Why Doesn’t Mummy Love Me?
As I write this post, countries in the Southern hemisphere begin their Mother’s Day celebrations. But being or having a mother is not a cause for celebration for everyone. Some children are blessed with wonderful mother’s and others aren’t. The traumatic truth is some mother’s don’t love their children as they could, or should.
Toxic mothers (and fathers, brothers, and daughters) is a theme I write about in many of my self-empowerment books (written as Cassandra Gaisford) and love stories (written as Mollie Mathews).
Having a toxic mother doesn’t have to condemn you to a life of less. You can find joy from sh*t and be your own magic mummy and give yourself all the love and devotion, cheerleading and praise you missed out on growing up.
You may find the following book in my Transformational Super Kids series helpful in your journey:
Why Doesn’t Mummy Love Me?Love yourself unconditionally. Be a magic mummy!When Annie’s mother is mean to her she tries harder to please her, but nothing works. She believes she’s unlovable and thinks she’s bad. Until her friend, Lulu shares her story and tells Annie that some mothers don’t know how to love.
This is a classic, empowering book that every child, teenager and adult should have the joy of reading.
With a unique combination of beautifully simple stories, comforting words, and powerful uplifting messages, Cassandra has been delighting young children, teenagers and adults for over fifty years.
Cassandra cuts to the heart of the lesson we all need to hear, over and over again, helping us learn to self-soothe, surround ourselves with positive influences, be empowered and love ourselves unconditionally.
Creator of the delightfully beautiful and courageous, The Little Princess, Cassandra Gaisford is a global best-seller.
Why Doesn’t Mummy Love Me? is an inspiring story and personal development guide for girls with themes on self-love, self-esteem, self-reliance and resilience.
This book is especially for you if you’re:
The child (young or old) of an abusive parent, narcissist or a mother with borderline personality disorder, this book will aid hope and healingA therapist—this book will help empower your clientsA caregiver or friend of an abandoned child, this book will aid understanding
Click the BUY NOW links below to get your copy today.To enjoy your copy from Amazon: viewbook.at/WhyDoesntMummyLoveMe
To enjoy your copy from iBooks, Barnes & Noble and other great bookstores, click here: https://books2read.com/u/38MdW6
To enjoy your copy from Kobo, click here:
https://www.kobo.com/en/ebook/why-doesn-t-my-mummy-love-me
AUDIOBOOK
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/why-doesn-t-mummy-love-me
Amazon coming soon
What Readers Say“A really good story. I love that the Transformational Super Kids stories have a real rhythm to them that makes for easy reading for a child. In Why Doesn’t Mummy Love Me? I particularly liked the perspective from her friend, challenging what Annie thought of herself. The gathering evidence exercise is awesome and was a reminder to me to do that more often Also for Lulu to say she didn’t see her Mummy anymore because it was too painful was very powerful. Too often, I think stories along these lines still put the onus on the reader to change themselves to somehow appease the other person Cassandra did not. In a very subtle way, she has got across that the mother’s behaviour was unacceptable and that Annie caring about herself was not selfish but necessary (it’s hard for me to admit to anyone other than my brother that life is much more stress-free without my own mother around). And lastly, the talk of being a magic mummy has a real sparkle to it – something a child could imagine doing and a helpful way out of a difficult situation. A really good story and the following author’s note, while confronting is very real and relatable.”
~ Laura V.
As a child therapist, I had the privilege of hearing from boys and girls, young and old, who told me that their mummies didn’t love them as they should.
“If I was my mother, I wouldn’t drink,” one 8-year-old said. His father was in prison and his mother was at the pub. Luckily he had an excellent GRAND-mummy who was raising him and bringing him to therapy to help with his anger issues.
“My mother wanted custody of my sister, but she didn’t come for me. She doesn’t want me. She doesn’t love me. I’m no good,” a 12-year-old boy referred, also for anger issues, told me.
“I want to kill myself,” a 10-year-old sobbed. “My mother is always yelling at me. The more I try to do to make her happy, the more she gives me and then she shouts when I can’t do it all. She wouldn’t care if I died.”
Look into their mother’s history, as I helped these children do, and as I have done to heal my own wounds, and they discover that their mothers are walking wounded. Their mummies (and daddies) rather than learn from their childhoods, victimise all, or some of their children.
