Tell me about your mother…

I had a really unfortunate experience growing up with a mother who was secretly mean to me at home but heaped praise onto me in public. She was and still is very distant emotionally and I don’t really know who her authentic self is. I can only ever remember her talking to people about me as defined by my prizes and achievements. She actually became emotionally abusive in my early teens and would scream in my face for hours and hours on end. I didn’t know it was abuse until nearly a decade later and I think I just used to disassociate and ignore it by day to survive. It affected my emotional and personal development in many ways. I ended contact with her a couple of years ago as she is still way up Denial Creek without a paddle, and it’s too painful to deal with right now…

Anyway, after the recent community post asking how people came to be feminists, I’ve been reflecting on how I think I was drawn to feminism as a way of dealing with my situation.

Firstly, I think I was drawn to feminism to counterbalance the overwhelming reliance I felt towards the men in my life, particularly my father. I was always looking for a male ‘rescuer’ in my first romances, so unsurprisingly they were fairly imbalanced and age-inappropriate relationships and I’m lucky to not have been taken advantage of.

Secondly, when I was first introduced to feminism I remember thinking that perhaps my mum would not have been so awful to me had she been a feminist and been able to articulate her frustration in meeting expectations in the roles of ‘wife’ and ‘working mother’. I do feel really sorry for her as she must have been going through hell inside to act out that way.

Thirdly, I think my vulnerability made me very influenced by the strongest forces in the somewhat patriarchal and conservative (though thankfully not overly religious) community I grew up in. When I left home for more cosmopolitan surrounds during my university years I played up to pretty much all the expectations of young women (cringe). So gendered expectations were instantly familiar to me and easily recognizable when I heard them critiqued in the context of feminism.

What I find interesting is that so many of my feminist friends come from backgrounds with strong mothers or had a strong feminist influence in their lives. I’d love to know how your (good or bad) relationships with your mothers has influenced and defined you as feminists.

… This is my first post at Feministing, though I’ve been an almost daily reader for about 2 years now. It’s great to finally join the community!….