Unmothered: A Conversation with Vanessa Mártir

A Healed Person Can Help Heal The World

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Vanessa Mártir and I first bonded over dogs. I was walking my neighbor’s dog, the irrepressible Ortiz, and doing so was helping me heal from head and brain injury; Vanessa was walking her family dog, Napoleon, a practice she’d formed when grieving the death of her beloved brother many years before. We both loved venturing as deep into nature as possible: the sturdily rooted trees, the joyful birdsong, the earnest flowers. They renewed our belief in ourselves and the world.

Later, we met at the legendary 2019 AWP panel: Writing The Mother Wound, which Vanessa moderated. Prior to Vanessa, I wasn’t familiar with the Mother Wound but her work on this topic reshaped how I understood my relationship with my own mother as well as mother/child relationships in general. So many of us are unmothered. Or inadequately mothered. Often raised by mothers who were unmothered themselves. But true to Vanessa’s big heart, no matter how dire the circumstances, there is always hope and healing.

I wanted to speak with Vanessa because she radiates kindness and truth—and is also a badass. We chatted about lineage stories, gardening, and being true to your heart.

I first became aware of your work when you were on the 2019 AWP panel on Writing the Mother Wound. I thought we could start there. Could you talk about the Mother Wound and how you came to write about it?

There’s an essay by Cheryl Strayed called Heroin/e where she writes about how when someone dies, they tell you about the grief of the loss but they don't tell you about the griefs that loss will uncover. What came shooting at me–there's no way else to describe it, it was like a bullet to the heart–was my relationship with my mother. In 2013 my brother passed away, and it was a huge loss for me, he was my Superman. In my mother's grief, she turned her back on me. She and I have always had a difficult relationship. I left home to attend boarding school at thirteen and never moved back. But when Carlos died, and she turned her back on me, it amplified the grief. There was no running away from it anymore. And because I am who I am, I threw myself into literature about strained mother-daughter relationships, and found work on the mother wound.

The work I found was very white cis heteronormative. As a woman of color, I questioned where does race fit in this? Where do different ethnicities, different cultures, the horrors of immigration fit into this? I started researching, and I found answers in literature. That’s where I found the term unmothered. I have felt unmothered for much of my life.

Can you define what you see as the mother wound?

It’s the relationship between mothers and daughters when it’s made difficult by the mother's traumas. Usually, mother's traumas are a result of patriarchy. The thing is, that doesn't delve into or examine how the mother wound is shaped and exacerbated by realities like racism, the legacies of colonization and slavery, the dissolution of the family as a result of racism and slavery.

My mother's a Honduran woman whose mother left her to come to this country seeking a better life. Years later, she sent for her daughters. This is a common immigration story, but what does that do to the children? None of that was really discussed in the mother wound information I found. The focus was on patriarchy, but there are so many more layers.

I don’t think my mom thinks she can heal from what's happened to her. She’s been through so much.

How did you reorient this into a more expansive vision?

Literature. I found that for decades BIPOC people have been writing about the mother wound without labeling it as such. I started reading essays, novels, memoirs, poetry, and also watching a lot of shows and movies. The mother wound is everywhere, but it's not something that's actually labeled the mother wound.

Also, with the gendered part of it, I've had discussions with nonbinary and trans students regarding how to make Writing the Mother Wound more inclusive. It's something that I'm working on. I don't think I have it down yet, but I'm really being deliberate about including that perspective as well.

Also as a queer woman, where does that fit? How has homophobia, queerphobia, et cetera shaped and exacerbated the mother wound?

Do you feel comfortable talking about how you experience your own mother wound, physically, psychically, mentally? Where it lives in your body?

Great question. It’s an emptiness in my chest. A hole in my life. I’ve often felt untethered in the world, like I don’t have a foundation. In Latinx culture, mother is everything. You’re supposed to sacrifice yourself at the altar of the mother. But what if mother is not mothering? What if mother can’t mother you in the way that you need as a child, or in that very vulnerable, weird time that is adolescence? What happens to the child when mother can’t be that for them? I’ve really dug into this, how my mother’s life shaped her into the mother she became.

My mother got pregnant with me when she was on birth control. She didn't find out until she was four months pregnant. This was 1975. The doctors told her that she should abort because they were worried about my health. She refused. I'm alive because of my mother.

When she told my father that she was pregnant, he chased her into the street and tried to beat me out of her. He accused her of setting him up. Her already high risk pregnancy was worsened. She was in and out of the hospital for the remainder of the pregnancy, and doesn’t remember the labor. She remembers waking up three days later, and when the nurses tried to put me in her arms, she refused. She told me a few years ago that she thinks she had postpartum depression, which makes sense, of course, but PPD wasn’t taken seriously then. I was healthy so they sent us home. Within days I was ill. Everything she gave me, I either threw up or diarrhead out. No one knew what was wrong with me. She finally took me to a hospital in Queens where I was admitted me into the NICU. One day she walked in and, I remember her saying, “it looked like you hadn't been touched tenderly all day.” I was eight months old and had nodes on my body monitoring my vitals, and an IV through my head, because my veins were so weak they couldn't hold the needle. When she saw me, her exact words recollecting that moment were, “A mi se me metió algo”, or “something came over me.” Something inside her said, get her out of here. So she started pulling the nodes off on me. The doctors thought she’d lost it. They made her sign a release form so if something happened to me, they wouldn't be held responsible.