Pondering the Roles of Mothers and Daughters

I am reading the book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. It is a vividly written narrative about women in China in the 1800s. As a western person, I am perplexed by Confucian society. I  wonder about the actual nuts and bolts process of how Confucian thought was implemented and adopted into daily life. The traditions are so imbedded it appears that they are almost omniscient; that there was never a time that they did not exist in the collective Chinese memory. It is hard to imagine them at one time being a new innovation, introduced to a society that had previously used some other paradigm. From an outsider’s perspective, (mine), the society seems rigid,  loveless and even cruel. I refer especially to the binding of little girls’ feet that involved breaking bones and wrapping them into a new and improved shape. Which nemesis of Dr. Scholl started that tradition? Was it a man who practiced on his own feet? I doubt it.

Disapproval, judgment, oppression, narrowness and almost everything unpleasant and unkind seems to have been the daily fare. That may not have been what Confucius intended, but human frailty often contorts good intentions. Maybe compared to what they had before Confucianism, this was an improvement. I don’t pretend to know anything about China or its history. All this pondering about this one tier of human existence is just that – pondering about a tier of human existence. I have a hard time understanding how human mothers were persuaded to favor sons over daughters and how men allowed this to happen. I wonder how and why societies developed the carte blanche oppression of women, and I wonder why everyone put up with it.

I have a lot of questions. I feel certain that some people must have known instinctively that these traditions were not right, but  they were powerless to do anything about it. One can lift the lid on almost any society on earth and say, Ugh! Do you know what they have in there?

I was born in the West, and the West sits upon the Christian foundation. Never mind how unchristian it often is. There are norms that have deep roots that manage to seep up through the muck. These norms suggest the value of the individual, and have resulted in other byproducts such as kindness, compassion, forgiveness, grace, and joy. These intangibles resulted in the development of a particular idealized type of family unit. Of course, it often didn’t play out in the West the way it should have either. The world is saturated with stories of abuse in all its forms. We hear of them and sigh in disbelief. Oh my goodness, what a sad world we have come from.

Somehow women have not only been devalued by men but by other women. The abused become the abusers. If one believes in the afterlife, then it would stand to reason that the halls of the beyond must be inhabited by billions of people who were not loved adequately. I’m not advocating any doctrine here, I’m just talking about the innumerable souls who lived and died  who may have never known love in the way that they deserved.

I saw two movies this year with mother-daughter themes. One was Masterpiece Theater’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 19th century story, “Bleak House”. Gillian Anderson portrays the porcelain beauty, Lady Dedlock. Anna Maxwell Martin is the unfortunate orphan, Esther Summerson. In a most heart wrenching scene, Lady Dedlock reveals to Esther that she is her true birth mother. Esther has never known her real parents. Lady Dedlock confesses that in her youth there was a love affair between herself and a young officer. Esther was the unexpected result who was taken away after her birth. Now, if anyone was to find out the truth, her husband would be ruined by the scandal. So they must not only keep the secret but they must never see each other again. Esther, who has never been wanted, loved or valued, experiences the height of joy in being found and the devastation of being abandoned a second time.

The other was a movie with a similar theme starring Brenda Blethyn, called, “Secrets and Lies”. It is the story of a white English woman who gives up a baby for adoption. She never sees the child. Years later the daughter finds her birth mother, who is shocked to discover that the daughter she gave up has black skin. After the initial reaction, there is a redemptive reconciliation in the family, and an honest sharing between them that creates a new and growing love.

Stories reveal human reaction and that action has rarely followed the logic of loving behavior. As we are able to observe the norms of various cultures we can evaluate what has been missing and how we can reshape the future of the human race through the expression of our love. Hopefully, one day in the great somewhere, there can be millions of incidents of reconciliation and forgiveness between those who did their best at the time from the culture they came from.

As a woman in the 21st century, I hope my brothers and sisters on earth can join the quest for reconciliation between all broken relationships regardless of the society they come from or their norms. These reconciliations would call for new beginnings – for the halting of damaging traditions such as female genital mutilation in Africa, the burqua in the land of the Taliban, and for the cessation of cultural scarring that ensues from the disposing of girl children in various countries.

I believe that God in Heaven embodies the harmonious union of yin and yang as does the created cosmos. We pray for the day when women can assume the dignity they were born to assume alongside men, and that the kings and queens of the earth can love each other, their children and all living things the way they were meant to be loved.