When I was a little girl I used to fantasize about spending time alone with my mother. The pang of the emotional distance between us cut like a hot dagger. I yearned for her touch me to help make me feel real. But instead I felt pushed to the side, which made me feel wrong.
I was too young to realize that my mothers insufficient bonding with her own mother, was the root cause of her inability to mother me. Adding insult to injury, the sudden death of her beloved father while pregnant with me, only compounded the sorrow my already overburdened young teenage mother carried. It could have been no other way. How could have my mother been able to 'see' me? My mother had not yet discovered her own Self.
By the time I was seven, fantasy was pretty much a norm for me. It was how I survived feeling 'not real'. Escaping into a world my mind created, that I could manipulate and create was how I escaped reality when my reality became too painful.
I since understand that the emotions of alienation I experienced as a child were the result of feeling psychologically invisible. What I and what every new soul needs as a child is a sense of worthiness that is mirrored back to them through the eyes of caretakers. It is essential to a child's emotional development to have acceptance, validation, forgiveness, and unconditional love be reflected back into them so that they can adopt those feelings unto themselves.
When this does not occur, a child does not develop emotionally as fully as it should. When a child does not believe she/he is loved, the child grows feeling foreign to his/her own world. The child feels alien even unto his/her own self. It is a feeling of detachment that leaves the mind feeling fragile and assuming it is unworthy of love.
I did not 'feel' loved. Intellectually I assumed I was because my house was clean, we always had wonderful meals on the table, and my parents kept a nice home. But there was always a sense in my that I was not good, not good enough, and worse not real.
I see now that because a healthy sense of Self was not mirrored back to me, I could not connect to my own soul. Growing up in a home void of emotion, kept me yearning instead of becoming. Disconnected from her own Self, my mother could never have known what it was she was not giving me.
