Last month I spent a weekend in Amsterdam, my ancestral home, where I had the emotional experience of standing on the same platform my great-grandmother stood in the late 1890’s, as she said goodbye to her parents, family, and friends, before boarding a ship bound for Indonesia, a Dutch colony at that time. Even though the platform looks rundown and neglected today, I could imagine the throng of people all dressed up for the occasion. I could feel their barely contained heart-wrenching emotions as they said goodbye to loved ones. Without email and Skype, keeping in touch was difficult back then, and I wondered what my young great-grandmother was feeling. Was she scared of never seeing her parents and family again? Was she nervous about her new life as a missionary’s wife in colonial Indonesia? What were her hopes and dreams? How much did she know about what was to be expected of her? And did she know that she would be saying goodbye to each of her children when they turned 6 years old, because convention dictated that children born in the colonies were to be sent home for their education?
My grandmother, having been born in Indonesia, returned to this same platform as a scared 6 year old. I heard my grandmother speak about being sent back to Holland only once when she was in her seventies. She said that her father took her to the wharf, and that she didn’t know that she was being sent away until she felt the ship pull away from the wharf. She said in a childlike voice that she screamed to her father and watched him walk away without looking back once.
The next time my grandmother stood on this platform was as a young married woman, returning to Indonesia with her husband. My mother was also born in Indonesia, and the final time my grandmother and mother stood on this platform was about 8 years after the second world-war, when my mother and her parents left Indonesia the last time, and returned to live in Holland.
Standing on the platform, I felt overwhelmed with emotion of how the women in my family kept having to say goodbye to the people they loved. And I felt angry about the way my family dismisses the emotional truth of my great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s life. My family honors wives and mothers who are dutiful and selfless, and they silence the emotional truth of what it was like for my great-grandmother and grandmother to be separated from their parents and loved ones. The facts, as I outline above, don’t do justice to telling the story of their lives. It doesn’t inquire after what my grandmother and great-grandmother needed, desired, nor what they secretly hoped for in their lives? It doesn’t speak about their relationship with their husband. Whether my great-grandfather and grandfather listened to their wives and honored their rights as people, or whether they silenced and emotionally neglected them.
Through my mother-daughter relationship work I have learned that telling the story of women’s emotional reality is vital for healing conflict between mothers and daughters, women’s emotional wellbeing, and challenging harmful beliefs and practices that silence women’s voices and limit women’s power and autonomy. When we understand, and have empathy for, what our female ancestors went through, felt, and needed, we increase our understanding and empathy for ourselves. We learn about the emotional impact caused by the events in women’s lives. And when we connect the dots between patriarchal beliefs and practices that are repeated generation after generation, and the emotional harm they inflict on women, we empower ourselves to fight for a new normal.
In my generational family, the separation my great-grandmother and grandmother experienced, along with the silencing of what they felt and needed, created sticky, emotionally manipulative power struggles between my mother and I, and my mother and grandmother. As I write in The Mother-Daughter Puzzle, when women’s needs are not inquired after, mothers and daughters fight over whose needs get to be met. When women are emotionally neglected, mothers and daughters fight over their respective emotional starvation. And when women’s lives are limited by restrictive gender roles and practices, mothers and daughters fight over their lack of freedom. Surmising what my great-grandmother and grandmother felt and needed has taught me how to speak what I am feeling and what I need emotionally. And through the awakening of this previously silent language, I am changing my own life and relationships, my daughter’s life, and the lives of women yet to be born.