A Soft Place to Land: The Uniqueness of a Mother’s Love

As Mother’s Day approaches, I’m reminded of my own mother and her contribution to my capacity to love, feel for others, and walk courageously throughout life. Healthy mothers are not extraneous, fungible, or interchangeable with fathers—they are unique, critical to a child’s emotional security and future mental health. They provide sensitive and empathic nurturing, which is the foundation of compassion for others. They are selfless, which models the ability to sacrifice for one’s own children in the future. Their unique brand of unconditional love is unlike any other love you will ever feel in your life.

Empathy is not something we are born with, just as we are not born resilient to stress. We learn to feel for and think about others from how our mothers feel for and think about us. It is through their tireless love, attention, and vigilance—when we are in distress, comforting and soothing us, protecting us from harm—that we learn to nurture and give to others. It is this emotional attunement, where our mother’s physical and emotional presence provides us with emotional resonance, that teaches us to resonate with others’ pain. 

My own mother was, and in my heart still is, the person I could go to when I was in pain or distress. She was always there to soothe me through the painful parts of my childhood and young adulthood. My father was also an incredible and loving support to me as I was growing up, but in a different way. When I was being teased as a young adolescent by a group of bullies, it was my mother who comforted me with loving and sensitive words and physical affection. My father also comforted me, but in a different way. He told me I was a Komisar and that I could show those mean girls that I was confident and strong. He gave me pep talks and tried to shore me up to face the social challenges ahead. My mother, however, was the one who cuddled me and provided the emotional resonance for my distress—something that was necessary for me to even be able to take my father’s advice. Each wanted to protect me, but in their own unique manner.

The resilience and courage we seek for our children does not come from making them self-sufficient, independent, or tough at too young an age—it comes from providing them with a soft place to land.

We have forgotten so much wisdom about the importance of mothers in a time when women are only seen as valuable for their contributions to the economy of the household rather than to the emotional capital of the family. How can we pass these important lessons of empathy and emotional resonance to our children if we are not there much of the time because we are out pursuing our individual ambitions?

The resilience and courage we seek for our children to exhibit does not come from making them self-sufficient, independent, or tough at too young an age—it comes from providing them with a soft place to land. A place where they can come to us to receive love, understanding, and comfort, so they can go out into the world with the internal confidence and security that they are loved and lovable, unconditionally, without their achievements or material successes as barometers of their worth. A mother’s love gives children this sense of themselves in the world—as whole and imperfect, but loved and valuable. It is the core of a child’s self-esteem, transmitted from a nurturing mother to her child through her sensitive, empathic, and loving responses to sadness, fear, distress, anger, frustration, and even excitement.

This Mother’s Day, remember that a mother’s love is unique and critically important to the development of a child’s sense of themselves as valuable and loveable—but also to their empathy, their capacity to think about and feel for others, and their deep emotional ability to relate to and be intimate with others. When we devalue or dismiss a mother’s unique role, we dismiss the importance of her influence on our humanness.

Even though she has been gone for many years, my mother is still with me. In Judaism, when someone dies, we say: “May their memory be a blessing.” My mother’s memory is a blessing, each and every day, in my capacity to think about, feel for, and relate to others deeply.

Erica Komisar, LCSW is a psychoanalyst and author of Being There:  Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters and Chicken Little The Sky Isn’t Falling:  Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.