Motherless Daughters retreat: Signs of resistance

As I mentioned last week, I spent the weekend at a retreat for women who lost their mothers before age 21. I looked forward to all of it: traveling to Los Angeles, staying alone in a tiny Airbnb camper-trailer, walking each day to the retreat house, and spending all day with women who have shared this traumatic, or at least seismic, event of mother loss. And I wondered how I would feel.

I had forgotten one thing. When I sign up for something, I often resist the experience when the time comes. During the past 30 years, I’ve been to several peer-counseling workshops, many weekend-long (or long-weekend) fitness-trainer seminars, life-coaching and nutrition courses, an intensive swimming course, and now this support-group retreat. Each time, until the past five or ten years, I’ve developed a migraine when it was time to go to the event, and when I’ve dragged myself to the location, I’ve begun a mental litany of criticisms before I’ve even noticed what I was doing. Then I’ve spent hours loosening up my mind so that I can learn and absorb what I came for, rather than judging.

On this trip, none of that reluctance or resistance even crossed my mind until I walked into the retreat house, on the same evening I’d arrived in town. As I closed the door behind me and took off my shoes, I heard a dozen unfamiliar voices and thought, this is too noisy. When are the activities going to start so that we can be quiet?

After the greetings, I sat on a couch and wrote in my journal: “Impulse to not talk. Impulse to skip certain activities. Impulse to throw away the herbal sachet in the gift bag because it might give me a headache [it didn’t]. Impulse to avoid eye contact. … I can almost see myself acting all fastidious and aloof — thus not really looking at feelings that I came to explore.”

Yikes! I was glad at least I recognized the impulse. So I coached myself with my all-purpose, favorite cue, which is, when it’s time, you’ll be ready. I told myself, “You can write in your journal all you want. You don’t have to jump up and mingle right now. All you have to do is listen. When it’s your time to speak, you’ll be ready.”

It was true. The stories told by others, and the welcoming talks from the facilitators, warmed my heart and inspired me. The evening meal gave me energy. I was ready to participate.

There is something about a group. A group forms a community. A community opens me up emotionally, despite the resistance that comes from having spent lots of time by myself. I experienced vulnerability in community first in the rather homespun peer-counseling group I joined in my 20s. Those workshops helped me feel my grief and the ways it showed up in adulthood. This almost too-intense peer counseling led through anguish to greater self acceptance when I needed it. Then, a dozen and more years later, there were the various fitness communities I was part of or led. 

It was easier to open up, try new things, and surprise myself within a group or community. That’s despite bad experiences in school, where I never felt I was part of something and didn’t know I could find group activities rewarding. 

At the Motherless Daughters retreat, it was so enriching to hear the stories of others, their losses, and how they coped.

It was gratifying to follow guided meditations and imagine conversations with the mother I lost when I was a child. My very sensitive “woo woo” alarm threatened to drown out the imaginary dialogue — but it didn’t. Ultimately, by participating, by gently turning away from my own resistance, I discovered that I truly believe I have led the life my mother would have wanted for me. Not just a stunted facsimile of it, but the actual right life. I told myself, in the imagined voice of my mother, from her remembered presence, “You did it. You are who you were supposed to be.” This feels good.