I feel at this instant like a dancer might who is poised behind a curtain of a stage, breathing those last breaths before the music starts, before the curtain rises, about to dance a dance before an unseen but present audience.  This dancer would have performed the dance before, would have practiced it step by step, part by part, before this evening’s performance.  Not I.  I have no idea what I am going to write here before you.  I know not one word before I begin.  All I can do is take that last breath and step on out, hoping.

Hoping that I know what I want to say, what needs to be said.  Hoping that I can say it right, leaving nothing out but adding nothing in that does not belong within this dance of words.  What is it that I will say first?

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Do we, as a species, want to replace the kind of mothering that built our species from the beginning with medications that alter our brain chemicals and that might mimic what we used to be able to accomplish within our own brains without any other assistance? After all, we used to be prepared for the task of living as members of a social species in such an exact way that all the programming needed to accomplish this mothering was biologically given to mothers, and given to infants, so that in the end infants grew up to be balanced children and adults who knew the possibility of well being.

What happens to infants when the ability to mother adequately is removed from the people-growing equation?  What happens to the adults that these infants grow up to be?  How far back in my own family can I look in order to discover where the diversion of mothering abilities began and where mothering began to be altered and removed from the ongoing patterns particularly of how mothers raised their daughters?  I can’t see back there very far, but far enough to know something passed down to me was very, very harmful.

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I must tread carefully here, if treading across a public stage can be considered dancing at all?  I wish I could say what needs to be said exactly, specifically so, as if the dance has already been danced before and I can follow in some earlier, preexisting invisible footsteps.  If I knew ahead of time what the dance was and how to perform it, this writing would be so much easier to do.

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I do not wish to alienate mothers.  I do not wish to harshly condemn any mother’s efforts to raise her own children.  Those of you who have been reading my posts already know that something was so wrong with the way my mother raised me that it could hardly be called mothering at all.

But she was my mother and she did mother me.  Inadequately, but she did mother me.  Taken from that far extreme of mothering like my mother gave me, across an entire range of possibilities of mothering, all the way over to the most perfect mother we could even collectively imagine — somewhere along this line every mother could place her own.

It is not that I am deliberately eliminating men from my writing here due to some inner bias of my own.  I very specifically consider that mothering is something only women can do.  Men father.  They cannot mother, no matter how nurturing they may be toward their infants and children.  Everything we know and can imagine about the biological, physiological differences between women and men apply here.  How men father is not the topic of this post.  How women mother is.

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With that clarifying step taken, I will turn in another direction and take yet another step.  What we might consciously know about mothering will always be only a tiny part of the story unless we today begin to think very clearly and carefully about ourselves as a species, and particularly about being American members of our species at this point in time.  We cannot leave the context of culture and society out of our discussion about mothering.

I can report facts to you about my own experiences of mothering as I consciously understand them, but I also must state I know really nothing of substance about the generations of women in my family that preceded me as mothers.  I make guesses based on guesses.  My guess is that my mother’s grandmother — who came into my mother’s home when her own husband died, and very closely in time to when my mother’s mother divorced her own husband — was as important to my mother as she grew up after the age of 5 or 6 as her actual mother was.  I do not believe that my mother was healthily mothered by either one of these women.

It is here that my dance must take another step, a sort of flying leap into the air with a shift of the body above the stage floor, so that some distance is covered and the dancer lands in a surprising spot — of sorts.  This step includes what any of us women might know or imagine about all the grand mothering in our families.  What is grand mothering compared and/or contrasted to mothering?  We cannot leave the grandmothers out of our mothering equation.

How my mother’s grandmother mothered my mother’s mother had to have had — my definite guess here — a major influence upon how my mother developed not only as a person, not only as a mother, but specifically as my mother.  How my mother mothered me had a powerful impact on my ability to mother my own children, and backward and forward throughout the generations we see that mothers never do their own mothering in a vacuum.

