The past two generations have suffered miserably under emotional abandonment via an entire culture of preoccupied mothers--mothers who are (and were) there, but who seemingly don't (and didn't) care due to their own overwhelming lives’ demands and engulfing personal aspirations. And perhaps they didn't care because their mothers weren't there at all, taken out of the home to serve as cogs in the state machinery of the industrial revolution. This exodus morphed into permanent career women in all kinds of spheres, abandoning the role of motherhood entirely. To somewhat correct that, now we have mothers who work part-time and ship their children off to others part-time, juggling two full time demanding occupations, with half the energy/and focus in either, thinking they've achieved a nice balance, until they fall apart under exhaustion and guilt in both spheres. And the children grow up wondering who they themselves even are, receiving almost no attentiveness from a hotly divided supposedly super woman.
The toll this took (and takes) on children (and by the way, the nation) is psychologically devastating. The vacuum is filled by screen time. The parents are replaced by media. So now we have children who are there, but not there at all. Mentally somewhere else, always.
Listen to the pathos of abandonment in this description, sent to us by a grown woman:
"It is an extremely confusing type of experience to feel invisible to one's own mother whom one is naturally constantly looking to for identity affirmation and guidance and simple self-reflection. When her "eyes" don't even seem to ever be able to "focus" on you--when there seems to be little to no "vision" in those eyes that SEES you as a person--it does a doozy of a number on the formation of one's sense of self and ability to confidently carry oneself through life. And it can be hard to detect and label exactly what the problem is. Food, shelter, clothing were all there...so????
“To find a way to be in the world when I felt very unseen, unacknowledged, unencouraged, unsupported and plain old invisible, ...not even on her radar in a way that felt like I was seen as a person of my own or a person at all...was my challenge, that only just now I'm beginning to clarify. Mom was in a world of her own that was pretty much impossible to penetrate."
We as moms (and grandmothers) can invest ourselves in reversing this trend. May we pray to be vessels of God's attentiveness, by adorning our homes with many and continuous nurturing moments.
