A mother's love is supposed to be unconditional. What happens when it's not?

Shelfies is a column by writer Alicia Elliott that looks at arts and culture through the prism of the books on her shelf.

Every May for the past few years, I have dreaded Mother's Day. Each day leading up to it feels like a five-pound weight being deposited directly inside my chest, because each day is another reminder that I am no longer speaking to my mother.

This is the choice I have made to protect myself, the one I must continue to make to keep myself sane. But that doesn't lessen the pain come the second Sunday of May, as I watch people write out thoughtful tributes to their own mothers, describing the type of relationship I wish I had. 

I know I'm far from alone in having a troubled relationship with my mother. It's the basis of countless jokes, movies, books and TV shows. It's the first fact trotted out to explain how criminals became so cruel, so inhumane: their mothers didn't love them enough, and so they killed strangers. 

And yet, there doesn't seem to be much societal space or understanding for people like me. Motherhood is generally understood to be a word that is synonymous with providing care, particularly in self-sacrificing ways; a pregnant body prioritizes the nourishment of the child, and giving birth is considered one of the most painful and difficult experiences one can endure. But what if all the love that comes from your mother after you've been born begins to feel conditional?

What happens when our mothers refuse to see us as individuals, instead seeing us as extensions of themselves — as tools they can use to secure their own wants and needs, regardless of how those wants and needs hurt us? What do we do with the black hole this type of un-mothering leaves in us? How do we fill it?

These are, essentially, the questions — and the basis of the horror — in Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth. This surreal novel follows protagonist Abby and her obsession with both finding a loving, perfect mother for herself and becoming a loving, perfect mother to everyone around her — whether they want her to or not.

The book starts with Abby finding her mother-in-law Laura's body in the basement, dead by apparent suicide. Abby and her husband Ralph had just moved in to try to help Laura through her depression, and Abby was hoping she would get the mother figure — and maternal love — she had always wanted. Instead, her mother-in-law was cruel, criticizing everything Abby did and liked. And now, she's gone.

Abby naively believes this death will free her and Ralph from their respective un-mothering mothers, allowing them to start their own family and finally become the parents they both wish they'd had. But Jacob's guilt at not being able to save his mother sends him spiraling into his own depression and psychosis. And as Abby decides she will do anything — become anything — to save him, it becomes clear that these maternal wounds and intergenerational cycles of codependence can be more terrifying than any ghost or demon.

The title of the book, Motherthing, comes from an experiment that was done on monkeys to determine how necessary affection and love are for childhood development. Scientists found that, when they removed the monkeys from their mothers and gave the baby monkeys a rolled-up pair of socks, "the socks become their mother," as Hogarth summarizes. "Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing." 

Motherthings, then, are those things onto which we project motherhood in order to soothe ourselves in the absence of a loving mother. Early in the novel, Abby, the protagonist, recalls her own motherthing growing up: Couchy, a brown corduroy couch. Even as a child, Abby knew her mother only really cared about impressing the men in her life; she came to look forward to her mother getting new boyfriends because those were the only times she'd cook elaborate, delicious meals. She watched her mother change her entire personality for each boyfriend, then scream and cry and bargain when she could no longer keep up the ruse and each boyfriend left after inevitably realizing who she really was.

Her mother didn't save any of this love for her, so Abby developed "the same instinct as that little monkey. Find the soft couch, stroke the soft couch, nuzzle it, let it absorb my whispers, absorb my tears, dilute my squishy rhythmic sadness." 

The problem is, despite the various motherthings Abby has collected — Couchy; an old cookbook; a nearly mute patient named Mrs. Bondy at the care home she works at; her husband Ralph — none can give Abby the self-esteem and stable sense of self that her own mother refused her. Each attempt to fill the empty space seems to only confirm Abby's fear that she is, in fact, nothing. 