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Now I, as the dancer within my own mind, must take yet another step.  This time the step moves into a spin, both feet close together twirling above the floor, ending with me landing into a forward fold, down on one knee, both arms stretched in front of me, palms together toward the sky.  It is here I must talk about our evolution, how if we move far enough away from the kind of mothering that nature intended us to practice within our species we are running the risk of endangering ourselves — and I use this word ‘ourselves’ in both the most singular and most collective way.

I, singularly, suffered the consequences of my mother’s psychosis that was focused specifically on me.  I know that all of my siblings suffered from growing up with my mother as their mother.  Yet we all know that I was forced from birth to be the one chosen to grow up in the center of her storm.

I have said and I will continue to say it again, that my mother’s psychotic break and her overriding mental illness was influenced by conditions of her childhood that damaged her developing brain-mind.  This next step I am taking is more like a jumping up and down firmly in one place.  It is not a step of grace, it is a step of emphasis.  No matter what the men may be doing in the early lives of children, it is ALWAYS to the mothers that I will look for ultimate accountability.

I take another step here away from center and follow with another and another and another until I have traveled in a wide full circle.  At the center of this circle I place the young children.  For every step from that center in any direction I would want another woman to be standing there.  This wide movement I am taking in my dance is meant to point out that for the millions of years our species spent evolving itself, never until recent times and under the guise and the burden of so-called ‘civilization’ did we women EVER mother alone.

We can all talk until we run out of breath about the rights of women.  I am not opposed to women pursuing what they may think is best for them in their lives.  But I am NOT talking about women here.  I am talking about mothers.  I am talking about women’s fitness to mother in the first place.  And ultimately, I am talking about the children we bear and bring into this world.  These children not only need mothers (and fathers, not the topic of this post), they need adequate MOTHERING.

I have to let other dancers onto the stage now.  This is no longer a dance I choose to dance alone.  With the flurry of movement of multiple dancers I see in the patterns they create in their dancing that when women who are mothering are cut off from one another all manor of ill being replaces the well being that we always knew before.

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The color I remember from stories my mother told of both her grandmother and her mother were that they were brilliant women.  Each in their own way were educated career women.  I hold no false belief that either of these two women were adequate as mothers.  My mother paid a price for this.  I and my siblings paid a price for this.  My own children paid a price for this, even though I was a stay-at-home mother.

Just in looking at the influences in five generations, from my great grandmother to my own children, I see that it wasn’t the mothers themselves that were missing.  No, not us.  It was the necessary QUALITY of mothering that was missing, and that lack and loss is what has created the ongoing pattern of disaster.

If you read my June 1972 writing in +LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE, you will be able to instantly know what I am talking about.  That writing reflected the state of dysregulation within my brain-mind that was a direct result of the trauma and terror that formed by brain from the beginning of my life.  How could I, or anyone else, ever expect me to be able to adequately mother children with that brain?

True, except for the incident I described in THE DAY I ABUSED MY OWN LITTLE SON, I did not blatantly or overtly abuse my own children.  But I did harm them.  There was no possible way that I could not have done so, no matter how much I tried not to.  That is the nature of trauma when it is not resolved.  One way or the other, it passes itself on down the generations.  We can whine and moan, curse and spit, but there is little we can do about it — unless and until we find the right information and the resources we need AT THE RIGHT TIME.

Dance over.  I’m deadly serious now.  I do not have any grandchildren.  This may change in the future.  What matters to me most is that my children have broken the pattern to the best of their ability.

If I could magically go back and offer to my own self when I was 18 what I know now, I have no doubt my children would be the beneficiary of radical positive changes that I would have been able to make in myself as a result of the knowledge I now have.  True, there is a probable chance that they would never have been born in the first place.  I cannot find it in myself to wish for that.

All I can do is what we all can do — move forward.  We can learn.  We can change.  We can heal, each according to our abilities.

Before our species so changed our world, back before the coming of ‘civilization’ began to disconnect mothers from mothers, we did not mother alone.  Grandmothers were also part of the cycle of mothering.  Not isolated grandmothers, but connected grandmothers.  Women breast fed one another’s children.  They held them and cared for them as if they were their own.

