How Going to a Spa Helped Me Heal My Relationship With My Mom

The author, Annette Foglino (Photo: Nancy Adler)

It was at the Golden Door spa, outside of San Diego, that I fully faced my feelings about growing up as a “motherless child,” even though my mother is still alive.

When I was 5, a nice lady from the principal’s office pulled me out of kindergarten and told me that my mother “was sick” and had gone to the hospital. My father was waiting outside to take my younger brother and me to my grandparents’ home to look after us.

I knew my mother wasn’t physically ill, but she wasn’t like other mothers: Sometimes she would stay up late reading encyclopedias or the Bible. Or she’d scribble odd phrases in notebooks. Instead of having milk and cookies waiting for us after school, she was often in bed, medicated (or, as she now recollects, overmedicated).

Children who grow up with a mother who cannot be there for them — whether because of mental illness, addictions, or other issues — experience insecurities similar to those of children whose parent died at an early age. “It leaves holes in your sense of self — related to which ingredients were missing — and a hole in your inner mother, your ability to nurture and support yourself,” says psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori, author of The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed.

Related: How Visiting a Remote Island Helped Me Connect to the World After Losing My Mother

For years, I was lost in a matrix of sadness, wishing I could help (fix) my mother, anger, and guilt — and guilt about my anger (which I didn’t realize until much later).

Golden Door helped me begin to fill the hole.

The Golden Door (Golden Door/Facebook)

Spas in general are “mothering” places. They are places where you get “pampered,” swaddled in sheets and towels, and fed lovingly arranged, healthy meals. The moment you set foot in a spa like Golden Door, the message is clear: You are here to be taken care of.

As I entered Golden Door, I was greeted by a soothing woman with a calm, clear voice who offered me tea before leading me along a wooden path surrounded by a Japanese garden paradise of bamboo, birds, and ponds. She opened the door to my room, which had my very own little porch and pink-blossomed tree. She reminded me a few times that if there was anything I needed, she would make it happen.

I started out acting like a newly independent teen, telling her, “Everything is fine (Mom).”

My mother could be charming, with a quick intellect and a musical laugh, when she was “up.” But when she was down, her movie-star smile would disappear. She would be lost in a faraway stare, and it was hit or miss whether she would answer to “Mom” or anything else.

The message I received was clear: “You’re not important.” But I didn’t hear it as words; I absorbed it into my cells.

I would look out the bay window of our suburban house and long for life beyond the glass. When it wasn’t as quiet as a morgue, I could become the target of my mother’s depression and anxiety.

You’d think I would have learned how to be alone, but instead I feared emptiness.

That’s why I was surprised, during my first spa yoga class, when I finally felt at peace just breathing. The suggestion “Take a deep breath” had always irked me — breathing was automatic, boring, and usually silent, all things I hated.

Maybe it was the safety and security of the spa’s womblike surroundings, but as I filled my lungs in this yoga studio, I began to float. I melded with tree branches outside, singing birds, and dewy streams of morning light outside … becoming part of nature, but still me.

During a detox wrap, while swathed with lotion and lovingly cocooned in a warm blanket, harp music playing softly over me, I began to think about the friends and colleagues I’d known over the years who also felt like motherless children. We all shared a sense of being cheated, even robbed. We had to become adults before we were ready. When you feel like a motherless child, you’re always longing, always denied. You think something must be wrong with you, that you are marked somehow for having done something horrible to deserve deprivation.

Then I started noticing the mothers.

In the dining room, at least half of the guests were accompanied by their mothers. Some were laughing together; one woman at our table bragged that her daughter had just became a vice president at her firm.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine being there with my mother. Often, because of her anxieties, a trip to the grocery store could be a major journey.

For the rest of the week, mothers and daughters appeared everywhere. I saw them on the way to aqua aerobics, going to a belly-dancing class, or just relaxing on their patios with wet hair and white robes.

Related: Get Zen at These Top Health Spas

Walking meditation path at Golden Door (Golden Door/Facebook)

On my last night, all this mother-daughter synchronicity reached a crescendo. I participated in the spa’s walking-meditation ritual, which involves holding candles and following the circling path of an outdoor labyrinth. At the center, each person burned a note describing what she wanted to let go of. Mine said, “Insecurity and anxiety.”

Of course, the women in front of me were a mother and daughter. When the daughter got to the center, she had tears streaming down her face. Her mother gave her a beautiful, comforting hug. “She just got a divorce,” the mother whispered. Though at the time, empathy wasn’t my strong suit, with the sweet, somber notes of “Ave Maria” playing from nearby speakers, tears welled up in my eyes, too.

The only maternal love I felt as a child was from my grandmother. After my mother returned home from that weeks-long hospital stay, I missed living with my father’s mother. She had acted as though she adored me and took me shopping, bought me presents, and fed me treats.

Then the mother in front of me gave me a hug. It may sound strange, but I felt the full force of maternal love from her; and, more important, it was OK for me to have it.

I also knew that beyond the anger, I would have to become my own loving mentor and mother.

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