from the archetype. Only then can we provide ourselves as adults with those essential qualities, which we may have missed as children, that will nourish and sustain our growth. In this way we can learn to honor the legacies of the Mother World, choosing those we wish to inherit. Kathie Carlson put it this way in her book In Her Image:

By turning toward our inner mothers instead of trying to rid ourselves of their unwanted tenancy within us, it is as if we put our mothers into a different context, into the wholeness of ourselves. In this way, we become their matrix, in a sense, we become pregnant with our mothers and carry the possibility of their transformation and rebirth within ourselves.

There are as many ways of re-mothering as there are individual women. No formula fits all. We can try to find a nurturing and creative relationship with a surrogate mother, such as a friend, mentor, grandmother, or psychotherapist; we can join groups of women initiating and guiding other women in awakening the Conscious Feminine; and we can use writing, painting, and active imagination to express the latent parts of ourselves, to speak in the voices that ordinarily are silenced.

Some of us can develop a more conscious, revitalized relationship with our real mothers. This has the greatest chance of taking place after a certain amount of inner work has been accomplished, after strong feelings of anger and blame have been released.

I also believe that our current widespread fascination with deep ecology, and our efforts to reconnect with the earth and our roots in the natural world, are a reflection of a need to realign with the Mother archetype. For some of us, working with the Goddess archetypes also serves this purpose by providing a feminine source that is so much larger than our personal mothers.

In the essays in this section, you will find a rich array of inspiring ideas and practical guidance. As Riane Eisler asked when world culture was detoured from a female-centered one to a male-centered one, Emily Hancock asks when this detour occurs in the identities of individual girls. She proposes that we can reclaim the young girl within us, as she was before she took on the expectations and projections of others, as a way to complete our unfinished business with the past. By nurturing and strengthening that part of the female self, we can mother her back to wholeness.

Nan Hunt explores the nature of the mother/daughter wound in a mutual rejection of each other's essence. She tells stories about how the inherited female bonds of body and instinct are broken. Like Lynda Schmidt and Marion Woodman later in this section, she hints at the complicated relationship between the Mother archetype and the personal mother. And she offers concrete ways of re-mothering ourselves via mentoring with a female friend or therapist.

Lynda W. Schmidt explores her own realignment with her mother after a long stint in the Father World. She introduces us to the useful term father's daughter, which refers to those women who deeply identify with their fathers and lose touch with their female identities. Schmidt also wonders what conscious mothering would be like and how it might grow out of instinctual mothering. Like Nan Hunt, she describes losing her female instincts and turning to male experts to help raise her babies.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky points to our grandmothers as potentially positive sources of feminine modeling. The grandmother has a role in the family as well as a role in the internal world of a woman's psyche. Lowinsky suggests that we need to sort out her influences upon us and upon our mothers in order to uncover the source of our "motherline," the feminine lineage or family tree. Like Linda Schierse Leonard, who suggests in Part 3 of this book that we need to redeem our fathers by appreciating what is valuable in them and separating out what is not, Lowinsky suggests that we need to get realistic images of our mothers and grandmothers, to value their gifts and yet develop the Feminine in our own separate ways.

Marion Woodman's overarching description of the archetypes of mother, virgin, and crone sums up our vision of the Mother World within. For her, re-mothering is a consequence of the difficult work of psychological differentiation and a spiritual awakening that brings wisdom to the soul. She explains how unconscious mothering can give rise to conscious mothering, which awakens the virgin, the symbol of spiritual wholeness that Woodman perceives in people's dreams these days. The birth of the conscious crone follows, the wise one who comes about as a result of a life fully lived and who offers love without strings attached.

Kathleen Riordan Speeth, with painterly words, depicts the Madonna and child, the mother and virgin in a physical and spiritual union. She closes this section with an image that is both awesome and inspiring.

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