One Lucky Girl - On Mothers & Sons

Friday, July 18, 2008

I've heard it said before in the black community that "mothers love their sons, they raise their daughters".
Coming from one of the more chauvinistic cultures (West Indies), as a daughter with a brother, I can definitely attest to that.
But I haven't thought about it much until recently when I was romantically involved with a Latino, and re-introduced to this issue which brought up a lot of sadness, anger, resentment for me, among other challenging emotions about mothers and sons.

It started when I began to think about the disparity between how he prioritized spending time with his son as opposed to his two daughters. Granted, there were extenuating circumstances, but still I couldn't help but know with a certain sense of certainty that he would make much more of an effort to correct those circumstances had the children's genders been the other way around.

There was another major trigger for me about the very different way I perceive and experience that my mother treated and still treats me and my sister (with a mother's love and civility, but not much favor), and the way she continues to treat my brother (with unending patience, generosity, and preference). My ex-boyfriend's relationship with his own mother. They are very close. He made it a point to call her several times a week, spoke of her with total adoration and no resistance. He rarely ever talked about his daughters at all, but talked about his son.

This isn't about the mother-son relationship dynamic in cultures of color, it's about patriarchy and the favoring of the boy over the girl. This is why my ex had a father-son relationship that I envied, even thought it wasn't a "mother-son" one.

When I was four years old, my mother taught me how to use a sponge. I knew, because I was trained, very early on to clean and cook. What I hated the most was not only that my brother wasn't taught these same lessons at all, but that I, and later on my sister, were instructed to clean up after my brother. Routinely on Sunday afternoons, after church when my mother would make dinner (I was responsible for dinner on weeknights), my sister and I would set the table, and call my father and brother to the table. After the family was done eating, guess who did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen afterwards? You guessed it, the "girls". And guess who went up to his office to watch 3 o'clock international soccer? My father, as my brother went on to do whatever the heck he was doing those days.

My sister and I were never allowed to go to sleepovers because "girls can get pregnant", but my brother could because he didn't have a uterus.(The double standard that he and other boys were the ones impregnating the girls (so why were THEY allowed to go out?) didn't occur to me until many years later.)

In my late teens, my mother took us three out for clothes shopping once. We came across some nifty faded denim overalls that my sister and I coveted. We begged my mother to let us have a pair, but she refused and tried instead to get them for my brother who wasn't even really interested. That, I don't think was so much her favoring him because he was a boy, but resisting getting for us an unfeminine item such as "Farmer Bob"-type gear.

Living in "El Barrio" ("the neighborhood" in East/Spanish Harlem NYC), I get to see lots of mother-son dynamics at play. I very rarely see mothers coddle their daughters as they do their sons.

Just today I read a quote from actress Salma Hayek about her daughter and how she had originally wished for a boy instead of a girl, because, "there is always conflict between mother and daughters" (Glamour Magazine).

Other than the conflicts that come from a dysfunctional family, I don't think I or my sister had an unusual amount of conflict with my mother, but there was certainly less of it between my brother and her.

This issue of mothers and sons and their favored relationship (in patriarchy and families/communities of color - not that I can speak so much for Asian/Pacific Islander/Native cultures), goes very deep and even affects spirituality. For starters, I think how we relate to our parents affects how we later related to this so-called "God" we are trained from a very early age to believe in, obey, and fear.

Having always had deep strife with my own father, I have had a lifelong resistance to comply with organized religion or christianity (I'll capitalize that word as soon as "paganism" is capitalized) as well.

My ex-boyfriend, on the other hand, was not only into christ/ianity, or "the christendom" as he called it, but actually at one point joined a very strict fundamentalist catholic cult. Meanwhile, at the same stage of the mid-adult years of my spiritual experience, development, and identity, I was studying mysticism, the Tao, Zen Buddhism, and Wicca. Don't get me wrong, I dug Christ, but only because he did some pretty awesome things.

In my mid 20s, I noticed and told my Dominant boyfriend at the time, a distinct correlation between how I was feeling about my father that particular time, and how I felt about God. When I was angry with my father, I was an agnostic, pentacle-wearing "witch". This also affected my relationships with men and how trusting, healthy, or intimate, I could be with them. And when I was at peace with my father, I suddenly began exploring the idea and a renewed relationship with God.

There have been times in my life when I have felt a deep need to surrender and come back to God, men, the whole frikkin' she-bang. But then I also remind myself that I always have a relationship with God, even if I'm "just" calling it "the Universe", "Source", "the Flow", "the Light", "Oneness", or something else.

I think my often strained relationship with my mother affected my concept of, identifying, and relationship with femaleness.
I have a hard time with the idea of "Goddess(es)" and no more accepted the concept of "maiden, mother, crone" in the Dianic Wicca I was studying than I could in the "father, son, and holy spirit/ghost" that I was indoctrinated with from birth.
It is work that I do now to awaken in myself the divine feminine, so that I can empower all that I am, and I envy somewhat my ex that he had and continues to have such a strong and loving, accepting relationship with his mother that he easily and predominantly sees his God as female, even though he's also macho in many ways, and from one of the most macho cultures to be found.

I wish Black and Latina mothers were as sweet, generous, and affectionate with their daughters as they are to their sons, but I recognize that the solution to feel better about how I grew up isn't to indulge these negative feelings and memories, but to both find instances that dispute my claim, as there are, I'm sure many (I've found pictures of my mother hugging me when I was a toddler that warmed my heart and brought back previously lost memories), and most importantly, to give myself the same sweetness, generosity, and affection I am claiming to not have received, or at least, in amounts equal to that which my brother was given by our mother.

Only in loving myself to the degree I wish I had been loved can I make significant process in healing and resolving this issue for myself.


All best,

Cassendre Xavier a.k.a. Amethyste Rah
renaissance negresse
www.cassEndrExavier.com