What If Being Yourself Once Meant Losing Love?

Photo by Florian Dormann on Unsplash

My mother read me a Scandinavian fairy tale about a cuckoo bird.

In the story, a mother has children who don’t listen to her. She cooks and cleans and takes care of them, while they run around playing and refuse to help. Eventually she becomes ill. She calls for them, but they still don’t come.

So she turns into a cuckoo and flies away.

The children run after her crying, “Mama, Mama, come back,” but she doesn’t.

As a parenting technique, it was spectacularly effective on me.

My mother didn’t have to yell at or punish me. Well into my teenage years, if I was getting difficult, she could simply look at me and say, “I’ll flap my wings...”

Message received.

I behaved.

I hadn’t thought much about this until recently, when a four- or five-year-old version of me appeared during a healing session.

And she was furious.

Not mildly irritated.

Full toddler apocalypse.

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She wanted to scream and throw things and destroy things.

I said something during the session that suddenly seemed important:

I never had tantrums as a child. They weren’t allowed.

Not because my mother was cruel. She wasn’t.

My mother loved me. I knew she loved me. She was also a single mother with a lot on her shoulders, and she had apparently discovered an extraordinarily efficient way of keeping her very sensitive, very intense daughter manageable.

The problem was that children don’t necessarily understand nuance.

A child doesn’t hear:

Mom is overwhelmed and needs cooperation.

A child may hear:

If I become too difficult, Mom can disappear.

And as we stayed with that little girl’s rage, I suddenly understood the rule I had extracted from the story:

If I am myself, I can lose my mother.

Well.

That explains a few things.

I’ve written before about self-abandonment, people-pleasing, hypervigilance and the feeling that love was somehow conditional.

But this gave me a different way of understanding them.

Maybe self-abandonment doesn’t begin with disliking ourselves.

Maybe sometimes it begins with love.

We love someone so much that losing connection feels unbearable. So we become exquisitely attentive to what keeps the connection intact.

This is okay.

That is too much.

This makes Mom happy.

That creates tension.

Be easier.

Need less.

Don’t make trouble.

Don’t be angry.

And eventually nobody has to tell us anymore.

We take over the editing ourselves.

During the session I described it as having twisted and squeezed myself into a straitjacket to become comfortable and acceptable.

That sentence stayed with me.

Because a straitjacket can eventually feel like your body.

You forget you’re wearing it.

You just assume:

This is who I am.

My mother wasn’t the villain.

This distinction matters enormously to me.

I don’t want to rewrite my childhood into a trauma story in which my mother becomes the perpetrator and I become the victim.

That isn’t how I experienced her.

She loved me. She supported me in countless ways. She devoted her life to my brother and I. And, like every parent, she had her own history, limitations, needs and survival strategies.

What interests me isn’t blame.

It’s interpretation.

The adult communicates one thing.

The child’s nervous system can encode another.

My mother may have been communicating: Please cooperate with me.

My system seems to have learned: Connection requires self-suppression.

Those aren’t remotely the same statement.

But if the second one gets installed early enough, we can spend decades living as though it were a law of physics.

And perhaps this is why some patterns are so resistant to logic.

Of course I know that expressing an opinion doesn’t make people evaporate.

Of course I know I’m allowed to be angry.

Of course I know people who love me can disagree with me and remain.

But knowing something as an adult and feeling safe enough to live it are two different things.

The tantrum lasted a few minutes

Something beautiful happened in the session.

We let the little girl be angry.

We didn’t tell her anger was low-frequency.

We didn’t ask her to forgive.

We didn’t explain that her mother had done her best.

We didn’t try to turn her into a spiritually advanced five-year-old.

She got to be pissed.

We stayed with her.

And then...

she got tired.

She wanted to sleep.

That was it.

I remember realizing how small the whole cycle actually was. The feeling I’d spent a lifetime avoiding didn’t destroy anything. It arose, became intense, moved through, and evaporated.

Which made me wonder how much energy I’ve spent preventing emotions that might have needed only to be experienced.

Perhaps the dangerous thing wasn’t anger.

Perhaps the dangerous thing was the old meaning attached to it:

If I express this, I could lose love.

I’m rewriting the contract.

I think a lot of self-love advice starts too late.

We’re told to love ourselves, express ourselves, set boundaries, stop people-pleasing, speak our truth.

Great.

But if some young part of us learned that authenticity threatens attachment, “just be yourself” isn’t inspirational.

It’s terrifying.

So I’m less interested now in forcing myself to be authentic.

I’m interested in finding the places where authenticity still feels unsafe and meeting whatever lives there.

Listening long enough to understand what it’s protecting.

Because the cuckoo bird isn’t coming.

I’m 51.

My mother is no longer alive, and I miss her terribly.

But I’m beginning to understand that loving her doesn’t require me to keep obeying a rule a frightened little girl created decades ago.

I can love my mother.

I can love that little girl.

And I can let myself become inconvenient.

Angry.

Loud.

Different.

Disappointing, occasionally.

Myself.

Nobody has to fly away.

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