Mother Nurture: Emily’s Ode to Suzanne
Suzanne, Summer 2018
This blog post was written by Emily Ziegler, Architecture of Humanity social media manager, photographer, videographer and marketing and communications director.
We discuss mother-daughter relationships often within our Sisters of the Forest women’s groups. In our focus on integrating experience, trauma and truth into our lives, we cannot ignore these sacred relationships that inform some of our most crucial experiences. Mothers are our portals into this world. We are released from the sacred darkness of the womb, through the shadow and into the light, and feel the skin-to-skin contact of our mothers to provide safety. Hearing the heartbeat of the mother, smelling her skin, is the only familiarity that we have when we enter the Earthly realm. We are raised to the breast and fed as babies, and as we grow into young women, our mothers lead us through the shifts and changes that come with things like our first menstrual cycles. We become women in a physical sense, something that, eventually, we will witness our own daughters experience. Something that each woman has experienced for generations before.
Our unique biological experiences have informed our perception, our spiritual and psychical growth for millennia. You can see this carried throughout every culture, in every corner of the globe. Our legends and folklore carry the traditions of women whose fundamental experience is no different than ours. We contain within us millennia upon millennia of generational female experience, holding onto knowledge that is passed down from woman to woman as she births a daughter into the world. Each woman has both given and taken from this world, leaving a part of themselves and taking a part of us as they leave. Why is this? Women have always lived in community with each other. These communities were neither matriarchal nor patriarchal, but interdependent. In tribal societies, female bonding and community were paramount to the success of the tribe. If a woman was pregnant, her birth experience was not solitary, but surrounded by the women of her tribe, whose support was key to a healthy mother and baby. When one mother grew too tired, another would act as a nanny for her child. It was this interdependence between women that created a healthy community and stronger bonds of sisterhood between each generation. Until it was their own turn to have children, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, aunts and nieces, were in each others’ company with a healthy consistency, learning and growing among each other, passing down knowledge and experience, trauma and darkness, myth and folklore from one generation to the next. They bore witness to each other, provided sacred space for growth and nourishment both physical and spiritual, and carried each other through the proverbial forest.
How does this tie into our lives today? As we have moved away from the pastoral lifestyles and into an industrial age, the connection between mother and daughter has grown thinner, more veiled. Critically, we find ourselves more isolated than ever. We don’t have the means to foster this sense of community that our ancestors thrived in. So, how do we navigate a world that no longer equips us to form these bonds? I find myself in a unique situation when it comes to sourcing these bonds, to doing this work.
I grew up incredibly close with my sisters and mother. While not without its faults, I’d classify my childhood as idyllic. I was raised in the rolling English countryside, and moved to America when I was eleven. My mother was a Cambridge-educated forensic specialist who gave up her work in the police force to nurture a family. Her intelligence was immeasurable, and her ability to always help my sisters and I move through hard transitions with ease was effortless. I know now, as an adult looking back on this time, that the effort wasn’t without her own darkness and experience.
When I was seven, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was exceptionally young for a breast cancer diagnosis, and of course this was hard for me to understand, but one thing I did recognize was that, when a community forms out of necessity, healing becomes more likely. Grandparents, family members, neighbors and friends, mostly women, were a constant source of support during that time. Her subsequent remission in 2008 brought an even greater sense of community to mine and my sisters’ lives as young girls. A friend informed my mom of a cancer survivors dragon boating network centered at one of the local lakes. Dragon boating, as a sport, encourages lymphatic drainage, which furthermore prevents lymphedema post-cancer, while also fostering a sense of community, as each woman contributes to the rhythm and movement of the boat with her paddle. There was a focus on breast cancer survivors, and the group allowed for my mother to gain back her sense of self and strength in the years that followed her diagnosis. Like the Handless Maiden, this group of women radically encompassed a sense of healing and community in our lives, and getting involved with them from a young age was a huge awakening for me: women didn’t need to traverse the darkness and trauma of something like breast cancer alone.
When we moved to California, I was eleven, and my sisters (twins) were thirteen. My admiration and respect for my mother dealing not only with a transatlantic relocation, but three pubescent daughters, is extremely high. I struggled immensely. I had to adjust to an entirely new school system, a new country and on top of that, had to find a way to make new friends and connections. My mother was my most stalwart supporter during this time, and through utilizing her own past struggles as reference, was able to move me through the transition as best she could.
