Her Mother Love (First Posted May 8, 2011)

As she has been ruminating on the distinct qualities of her various feelings lately, and as today is Mother’s Day and she has just concluded a wonderful conversation with her son to honour this fact, she finds herself thinking about the specific feeling of love she has for her son.

Although this may sound odd (or even "un-feeling") the quality of love she has for her son is more "whole-heartedly dispassionate" than "whole-heartedly passionate" in nature.  Why would this be so?

Or, more specifically:

Why would this child (who was born into her sole care and keeping and who would remain there for the first 8 years of his life) inspire her "dispassionate" love (i.e. emotionally cooler to create and maintain some emotional distance) rather than her "passionate" love (i.e. emotionally hotter to fuse emotions together)?

Well, keeping in mind that her (at first instinctive and eventually conscious) goal was to raise a free thinking, free standing child who would eventually feel completely free to leave her and to freely pursue his life on his own terms, it's obvious the love he felt from her had to be of a quality that supported this outcome.

So:

1.  Paradoxically, she understood that for him to live free in the ways ascribed above she would have to discipline him (so he would eventually learn to be self-disciplined and so able to focus his energy on achieving himself and that which his 'self' needs from life).  In her opinion, discipline is meted out by a cool head not a hot one.  A hot head is much more inclined to dish out punishment which is fear's henchman, not love's.

2.  Not having a father's masculine (bolstering) influence to offset her own feminine (nurturing) influence for the first eight years of his development she felt she had to be especially careful not to pull her son too far under her feminine, emotional sway (the 'cheatin' side' of which fosters guilt and dependency in order to keep a child close and, therefore, "safe").

3.  In order to be a truthful mirror in which he could encounter his most truthful reflection she, in turn, could not allow herself to be brought too far under his sway.  For the sake of his development as a man, and more importantly as a human being, he could not afford to have her adore him unquestioningly.

Maybe, when she boils it all down, it has always been that in order to give her son the very Truth of who she is as a Mother - so as to provide him with a firm foundation upon which to build himself to the best of his ability - it required (and still requires) her feeling of love for him to be dispassionate because it is in the coolness of the moment, as opposed to in the heat of the moment, that she is able to connect with her best instincts and wisdom as a mother.

Hmmmm.  Okay, then.

Happy Mother's Day.