Motherhood: The Mother Link - The Magical Bond of Motherhood

By Cassandra Eason

"As a mother a woman is another person than the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night for nine months in her body. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother and remains a mother even though her child dies. For at one time she carried the child under her heart and it does not go out of her heart ever again."

--An Abyssinian noblewoman quoted by Leo Frobenius in "Der Kopf als Schicksal"

Mother love and maternal instinct have been central to humankind from the time when Mother Earth was first worshipped. Today mothering is still regarded as the fundamental psychological and perhaps psychic human relationship. Its cornerstone is love of the deepest, most enduring and altruistic kind.

Maternal intuition is one of the least researched aspects of the psychic experience and yet one to which almost all of us can relate. Mothers also draw upon superhuman strengths to save their children in life-threatening situations. But motherhood is not just composed of magic and spiritual links. A mother may show patience and care that last a lifetime for a sick or disabled child, and sacrifice her own happiness or even her life for that of her offspring.

Whatever our circumstances, we all have a mother who, for good or ill, has influenced our lives in profound ways. Even if they are no longer with us, our mothers live on in our hearts, and in our unconscious as well as conscious actions. A wise friend of mine once said that if you have children, you die a mother. If not, you die a mother's child.

The mother link stretches backward through history and forward to unborn generations, an elusive but unbreakable silver cord from Paleolithic caves to 22nd century space stations, where mothers will still pace the midnight hours with wakeful infants. It outlasts civilizations, and will endure until the end of the world.

Many women do see a religious significance in such dramatic examples of maternal intuition. Annette responded to a smell of burning that prompted her on an unconscious level to recognize a danger to her infant. Maternal intuition at its most dramatic is inexplicable in scientific terms. This power seems to operate as an automatic radar from a mother to her infant that enables her to detect unvoiced distress or unseen danger to her child whether they are together or miles apart.

Eleanor, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, wrote to tell me how a voice in her head warned her of danger and prevented her from inadvertently killing her son:

"When my three sons were young, I never went out in the car without ensuring they were clear of the driveway. One day when my youngest son was about two years old, I checked that the boys were inside and went to the garage, then backed out slowly. A loud and urgent voice in my head yelled "Stop!" and I jammed on the brakes. As I got out I found my son lying on the driveway with his head inches away from one of the back wheels. How he had gotten out I do not know, but he had obviously fallen. After that incident I always trusted my intuition concerning the children."

The maternal automatic radar is strongest before an infant has a sense of his or her own danger and the ability to take effective action. Maternal telepathy is the most common and easily understood of all psychic phenomena. Many people have experienced a paranormal cry of distress to a greater or lesser degree with their own offspring or can recall an incident in their own upbringing or family history when Mother or Grandma "knew." The instances of fathers experiencing this same sense of danger on a psychic level are comparatively few, so why should women have these promptings?

A survey on the medical differences between males and females carried out by the British magazine She in March 1997 may offer a clue to women's heightened sensitivity. Rita Carter, the journalist who investigated the findings, reported on brain scans which indicated that when women were asked to think sad thoughts the areas of their brains that registered emotion showed up to eight times more activity than those of men. This suggests that they might actually feel more sorrow, making women much better than men at empathizing with others. The image of women as intuitive, caring souls could be a real reflection of their biology. Women seem to be exquisitely attuned to their babies' crying, while men are better at picking up faint animal noises, a holdover perhaps from the time when they had to keep their ears pricked for prey while hunting.

Taken a step further, this fine tuning in women may extend to a psychic level, so that not only does the mother wake before the baby cries, but she can actually tune into the infant's psyche and take over its own warning system by using a telepathic link. Is this possible?

The psychologist Carl Jung was foremost in recognizing what he called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, and saw the mother/child relationship as one in which telepathic bonds are at their strongest. Jung's own mother Emilie had evolved psychic abilities and kept a diary in which she noted down all the strange occurrences in her life. Jung's maternal grandmother also had second sight. So Jung was part of a psychic chain. Such maternal influences suggested to Jung the possibility that the human mind and spirit did have many channels of communication that could not be explained in biological terms and that these abilities were inherent in the mother/child bond. He himself dreamed of his mother's death at the time she died.

Jung's private secretary, Aniela Jaffe, an analytical psychologist in her own right, noted that to Jung synchronicity was the fourth principle that must be added to the recognized triad of space, time and causality. Jung believed: "The mother/child relationship represents an archetypal situation par excellence. For a long time after the birth, the two form a psychophysical and later a psychic unity. Normally a strong psychic bond persists throughout childhood. It has its roots as much in the unconscious as in consciousness. Hence, a much smaller impetus is needed for synchronistic phenomena than with people with whom the unconscious bond is weaker and who are not contained in the one and the same archetypal situation."

