To Nurture or Not to Nurture

by Charity

[An online multiple friend wrote about being afraid of the littles in her system, about not acting grown up, and about feeling guilty for not being the nurturing maternal figure that she thought that she should be.]

I empathize with you. I really do. I'm not afraid of our inside children, but I do currently struggle with being the adult and not wanting to care for the children the way nurturing adults are supposed to do.

When we first started to get to know our system 20 years ago, I was there. I was one of the first few who made ourselves known to each other. I had this vision of myself as this ultra-kind, completely nurturing quasi-mother-figure, not old enough to be the mother, but more like a big sister acting as mother. The biology of it wasn't as important as was the idea of my being perfectly maternal.

The problem was, I/we never received any maternal nurturing, but wanting to give the children what I/we never had growing up seemed like a reachable ideal, and I kept up the appearance for quite some time, fooling even myself. But it was really history repeating itself, because our mother had promised herself that she would be a better mother than her own mother was. It wouldn't have been hard for her to succeed, given how horribly she was treated by her own mother.

But our mother went into parenthood as a young bride with 21 years of childhood trauma and anxiety that she hadn't even begun to deal with, let alone the fact that she was multiple and didn't know it. All of her good intentions, and even the ways that she did surpass her own mother as a parent, didn't make up for the damage done to us by her shortcomings. We never bonded with her. She couldn't nurture us, and I/we spent our whole life looking for her approval and never feeling that we had it.

Even now, 15+ years after her death at the age of 61, I still feel a gigantic hole where my self-esteem should be. I still crave a mother's nurturing, crave it to the point where I do myself and our others a big disservice by obsessing about it. And when our father, who was very nurturing, passed away nearly two years ago, that hole became a canyon. :(

I don't act grown up a lot of the time either. I don't want to. I don't want to be nurturing any more. I can't give what I never had, and I don't want the responsibility for anyone else's well-being,not even on the inside. The Babysitters (a group of seven helper teens) do a much better job with the children than I could ever do, and they want to do it.

I struggle with the dichotomy between who I think I should be and who I really am. I'm the oldest in the system, and I want to remain the oldest. We know from being the oldest outside sibling that the oldest is a position of power, but it's also a position of responsibility that we never wanted.

We can't have one without the other, no matter how much I wish for it. I can't be the oldest and still want to remain very young and be nurtured. I don't want anybody in the system nurturing me. I want it from someone important on the outside. But our mother is gone, and even if she weren't, she would never be able to give me what I need.

I know that this post has been long, and that only part of it has touched on the feelings that you and I have in common. But as I said, I really do empathize, and your post has helped me to take another step in recognizing what I need to deal with.

I hope that you find peace.