Marta: The Telling was a major success. I am filled with hope and healing in this endeavor. So many Tellings that can free us from our deeper secrets, our need to be held, loved and comforted. There is still grief that is in my body. Fear that is in my body. The child who never had a mother to soothe her. My father who died young and I never got to work through my anger with. He never comforted, rocked or held me when my mother beat me, or terrorized the family. A sister that left without a touch or a look of knowing that we were bonded in this life as sisters. She tore that bond to shreds.

There are times I still don’t know how to mother myself. I need somehow to find a way to fill up this hole. I breathe and sit…and breathe and sit, until I find the connection to that silent song of love. I am 61 and with all of what I have accomplished, all of the personal work I have done…I still need a mother…one that can weave the the parts of myself into a whole. Listen to me. Look into my eyes and reflect me as her daughter…her life.

I am ashamed to say this, but I am sharing this. I am not sure how I am going to find this in my body, this love that is endless and enduring. I have the will to live, I have strength, I have courage, I have tenacity, I have creativity, but the deep self love still calls in me…strange…I have survived and I am still recovering from the lack of a gentle touch from a mother.

When I was sixteen, the first therapist I went to told me I was touch deprived (along with other physical and emotional abuses). I didn’t know what that meant. In my first psychology class as a freshman at Brooklyn College, they screened a documentary on rhesus monkeys that were touch deprived. The young baby monkeys were screaming with insanity from lack of touch and comfort. Then it dawned on me, that was what my therapist was speaking of. The after-effects of touch deprivation leave a hunger so deep that a thousand angels wings need to stroke you into heaven. A pain in my heart that pumps out a yelp for the mother who never could mother. It is hard to admit that I still need that mother, and I continue to be the mother, nurture and be kind to myself, be warm and open to my daughter. My daughter and I learn together how to touch each other’s skin, mind, body and soul so we can feel accepted and breathe in that it is okay to be alive. Just saying I’m okay seems small, yet it is big. It is a whisper that I needed to hear as a child, “It’s okay, everything will be all right.” Even it wasn’t all right, it is good to hear that comforting sound. I’ve learned to live with loss and fear as a divine source that ignited me to find the true mother love that lives inside of me. All these feelings hold the key to the meaning of my life. “I’m Okay,” says the mother to me.

Friend: All that you shared in this message has been with me today like a melody, a song, a plea. I resonate with joy and pleasure at your success, the chords you have touched and the new conversations that will grow and grow from your work, from the gift that you are in voicing the unvoiced. I am most profoundly touched by what you share, what you say you are ashamed to share. Your words – the desire, longing, need for your mother, your true mother, to mother you, these are words I now hear in such a different way. From your own writing I have heard and from this new conversation I am having with my own daughter – a daughter that I thought I “mothered”, yet she, too, is missing a mother to comfort her. It is a deep place, this motherhood. A vital, elemental fragrance necessary for our lives. It must lie within us, and how we find that it lies within us is perhaps part of the life journey. I miss deeply, my own mother, who did mother me AND whom I still need. Out of our friendship in writing I am discerning that there is an essential feminine that is evolving as if the utter source of being is found in the discovery of the feminine power, depth, love, spirit. I am simply and profoundly grateful to have you in my life.