The failed mother

The patriarchy is the collective psychosis that somewhere out there exists a man, an idea of a man, who is superior to a woman. That is a physical impossibility. At most a man can be is equal to a woman. There will always exist a greater woman. But a man cannot set or sustain a standard. He is not emotionally equipped.

You will recognize a man that is trapped within the patriarchy psychosis because he will assert himself as superior to a woman, repeatedly. The strength of his delusion is how many times he tries even when given evidence of his subordination. This is a psychosis, an illness, against the better powers of nature. What does it mean to go against nature? At some point you will be faced with dysfunction, with non-adaptation to reality.

Women trapped in patriarchy know there are women better than her and there are men better than her, however, she hopes for some greater man to exist and to punish and subordinate the greatest woman that is the evidence of her lack of responsibility over her own freedom. She aligns herself with men despite being subordinated and allows for this because she hopes for the sadistic punishment of the woman that represents her choice to remain. The superior woman represents herself, whom she wants to see punished to atone for her own suffering, she blames the other.

But the superior man who comes to subordinate the superior woman never arrives because he does not exist, and so she takes it upon herself to become the superior man to subordinate the woman that is better than her. All the while ignoring that the superior man does not exist, her guilt and sadism is fragile. It does not know how to stop once it takes on this role, it can only continue simply because she has already started. Like the red dancing shoes, she cannot stop even if she wanted to. There is no path back to her own dignity or superiority, there is no path back out of psychosis but through psychosis.

When the mother automatically takes on the role of maintaining patriarchal order, there is less work for men. She is commended by patriarchy for being a good mother. She has earned her badges.

Badges like wages given to workers that can only be spent at the corporation store. Symbolic rewards, meaningless titles like ‘good mother,’ but never freedom. The system never rewards with freedom.

It doesn’t matter how much you try to love her. She resents you for never hurting her, for being in a position to love her, a position of superiority. People always hate the ones they hurt. Love is a kind of freedom because it is a currency without symbol.

Such a mother has spent her whole life descending into hell, becoming dependent, lowering her self worth each time she abused the daughter, becoming addicted to it because of the emptiness it causes. Watching enviously each time the daughter chooses not to hurt her in return, secretly delighted when the daughter gets angry or threatens to kill her, disappointed when she corrects herself and chooses peace. When she chooses a path of moral superiority even when she doesn’t recognize its own value. The daughter is free yet confused by her own status and superiority and freedom. Confused by her own ability to live beyond symbolic reality, because it is a reality so disorientingly different than the mother’s. Other women with less brutal mothers may in turn become brutalized by the patriarchy through their own vertigo and anxiety of their own freedom. But the daughter of such a woman has no choice but to be free, completely free, or not at all. The only lesson an unfree mother can give.

Every reward such a mother gives is a token of the false world the daughter must learn to reject and refuse. Not gifts, but bribed from the symbolic order. The mother fixes her daughter’s teeth for cosmetic purposes. She enjoys dressing her in nice clothes like a doll so men can humiliate her. The daughter searches for alternative rewards, learns to read books the mother will never enjoy. She is devastated by the mother and yet prepared for the devastation of the world. The initiation into moral sovereignty. Symbolic ownership of the self, you can buy yourself out of the system.