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Date: 7th May 2021, Posted by mollie
Dear friends,
Where ever you are in the world, whether you’re a mum or not, it’s fab to celebrate our mothers. So many of my loveable heroines have been created because of their strong mothers. Women create, nurture and give birth to life. But not all mums know how to love their daughters. Sometimes their daughters don’t meet their mum’s expectations. Or their mums have had a difficult life themselves. That doesn’t make their mums inherently bad. A true heroine knows how to spin gold from straw and sparkle through the darkness. That’s what makes them so loveable.
As I share in my children’s book, Why Doesn’t Mummy Love Me?
As a child therapist, I had the privilege of hearing from boys and girls, young and old, who told me that their mummies didn’t love them as they should.
“If I was my mother, I wouldn’t drink,” one 8-year-old said. His father was in prison and his mother was at the pub. Luckily he had an excellent GRAND-mummy who was raising him and bringing him to therapy to help with his anger issues.
“My mother wanted custody of my sister, but she didn’t come for me. She doesn’t want me. She doesn’t love me. I’m no good,” a 12-year-old boy referred, also for anger issues, told me.
“I want to kill myself,” a 10-year-old sobbed. “My mother is always yelling at me. The more I try to do to make her happy, the more she gives me and then she shouts when I can’t do it all. She wouldn’t care if I died.”
Look into their mother’s history, as I helped these children do, and as I have done to heal my own wounds, and they discover that their mothers are walking wounded. Their mummies (and daddies) rather than learn from their childhoods, victimise all, or some of their children.
One woman, now in her mid-fifties, was the daughter of a mother raised by an alcoholic. “I don’t remember my mother ever being sober,” her mother once confided in her. “And my father flew into violent rages.”
A child of divorced parents once said to her mother, “If you don’t love my dad that means you don’t love half of me.”
I can see the logic, but also the mistaken belief – because her mother had raised her on her own and had given her more love than 20 fathers ever could.
Reflecting now I wonder if a mother doesn’t or can’t love her daughter perhaps there is 50 per cent or more about herself that she doesn’t love either. Perhaps because of the damage inflicted by her mummy (or daddy) too.
Only love loves. It’s often a hard lesson to learn. So many unloved children suffer from mental illnesses, which if left unexamined extends into adulthood
“I was four or five I ran away from home. It’s my earliest memory of wanting to find someone to love me,” a client shared with me.
“I think my mother-story started at birth. I was the first-born— a girl. Not the son my parents wanted. But perhaps the daughter upon whom my father doted. They quickly tried again. My brother, my mother’s favourite, arrived with lungs that never stopped yelling, 11 months after I was born.”
“Don’t show off,” her mother scolded my client, then a child, when she would come home from school with A’s. “Don’t do so well, you know your brother finds school hard.”
She told me that both her siblings later excelled commercially.
“Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t be that. Don’t wear that. Don’t say that. Whack! Don’t be left-handed,” she was told with smack and smack.
“Don’t! Don’t. I soon lost myself. I became a mummy pleaser—or, rather, I tried. Bending over to try to be loved, keeping quiet when I wanted to cry or share something that made me happy. I pursued careers in accounting and banking to make my parents happy—at the cost of my own mental and emotional health.”
I can assure you people-pleasing is not a winner’s strategy. If someone has taken a dislike to you, sometimes, like a person who hates eating fish, their distaste never changes.
Nor should you.
If you can’t be loved by your mother unconditionally then love yourself unconditionally. Warts, pimples, freckles, flaws and extraordinary talents and all. Because you are a star. We all are. Some stars live in dark galaxies, and others need to live in the light to shine brightly.
Promise me you won’t play small to make others feel tall. Be greater today than the story of your past.
Everyone’s mean-mother story is unique. As one of my clients shared, “My issues with my Mum were a bit different. She definitely had a victim mentality and while she would say she was proud of me and my brother with our achievements, there was always a little dig about how much luckier we were than she was. She ‘took umbrage’ (her words) to everything and always seemed to turn an innocuous comment into a personal attack on her. Threatened suicide several times which meant every time I had a fight with her, I had to ring one of her friends afterwards to check in on her to make sure she hadn’t done anything stupid. I think when Dad left (when I was 15), she defined herself as a divorced woman and never recovered.”
Of course, it’s not just mums that can be mean, or manipulative. There’s plenty of mean and toxic dads out there. If you think you were or are lucky to have your mum or dad, I promise you one day you’ll look back and you’ll understand why you had your parents.
Like my book coaching client Heather who channelled her lack of love into teaching and later became a children’s self-empowerment author.
Similarly, author and creator of Hay House books, Louise Hay who was sexually and emotionally abused as a child, transformed her wounds into wisdom. Hay’s success lay in highlighting the power of our words to both heal and harm.