The birth mother was not left with the full burden of caring for her child alone.  She was always accessible in times when her infant could not be solaced by other women.  The infant could always be returned to its birth mother (if she were alive) when necessary.  But in between these times the birth mother had the ability to ‘get away’ and to work at her other tasks, but the infants never suffered for lack of mothering.

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I take the stand that in today’s world of American culture we are hurting our mothers by isolating them from other mothers and we are hurting our offspring.  We have gone so far away from what nature gave us in the beginning I am not at all convinced that we can ever find our way back.  But I also know that if we never identify problems that exist we have absolutely NO HOPE of repairing the rupture we have created within our culture — and in increasingly wider circles within other ‘advancing’ cultures — as we interfere with mothers’ ability to adequately mother their young.

I will describe in future posts that the damage we are causing directly affects our brain’s ability to regulate itself.  Adequate mothering is designed to build a regulated human brain that can experience well being as its center point of balanced equilibrium.  The more mothers don’t and can’t mother their young the way nature intended us to, the more dysregulated our brains become.

Is it a good thing that we now have, as the end result of very expensive and extensive research, all kinds of prescription drugs to regulate more and more and more brain and nervous system dysregulations than ever before?  Or do we look at the bigger picture and accept as fact that inadequate mothering of infants and young children is creating these dysregulations in the first place?  Are we more afraid to ask the questions or to find out the true answers?

We are becoming dependent as a society on the powerful drugs we take — as adults and feed to our children — to regulate brain chemistry because we are creating the problems by building these brains that cannot regulate themselves in the first place.

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I could ask, “What are we willing to know about this problem?”  Or I could ask the much harder and more helpful question, “What are we NOT willing to know about this problem?”  Maybe we are so acceptant of the fact that ‘everyone’ takes brain-regulating medications that we don’t even think it’s a problem in the first place.

Are we so absolutely stupid and foolish that we ‘thank our lucky stars’ that we have all these wonder drugs available to us in our super advanced civilization to fix us?  Does it ever occur to us that we are creating these same problems that need these medications and that the conditions are PREVENTABLE?

Do we refuse to see harm in anything we are doing or have done to our own children that meant they had no choice but to develop brains that could not adequately regulate themselves for the task of being humans who are healthy and have well being — naturally?  Just as women birth the children, they are designed to be the builders of infant brains.  That job is not done at birth.  If mothers cannot adequately build brains within their infants that can healthily regulate themselves, the job will not get done.

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I do not ask any question that I am not willing to ask myself, no matter how difficult it might be to look at the truth.  We might not need to use the word abuse in reference to how we parent our own children.  But if we have our own histories of trauma we cannot help but pass this trauma down to our children, no matter how much we try not to.

There is a wealth of new information available to us about the brain development of infants and young children.  Until we access this information at the ground level where we all live and struggle, we cannot make the kinds of changes within ourselves that will truly allow our children to escape what we never meant to do to them in the first place.  There is no bliss in ignorance.

We HAVE to know what happened to us.  We have to become crystal clear about the changes in HOW mothers mother because we are damaging our children and the future of our society.  This isn’t about feeling badly.  I give the example as clearly as I can that how my mother mothered me does NOT need to be an emotional issue on any level other than in my memories of the actual abuse experiences themselves.

What we need MOST are the facts.  The simple clear facts.  We can change nothing for the better without them.  I do not believe that we can continue to bear and raise children in our present and advancing technological world without knowing the facts we need to know about how to build a healthy human brain from birth.

Interactions within inadequate daycare environments, infant isolation from lengthy quality time with healthy mothers, ongoing lengths of time interacting with electronic media, lack of exercise, lack of time outdoors, lack of quality play, are all contributing to a demise of the human brain resulting in an increased need to consume medications to regulate the brain — whether we want to admit it or not.  We are social beings designed to build a social brain through powerful positive human attachments that begin most importantly with our mothers.

If we continue to choose not to pay attention to the reality of our human condition within our ‘new world’, our proverbial dance will be done.  We are a specific species with specific needs during our infant brain developmental stages.  How well we are mothered determines how well our brains work for the rest of our lives.  There are no exceptions.