Modern Motherhood and the Splendor of Selfishness
Mothers often feel drained, fatigued and spread thin by juggling the demands of work, needs of children and marriage, while maintaining quality connections and friendships. A good mother is often defined as one who is solely dedicated to her children's every need, sacrificing her own, in motherly selflessness. Social media is flooded with memes of motherhood being sustained by a combination of coffee and wine, illustrating the prevalence of the ‘hanging on by a thread’ mentality. Things such as health, nutrition, exercise, self care, friendships and alone time are downplayed, or disregarded to implement hectic schedules and activities. And even with an abundance of love, marriages too often suffer as routine set in and luster and romance fade.
So why are so many women experiencing motherhood as exhausting or draining despite tremendous love for their children. Has a mother's sacrifice enhanced their well being, and that of their family?
This week we discuss the frequencies of sacrifice in motherhood and how it is affecting you, whether you are a mother or not.
Part 1- Motherhood and Sacrifice
Nowadays, especially with the influence of social media, it’s about who can put more burden on themselves as a mother. You see mothers rushing around, taking their kids from soccer practice to swimming class, to music lessons; most of the time it's not even the kids that want this, it's that the mothers have a need to define who they are. In order to live up to the perceived ideal of motherhood, they believe they have to feel stressed out and burdened.
For most mothers, sacrifice equals love. The more exhausted they are, the more they forgo self care and sacrifice themselves, the more they love their children. This equation is completely false and sacrifice will never create the love that they want to feel. When they don’t get the result that they desire, they sacrifice themselves even more and it becomes an endless loop of burden and sacrifice.
The pattern of sacrifice comes from times of war. At one point in history, your family lineage most likely faced war, shortage, a situation where the men disappeared and your female ancestors experienced hardship. They had to escape and hide, tend the fields, earn a living while taking care of the kids. In those situations, sacrifice was needed. Unfortunately though, these mothers would do the men’s work through a male frequency and as a result they would lose their identity as a woman. This is the real sacrifice.
If you're a girl, being raised by a mother like that, you would have a masculine propensity and take on people’s burdens. As you grow up and start a family of your own, your spouse and your children would burden you, because of the pattern you're running.
If you were a boy in this scenario, you'd be abrasive and weak, lacking identity and confidence in yourself. Because you didn’t have a strong masculine role model and your mother was running a weak masculine pattern, you would run a female pattern to level up and you wouldn’t feel like a man. To compensate for this, you would be controlling and domineering.
As you go a few generations down with these patterns of sacrifice being inherited, what was once a valid sacrifice has now turned into a distortion. In this reality there’s really no shortage and we don't have any other way to explain why we feel the need to sacrifice for our kids. The only shortage that’s causing this issue to be perpetuated is the shortage of self-identity.
Another aspect is that most couples don't marry for love, they get married because they feel insecure. Then, they don't have kids for the right reasons. Usually it’s because they're trying to hold the relationship together and they think having a kid will solve things.
Many women have children because that’s what society dictates what should happen when they reach a certain age - it’s just what you’re supposed to do, right? Follow the status quo. In fact, for many women, there’s a biological clock that kicks in and they have such a strong need to have a kid that they don’t care how it happens.
When people are religious or have such a strong belief in something, on some level they want to disseminate that belief system into the world. Well the easiest way to do that is to have kids and submerse them in that religion so that they naturally adopt it.
In the past, in some cultures the more wealthy you were, the more wives and children that you had. So in these cases, the women and the children tended to resemble property rather than having an identity of their own. When women are running this pattern, their children and spouse would make them feel like property.
Women who are insecure think that having a child will help them identify themselves. In reality, what usually happens is that they realize how ill-defined they actually are. This is because children are magnifiers; they resonate with brilliance and this shines a light on the mother’s distortions. Unfortunately, this can often cause the mothers to feel more insecure and they latch onto their children to a greater degree. It can seem like they are extremely loving mothers, doing everything for their children. However these kids grow up feeling smothered and as they reach their teenage years and start to awaken, they pull away from their mothers in an attempt to release her burdens and patterns. It doesn’t matter how good their childhood was, how much education or opportunities they were given, that kid has such a deep need to identify who they are and they will do anything to break away.
These are most of the reasons why motherhood becomes a burden.
But what if there was another way, a better way to do motherhood?
How do we experience the euphoria and vibrancy of motherhood, as it is supposed to be?
Can we release the patterns of sacrifice and other distortions that we have inherited through our family lineage?
How can we transform our relationship with our children and our own mothers?
In the next newsletter we address these topics and discuss how XI can help us to change at the core frequency level, thereby transforming our lives and the experience of motherhood.