All Abby knows about herself is that she doesn't want to become her mother. And yet, in not knowing who she is, she still becomes her mother: the same woman who tried on personalities like new dresses, always defining herself in relation to the man she needed to love her in order to feel real. She keeps replicating this deep wound in her relationship with Ralph: "I'm nothing. Still just a seed floating in the wind. Landing on Ralph, rooting in Ralph, becoming Ralph instead of becoming me." 

It seems to be a contradiction at first. How can a person recognize a toxic trait but continue to let it fester, poisoning themselves and those around them instead of stopping it? But as I reflected on my own relationship with my mother, I knew that this seeming contradiction is not a contradiction at all. Just because you see a pattern in others and in yourself doesn't mean you know how to stop it — especially when that pattern is so deeply ingrained it feels as though it's no longer a choice you consciously make, but a part of you, as essential to how you operate as your own heartbeat. 

I have become used to being my own motherthing, soothing and caring for and mothering myself, the way so many of us who didn't get the care and love we needed from our own mothers have had to.

Like Abby and Ralph, I thought I could repair my relationship with maternal love by identifying the flaws my mother made with her parenting, then simply choosing to not do that with my own child. But I didn't consider that those childhood dynamics might carry over into my adult life in ways that felt out of my control and cause other, unexpected issues.

This is the sneaky, frustrating way childhood traumas and coping mechanisms come back to haunt us. The tactics we chose to get through difficult situations as kids — tactics we had to use over and over again until they became habits — become so instinctive that once we're adults, we no longer even recognize them as being choices. Instead, they feel like the true, unchangeable essence of us — which means if someone doesn't like that habit, that response, they don't like us. And for those who didn't have that unconditional maternal love, every rejection of what we interpret as us not only replicates but reinforces that first and most painful rejection; for if our own mothers don't love us for who we are, how can we expect anyone else to? 

It's easy to see how this lack of maternal love and acceptance creates a sort of black hole of affection. After all, no one's love in the present can change our childhood pain from the past. Maybe we try to cope by becoming like Abby — desperate to try anything, accept anything, to fill what feels more and more like a bottomless pit. Maybe we become like Ralph — finding ways to rationalize and understand our childhood pain through therapy and diagnoses, hoping that the strategies we develop are enough to keep us strong when we do interact with our mothers.

Or maybe we remind ourselves that mothers are nothing more than people, and there is no reason why a person who is a mother cannot be a person who harms, who makes mistakes, who is wrong. A person we have the choice to keep in or remove from our lives.

These are the ways we mother ourselves. We may not be our own perfect mothers, either, but we try. We really, really try.  

The last time I spoke with my mother, it had been a few months since I was diagnosed with the same mental illness as her. The experience that led to my diagnosis was terrifying and humiliating — but I held out a brief, stubborn hope that, if nothing else, this new knowledge might bring us together. Maybe she would finally open up to me about her illness; maybe we could commiserate on how dehumanizing mental hospitals are. Even after all that time, I was still the same little girl, standing in front of her mother, hoping that if I showed her the parts of me that were like her, she'd be pleased.

She told me that my mental illness was, indeed, the same as hers: a punishment from God for past sins. Not only did she believe my lack of faith was the reason demons were possessing her, causing her to see and hear things that weren't there, but it was also the reason they were possessing me, nearly destroying my life.

I knew in that moment I could never speak to her again.

Like Abby, I have tried to heal the wounds my mother left through motherhood. Though I have struggled with the same mental illness as she does, I have tried to learn from her. I have tried to be the mother I'd wished I'd had, making my son feel seen and appreciated for who he is, listening to his dreams and thoughts and concerns, creating a relationship based on true unconditional love. And though there are moments where it's hard — where I wonder what it would be like if my mother had been different; where I long for the warmth she'd give me if I did contort and shrink and muzzle myself to meet her requirements — they come less often now. 

I have become used to being my own motherthing, soothing and caring for and mothering myself, the way so many of us who didn't get the care and love we needed from our own mothers have had to. I have opened myself up to being known, and to being loved, and the beautiful safety and trust that comes from no longer having to separate the two.