About Being Abandoned
This feeling of abandonment seems to strike the core of every human being. Without that person or thing a human being feels their very safety, security and soul has been ripped out by that person’s leaving. The despair of being left behind alone is as though they’re being denied their very existence.
A person’s torment of being abandoned by a beloved, or even a seeming enemy, brings them to a place so unrecognizable that this very act of abandonment leaves the human being in a place, physically, that they’ve never been before. There is nothing that brings a person to a state of vulnerability, as if in infancy, as this.
Is there no way out of the emotional state of pain and loss? Hasn’t there been an answer to this since the very beginning of mankind? Why do things have to change? Can’t people and their relationships remain intact?
This despair brings the human being to a state of wailing, “I want my mother!” whether they’ve ever had a mother or not. It is primal to want and need to be loved, protected and cared for. Once that starts to shift, once that person lessens their loving attention, even for a little bit, our anxieties burst into play.
We see this first hand when a baby is born. Everyone thinks the birth of a baby is joyous and wonderful. It is yet, the attention of the female from solely being a wife to being a mother changes everything. Nothing can be done about this. It happens every time. The male is abandoned in a way that is unforeseen.
The happiness of a new baby lasts just so long. The birth of a second baby makes things worse in that regard. Abandonment means there was a definite before and after this happens. In whatever way it happens.
These are the very things NO ONE talks about. Despair during times when we are suppose to be so joyful is confusing and guilt ridden. Births and weddings are prime examples of these events. How many brides walk down the aisle with uncertainty? How many grooms do the same up at the altar, just waiting?
Does this mean no more weddings? Does this mean we must reconsider having children altogether? Neither is possible, yet opening up the conversation of these common themes brings those involved, hopefully, to a new understanding of what is really happening.
No one has more of a feeling of abandonment than the mother of the groom. That has been since the beginning of time. Books and movies have been written, humorously, about the shift of hanging onto the mother’s apron to the mother hanging on to the son’s coat as he leaves to be married or even leave home. On and on life goes with very little understanding of how guilt, shame and remorse plays out in all the situations that are viewed, at least by one of the participating persons, as abandonment.
Let’s talk about it.