There are experiences that cannot and should not be judged by materialistic criteria of frequency and statistical significance. Just as scientists cannot take a lover or a grieving widow or widower into a laboratory and quantify their love or grief, so there are no tools for measuring maternal links beyond rudimentary tests on lactation. The effect of breast-feeding on maternal intuition is discussed in one chapter of The Mother Link, but my own research suggests that bottle-fed babies are no less connected by this intangible power in times of crisis.

"Mother love is loving your mother and your mother loving you whatever happens forever, because she is your mother and you are her child."

--Jack Eason, aged thirteen

Mother love begins with wanting a child so badly it hurts. Not because all your friends are having one, not because babies are cute, or even because the biological clock is ticking like a time bomb, but because you already love the embryonic toddler, teenager and adult who are waiting to unfold from the as yet unfused cells of creation. Mother love is keeping faith with that child when he or she is sick, grumpy, ungrateful or frankly awful; being incredibly proud that you have reared a human being who is kind and gentle, brave and wise, and then letting your child go, maybe across the world, knowing that your love, if not conventional communication, will keep you close. It is accepting and forgiving your own fallibility and that of your mother.

I began writing The Mother Link with the desire to celebrate motherhood. I have been overwhelmed not only by the response I received to my appeals, but also by the fact that almost everyone I met in my daily world had a mothering experience that they wanted to share.

Most of these were endowed with great emotion: joy or sorrow, often a mixture of both. Whether we love our mothers, hate them or are ambivalent, they gave us life and most of them provided love and security to launch us on our way. If the mothering experience has been totally negative, we are not condemned to a repetition of our mothers' mistakes, but can reshape the destiny they imperfectly molded.

It is only now, as I approach fifty and am a mother myself, that I am beginning to appreciate the sacrifices my own mother made for me and the enduring values she passed on. They transcend any mistakes, any unkindness or possessiveness that stemmed from the disappointments of her own life spent in a tiny terrace house on the back streets of Birmingham, England, trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. More than anything, she wanted to be a writer. Every week she would send a short story to the Birmingham Evening Mail and every week would receive a polite rejection. I do not think the newspaper actually published short stories, but the hope kept her going.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I see her face in mine. I see her smile, a frown or a fleeting gesture. My lips formulate words she once spoke. In a sense I have recreated her into the ideal. Her sayings and eccentric ways have entered the family mythology. She insisted on cleaning the house from top to bottom on the day it was bulldozed for slum clearance, so that we wouldn't "show ourselves up," her favorite expression.

I remember her appalling rock cakes that my dad said would have won the war if they had been used as missiles. She would often recall how, when she was made a tram conductress during the war, on her first day she entangled the pole in the wires and brought down the entire system in the local tram depot.

I can laugh now, but was mortified the day she informed my snooty friends from the school I won a scholarship to that they had to go to the toilet in the hut in the garden because an enemy sniper had blown our bathroom off the side of the house.

In my children I can see her as well, especially in my daughters. Miranda, my youngest, has frequently been visited by Granny Beryl who died twenty years before she was born. I see in the girls, too, my mother's exact stance, her way of pursing her lips when she was annoyed. She is ever-present.

The freezer is merrily defrosting, having been left open by one of my offspring on an ice cream raid. There is a mountain of washing. The cat, having been parted from her kittens, is mewing piteously and pulling at my heart strings. On my desk is a letter from my bank manager, informing me we must subsist on bread and water for the next ten years to reduce the overdraft, and I have not yet bought the school uniforms for the coming term.

My mother's face comes into mind.

"What's for tea?" I ask her, as I did when I was a child.

"Bread and pullet."

"What's bread and pullet?" I demand for the thousandth time.

"Pull it open and you'll see what's inside nothing."

My children ask me why I am sitting at my computer alone, laughing. I tell them my mom's joke and they wander off, shaking their heads. It isn't any funnier forty years later, but I keep smiling and decide we'll go out for tea to celebrate. Mother love is the most natural state in the world, the most mystical and mundane. Like bread and pullet, if you take mother love apart to analyze its contents, there's nothing to measure. Yet it lies at the heart of human existence and is the purest and most enduring form of love.

Cassandra Eason is the author of Psychic Families, The Psychic Power of Children, The Handbook of Ancient Wisdom and Complete Guide to Psychic Development. See her website at

www.cassandraeason.co.uk