My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My mother: I either adore or abhor her, but never free from her.  I have often envied orphans.  How free they must be!  Nothing about my mother is normal.  She is eccentric, neurotic, possessive, manipulative, manic-depressive, superstitious, religious, greedy, and magnanimous.  She has been an entertainer all her life.  She dances, sings, acts, and does everything else to prove that she is the queen of stars!  She is too much!  Oh, how I have prayed for freedom from her!  Her obsessiveness made my life unbearable to a point of running away from her as a teenager.  She is the reason for everything that had gone wrong in my life. 

As I got older, however, I started to perceive her from a different angle.  Not only has she torn me down, but also has built me up.  Some quiet nights, I weep as I softly play the piano for I know that I owe her for the talents I now enjoy.  Her obsession of me—the person whom she loves the most, in her words—has given me an unbeatable confidence in strange ways.  Though I knew that there were people better, smarter, and prettier than me, I always knew that I was the best thing for my mom.  She loved me in powerful ways!  The power that cannot be bought with money, the power that helps me to move forward against all odds, the power that orphans can never fathom nor enjoy has become mine.  I hate to admit that she has molded the very essence of my being.  

Now that you know what kind of psychosocial power my mother had on me, you might guess that my sister has turned out to be as self-confident as I am—not exactly.  As I have mentioned in my first essay, my sister, who was once known as the genius of my family, has always suffered from severe psychological insecurity which, she says, stems from lack of maternal love as a child.  Interestingly enough, my sister, in an attempt to psycho-analyze herself after many years of receiving psycho-therapy, went back to school at night for a second M.A. degree in Psychology.  As a student of psychology, what she enviously told me back then about the powerful influence my mother had on my indomitable self-confidence makes sense to me now, as her psychological concepts coincide with what I study in this class—that mother’s emotional, physical, and mental interaction with her child has life-long effects.  In other words, my mother’s almost exclusive, overtly expressive love for me has killed my sister’s young fragile spirit as a child growing up under my shade, and according to her analysis, has caused her to become a chronically insecure person.

From the course textbook, I was bemused to learn that not only do “rats become smarter if they are frequently held [loved] when they are young,” but more significantly, “mother’s licking and grooming of her pup . . . leads to decreased release of stress hormones, which [in turn] leads to increased tolerance of potentially stressful conditions . . . in adulthood” (53).  This theory applied to humans means that, just as the rats in this study, there is an undeniable causality between mother’s loving care of her infant and her child’s psychosocial development, which, in turn, validates my sister’s quasi-argument of “my mother’s insufficient love” being the culprit of her lack of self-confidence and insecurity as an adult. 

Further, this same theory also helps me and my mother understand why she was so determined to outdo me in every realm of her life—e.g., going to college at sixteen or becoming an auditor of L.A. County at nineteen.  What is so extremely sad and ironic about this is that while I was trying to free myself from my mother’s obsession of me, my sister was emotionally and physically killing herself to gain more of my mother’s love by proving that she is better than me in every aspect.  Indeed, my mother is a powerful figure whose love built up one daughter’s self-confidence, while the lack of it demolished another.