Personal experience

Abstract

In a personal narrative of maternal love and loss, trauma and strength, the author in her sixties makes an inward journey to touch the untold depths of love and pain that run through her as a constant stream. … I permit myself now to live in the house of the mothers and I call it mine. I think increasingly about all of our lives, about their deaths, about time passing and my own death ahead of me … I find myself both war correspondent and war casualty, and surely war criminal also … I do not fear death. It is legacy from my mothers, that death in itself brings only release. It is living that hurts … With insight comes compassion and reconciliation for the author, the women and the wounds. The loving strength of mothers and daughters overcomes the pain they inflict on one another. Scars remain but they are intelligent and wise. Is healing rooted within this understanding?