From Mother to Daughter

Love travels from mother to daughter like a ball of fine thread — invisible, delicate, and yet remarkably resilient across time and space. It ties the first woman in the system to the youngest woman in the family, weaving braids of kindness and knots of unkindness along the way.

It's so easy to run that thread of love through our fingers and weave braids and knots for the other women in the family — and so much harder to do it for ourselves.

My mother was kind, but my grandmother was cruel.

You're kind like your grandmother, or you're cruel like your aunt.

"Kind" and "cruel" are the words I hear most often in therapy when I ask about the women in a family. Every braid of kindness you weave for your daughter, for your mother, for your granddaughter, is an act of unconditional love. Your braid binds the system together and gives it strength. It keeps the first woman in the system connected to the youngest one. The more braids of kindness there are, the stronger the youngest woman becomes — and the more aware she is of her role and her purpose in this world.

But wherever there is kindness, there is unkindness too. You do something good for your eldest daughter and, without meaning to, without realising it — or perhaps knowing exactly what you're doing — you overlook the youngest. In the eyes of the eldest you were a good mother; in the eyes of the youngest you were not. The braid of kindness and the knot of unkindness were woven in the blink of an eye, but their effects are still felt twenty or thirty years later, sometimes generations later.

Nothing is ever forgotten. Everything is passed on.

Forgetting is simply the unspoken being relocated — hidden away in another reality, another time, another place.

"Never mind, it's nothing" becomes "mum prefers my sister," which later turns into "I have to prove I'm the best." These private interpretations settle into the DNA of our belief system and our values, and they show through every pore of our existence.

Every act of ambition, every tireless effort to hold on to kindness and steer clear of unkindness, is a way of lifting your soul and honouring every woman in your family system. It's easy to label, to point fingers, to run people down — or simply to forget the ones who made your life hard.

In therapy you discover that the heavy, ugly words thrown out to discharge anger and pain are the very trigger keeping you tied to the situations and the people who betrayed, abandoned or abused you. That's when you start to examine your inner language and wonder whether you can ever really change. And that's exactly when your transformation begins.

Kindness is a conscious choice, and it becomes possible the moment you change your words. Speak kindly about your daughter, your sister, your mother, your grandmother and all your aunts. And most importantly of all — speak kindly to yourself, about yourself.

Today my hands led me through the pages of The Atlas of Beauty, a genuine work of photographic art by Mihaela Noroc, whom I admire enormously. In every photograph I noticed the details, and above all I noticed the kindness in each face. Kindness is beauty, and it comes from within.

What act of kindness are you preparing for yourself and for the women in your family?