One woman, now in her mid-fifties, was the daughter of a mother raised by an alcoholic. “I don’t remember my mother ever being sober,” her mother once confided in her. “And my father flew into violent rages.”
A child of divorced parents once said to her mother, “If you don’t love my dad that means you don’t love half of me.”
I can see the logic, but also the mistaken belief – because her mother had raised her on her own and had given her more love than 20 fathers ever could.
Reflecting now I wonder if a mother doesn’t or can’t love her daughter perhaps there is 50 per cent or more about herself that she doesn’t love either. Perhaps because of the damage inflicted by her mummy (or daddy) too.
Only love loves. It’s often a hard lesson to learn. So many unloved children suffer from mental illnesses, which if left unexamined extends into adulthood
“I was four or five I ran away from home. It’s my earliest memory of wanting to find someone to love me,” a client shared with me.
“I think my mother-story started at birth. I was the first-born— a girl. Not the son my parents wanted. But perhaps the daughter upon whom my father doted. They quickly tried again. My brother, my mother’s favourite, arrived with lungs that never stopped yelling, 11 months after I was born.”
“Don’t show off,” her mother scolded my client, then a child, when she would come home from school with A’s. “Don’t do so well, you know your brother finds school hard.”
She told me that both her siblings later excelled commercially.
“Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t be that. Don’t wear that. Don’t say that. Whack! Don’t be left-handed,” she was told with smack and smack.
“Don’t! Don’t. I soon lost myself. I became a mummy pleaser—or, rather, I tried. Bending over to try to be loved, keeping quiet when I wanted to cry or share something that made me happy. I pursued careers in accounting and banking to make my parents happy—at the cost of my own mental and emotional health.”
I can assure you people-pleasing is not a winner’s strategy. If someone has taken a dislike to you, sometimes, like a person who hates eating fish, their distaste never changes.
Nor should you.
If you can’t be loved by your mother unconditionally then love yourself unconditionally. Warts, pimples, freckles, flaws and extraordinary talents and all. Because you are a star. We all are. Some stars live in dark galaxies, and others need to live in the light to shine brightly.
Promise me you won’t play small to make others feel tall. Be greater today than the story of your past.
Everyone’s mean-mother story is unique. As one of my clients shared, “My issues with my Mum were a bit different. She definitely had a victim mentality and while she would say she was proud of me and my brother with our achievements, there was always a little dig about how much luckier we were than she was. She ‘took umbrage’ (her words) to everything and always seemed to turn an innocuous comment into a personal attack on her. Threatened suicide several times which meant every time I had a fight with her, I had to ring one of her friends afterwards to check in on her to make sure she hadn’t done anything stupid. I think when Dad left (when I was 15), she defined herself as a divorced woman and never recovered.”
Of course, it’s not just mums that can be mean, or manipulative. There’s plenty of mean and toxic dads out there. If you think you were or are lucky to have your mum or dad, I promise you one day you’ll look back and you’ll understand why you had your parents.
Like my book coaching client Heather who channelled her lack of love into teaching and later became a children’s self-empowerment author.
Similarly, author and creator of Hay House books, Louise Hay who was sexually and emotionally abused as a child, transformed her wounds into wisdom. Hay’s success lay in highlighting the power of our words to both heal and harm.
David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, based Livia heavily on his own mother, Norma Chase. He described her as being paranoid, sharp-tongued, abusive, and disregarding her son’s career achievements. Many of Livia’s memorable lines, such as “Poor you” (something my mother said whenever I tried to tell her how I felt) are what Norma Chase would say. Rather than be victimised he spent time in psychotherapy and channelled his experiences of growing up with a narcissistic mother into the gangster Tony Sopranos, mother.
Or Kiwi songbird, Kiri Te Kanawa, who said, “I learned early on to be self-reliant.”
Similarly, actress Drew Barrymore divorced both parents when she was fifteen.
In short, it’s easy to imagine who you may have become had your mother been kinder, nicer, sweeter.
But what if the real tragedy is, who would you not have become had life treated you differently? What if your life unfolded exactly as it should? What if there was a divine plan? There’s magic in that!
“Go laugh in the places you cried. Change the narrative. Everything aligns.”
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