As time passed and my sisters and I grew into late teenagers, all of the external forces in our technology-driven world (the media, television and film) pointed toward independence. After reaching a certain age, it’s expected of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year-old girls to release themselves from the proverbial chokehold of their parents and seek out the world for their own. I felt confident in my ability to do this, until my mother was again diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, when I was finishing up high school. This time, I was better equipped to understand what was happening and far more willing to contribute to that support system that was around in 2007, but was seemingly missing from her life at this point. We became a far more interdependent family, making adjustments and accommodations to suit the needs that she had. For the first time, I began to witness my mother as someone simultaneously new and ancient: a daughter. As daughters, my sisters and I realized that maybe the time we had perceived that was for independence was an ideal time to strengthen the feminine familial bonds we had. This was a woman with her own life and experiences that she had brought with her into motherhood, a woman who chose to be independent from a young age and pursue a reality that she wanted to make for herself. As I was preparing to do that for myself, I witnessed my mother traversing the shadow once more. This time around, the cancer was more aggressive and rare, and in turn, required a number of lifestyle changes we all wished to adopt. While we all adopted the external lifestyle changes, my mom internalized hers, asking the questions: What do I really want from life? What legacy will I leave for my daughters? What have I learned in this life that is truly valuable? She was not afraid to share that with us, either. This allowed our bonds as women to grow deeper and stronger. Material existence wasn’t a concern anymore, but was put aside while we navigated these deeper elements of consciousness. This experience, like in 2007, allowed for us to water the roots of our relationships, rather than the superficialities. In 2017, she was cleared again, and we got ready for another transition: I was moving back to the UK, to London, for college.
The trip to London is the most memorable experience of my mother for me. The two of us had never been on an extended vacation together, and I got to spend some quality time with the woman who had raised me. We spoke at length about the move to college. We bought plants together from a small market in New Cross to furnish my tiny apartment above a very busy, loud London street. She gave me advice I didn’t realize I needed. I began to recognize my own independence, while simultaneously tethering myself to my mother even more than before. I depended upon her for advice and comfort, calling her nearly every day to tell her about what I had been doing. She was a phenomenal, avid baker, and I took up baking as a means by which to feel like that part of home was with me across the ocean. While I was away at school, she found herself becoming more and more interested in doing deeper spiritual work. She would tell me about her interest in Sufism, her passion for taking things slow, and she started her yoga teacher training and qualified in May of 2018. After years of complaining about tattoos, she got her first, a Buddhist Unalome, representing the pattern of life’s journey. She explained the significance of it to me, of how the path is not straight, but takes on many different curves and bends, ending in enlightenment.
I came home for summer in 2018 and took a small job grooming dogs, and almost as soon as I got home, she started experiencing breathing problems. After scans and tests, it was revealed that there were nodules on both her lungs and liver. The cancer was back, Stage IV, and was spreading rapidly. She died in August of 2018. This was world-crushing, however I felt comfort in knowing that she had offered me as much as she could in her life. She had learned and grown on her own, given birth to three daughters, and given them the tools to approach life mindfully. A few weeks after her passing, I found the following written in her journal:
‘My body clearly has a different journey mapped out than my inner self. Trying again to align the two but perhaps that’s just ultimately the way it’s meant to be and my ‘life’ lessons will continue in the next lives? That is not to say I am about to give up…That is to say that I may get my mind and spirit to win out over my physical body. Because really that’s all it is. A physical body. We live on in all living things and the air, the ocean, the sand, everything – so I truly believe that wherever I am I will still be right here with everyone else.’
Her peace in the face of death was a comfort to me, and remains a comfort to me until this day. As I continued my education, I became more and more fascinated with myth and folklore, specifically, that which surrounds universal female experience. This resonated with me so much that I became insistent upon qualifying as a labor doula, so that I could assist in the continuation of that experience. Women are, after all, life bringers and death bringers. As women, we always hold mortality in our hands. I recognized this in my mother’s words twofold: she held death in her hands and made peace with it, but she recognized that in spite of her death, her existence would continue just as all women’s existences do, through the next generation.
This is why I do the work I do with Architecture of Humanity. I was blessed to have a mother whose community helped her realize her position as a woman in this world. I am blessed to have had my eyes opened to the raw deal women have been dealt by the modern world, and to have found an alternate path; a path that fosters growth and community, rather than isolation and bitterness. We are not meek, helpless creatures, but incredibly powerful souls. I have traversed the shadow and come through it with the ability to view myself as a continuation of millennia of women whose experience was universal. As we move toward an ever-independent society, we begin to feel detached, especially as women with potent ancestral memory. My mother’s life existed before mine, and mine exists after hers, just as my daughters’ lives will exist after mine. While we may lack the close-knit communities of our forebears, our souls yearn to re-establish them. This fact is key to understanding the role we play as women in this pivotal moment for humanity. In focusing on reintegrating the generations of trauma that we may hold onto, in focusing upon equipping ourselves with the tools we need to connect with other women from outside our circles, we can break the cycle of patterning that would otherwise leave us completely helpless. Even if our relationships with our own mothers or daughters are strained, by providing sacred space for each other, we can not only heal the wounds of our past, but cultivate true beauty and love within our relationships. The work that we’re doing at Architecture of Humanity is allowing generations of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters to provide the framework for codependence reminiscent of our own ancestors’ experience. I am overjoyed to contribute my own experience to that.
