Good Mom Bad Mom The Emotional Architecture of Motherhood.docx (2)

The Emotional Architecture of Motherhood

by

GENUES SHACON

RTR - Respect The Reader

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. First Edition ISBN To Be Assigned Printed in the United States of America

To my mother, Verna Jean Jones.

My first teacher in life.

She has cared for many families and friends,

sometimes overlooking her own children

to put a smile on the face of others.

2Pac once said, “I got my game from my momma

and my name from my momma.”

Not my name - but definitely my game.

My mother. My very first friend.

BIG-V. This time the right didn’t know,

what the left was about to do.

“Every mother is an architect who never saw the blueprints-

building rooms from memory, from wound, from prayer,

hoping the walls hold long enough for her children

to one day build their own.”

- Genues Shacon

The Emotional Architecture of Motherhood

Every person begins life inside a structure they did not design. Before you chose a career, before you chose a partner, before you chose who you wanted to become, someone else was already building the house you would live in. The walls were going up before you could speak. The doors were being hung before you could walk. And by the time you were old enough to notice the rooms around you-the ones with windows and the ones without, the ones that were warm and the ones that stayed cold no matter what season it was outside- you had already learned to call that house normal.

That architect was your mother.

Now let me be clear from the very first page, because I believe in respecting the reader enough to tell you what this book is and what it is not. This is not an indictment. This is not a prosecution. I am not standing in a courtroom pointing at the woman who raised you and asking for a conviction. If that is what you are looking for, close this book right now and give it to somebody who needs it more than you think you do.

This is a love letter. A complicated one. The kind with tear stains on it. The kind you write at two in the morning when you cannot sleep because you just got off the phone with her and you do not know whether to laugh or cry or drive to her house and sit in the driveway for an hour trying to figure out what just happened. This is that letter.

I wrote this book because I grew up inside an emotional architecture that shaped every corner of who I became. And I spent decades walking through life bumping into walls I could not see, tripping over thresholds I did not know were there, locking doors I did not remember closing. It was not until I stopped and looked at the blueprint-really looked at it,

the only way she knew how, using materials passed down from her mother, and her mother

fingerprints are all over my walls.

*

Think about the house you grew up in. Not the physical one, though that matters too. I mean the emotional one. The house made of rules that were never written down but you knew them by heart. The house where certain feelings were allowed in certain rooms and other feelings were not allowed at all. The house where the temperature changed depending on her mood, where a slammed cabinet door at six in the morning meant today was going to be a long day, and where the specific way she said your full name-first, middle, and last-told you everything you needed to know about what was coming next.

You learned that house the way you learn any language: by immersion. Nobody sat you down and explained the rules. You absorbed them. You learned that when Mama got quiet, you got quiet too. You learned that when she started cleaning the kitchen at ten o’clock at night, somebody was in trouble and it might be you. You learned that “I’m fine” meant she was absolutely not fine, and you had approximately ninety seconds to figure out why before the atmosphere shifted from partly cloudy to a category-five hurricane.

You learned all of this before you learned algebra. Before you learned how to drive. Before your first kiss. Your mother’s emotional architecture was the first curriculum you ever studied, and you graduated from it with honors without even knowing you were enrolled.

*

This book exists for the woman who loves her mama with everything she has but cannot figure out why she keeps choosing partners who treat her the same way. It exists for the man who cannot cry, not because he does not feel, but because the house he grew up in did not have a room for that. It exists for the daughter who just became a mother herself and heard her own mother’s voice come out of her mouth for the first time-the exact tone, the exact phrase, the exact look-and it terrified her so deeply she had to sit down in the bathroom and breathe for five minutes before she could go back out to her child.

...