butchcommunist:

The fact that many women’s first experiences with being told how to be women comes in the form of lecturing from their mothers about the ways they sit or chew or walk when they are girls is not something we can sweep aside. Frankly it is unsurprising- people do often pass on their pain and hurt from trauma in different ways when they have the absolute power over another human being which entitles them to do so (like in the case of mothers) and considering that girlhood and womanhood are largely collections of traumas and traumatic moments it makes sense that women who’ve been brought up to see order and peace in their own denigration might pass these values onto their children. We might also not be surprised that many mothers lash out at their children because they are the only people with whom they come into regular contact, having been sequestered off from the world in general and made into 24/7 maids, tutors, housekeepers, gardeners, personal chefs, and so on- the enormous stress of the standard way of doing motherhood hurts women, makes them badly emotionally scarred, and places all responsibility for upbringing of children on them in a way that no single human being could possibly ever fulfill. But that doesn’t make this passing on of generational pain less real or important, or less terrible of a thing to put a child through- it has very real implications and very real effects on grown women years later.