David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, based Livia heavily on his own mother, Norma Chase. He described her as being paranoid, sharp-tongued, abusive, and disregarding her son’s career achievements. Many of Livia’s memorable lines, such as “Poor you” (something my mother said whenever I tried to tell her how I felt) are what Norma Chase would say. Rather than be victimised he spent time in psychotherapy and channelled his experiences of growing up with a narcissistic mother into the gangster Tony Sopranos, mother.
Or Kiwi songbird, Kiri Te Kanawa, who said, “I learned early on to be self-reliant.”
Similarly, actress Drew Barrymore divorced both parents when she was fifteen.
In short, it’s easy to imagine who you may have become had your mother been kinder, nicer, sweeter.
But what if the real tragedy is, who would you not have become had life treated you differently? What if your life unfolded exactly as it should? What if there was a divine plan? There’s magic in that!
“Go laugh in the places you cried. Change the narrative. Everything aligns.”
I hope you enjoy this collection of some of my favourite love stories and the heroines their not always so loving mums created.
Devastatingly handsome Oliver Hart is used to getting what he wants. Single, thirty-five, and a committed bachelor he plays by his own rules. On a personal quest to catch a rare, elusive and very valuable butterfly he’s unwillingly distracted by former flame Ruby Diaz — a woman who callously abandoned him eight years earlier. When he decides he wants to reclaim the beauty as his own — in his mind, it’s as good as done.
But Ruby’s not his for the taking. Promised to the son of a wealthy landowner she refuses to succumb to his charms. On a quest to save her family land Ruby knows she must put duty first and silence the passionate stirrings of her heart. But Oliver doesn’t make things easy for her. He’s not taking no for an answer.
Risking everything to help the woman he loves to gain her freedom, Oliver entangles himself in an emotional net that alters his life forever. As he sacrifices his own selfish pursuit to help Ruby he realizes that you may be able to own something but you can never own someone – especially the women you love.
“This is a well-written book that tantalizes your senses. Will Oliver be able to convince Ruby that she loves him enough to disobey her family? Can they find each other when all seems lost? An excellent book that I highly recommend. It will have you laughing with joy and crying with sadness.”
~ Marie Fraser
“Mollie Mathews has written a beautifully scripted story of two people wildly attracted to each other but too constrained by family expectations to allow themselves to commit. When they meet again after eight years can they move beyond old patterns of behavior or are they doomed to always want, but never have?”
~ Jane Whitmeyer
“This book is a carefully crafted, truly original story. Mollie’s wonderfully descriptive narrative paints a picture in which it is easy to lose oneself—I really felt like I had been to Mexico by the time I had finished. Her butterfly theme echoes throughout the book both literally and figuratively. The main characters, Oliver and Ruby, are each conflicted in their own ways. Despite facing challenges, both ultimately find the strength to work through their difficulties to emerge better people, and most importantly, triumph over adversity together. A touching and heart-warming book, well worth a read.”
~ Cathy Rioran
To grab your copy from Amazon, click here>>getBook.at/FlightofPassion
To grab your copy from iBooks, Barnes & Noble and other great bookstores, click here>>https://www.books2read.com/u/bpp0LJ
To grab your copy from kobo, click here>>https://www.kobo.com/ebook/flight-of-passion-3
AUDIBLE
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https://www.audible.com/pd/Flight-of-Passion-Audiobook/B0874YCXVL
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https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Flight-of-Passion-Audiobook/B0874X8TGX
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https://www.audible.com.au/pd/Flight-of-Passion-Audiobook/B0874Y3V2T
KOBO
https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/audiobook/flight-of-passion-4
To enjoy your copy from Amazon: getbook.at/ClaimedByTheSheikh
To enjoy your copy from iBooks, Barnes & Noble and other great bookstores:
https://books2read.com/u/brVjdZ
To enjoy your copy from Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/claimed-by-the-sheikh-8
AUDIOBOOK
KOBO
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/claimed-by-the-sheikh-9
AUDIBLE
US
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08ZB1KSM3
UK
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Claimed-by-the-Sheikh-Audiobook/B08Z9L7D9G
AU
https://www.audible.com.au/pd/Claimed-by-the-Sheikh-Audiobook/B08ZB8H17F
44-year-old Ruby Evans doesn’t want to be a ‘leftover girl.’ But finding a ‘forever’ man is proving impossible.
Suddenly single after 20 years of marriage, her husband is the only man she has ever slept with. But the one bit of security she always thought she’d hold onto for the rest of her life is brutally ripped from her.
Humiliatingly and cruelly ex-ed when her husband trades her for a younger model, Chanel Zest, a long-time friend and motivational life coach, comes to her rescue. Together they embark on a quest to reclaim and rebuild Ruby’s shattered life and begin the grueling process of dating again.
Once in a pink moon, Ruby has to play dirty…
If you loved Brigette Jones’s Diary and enjoy romantic comedy, you’ll love Sex With Strangers.
Full of quirky humor and the promise of a happily ever after.
Sex with Strangers is a clean romantic comedy with a few spicy bits.
“I loved the humor”
“I absolutely enjoyed this story. I loved the storyline, I loved the characters, I loved the humor. I couldn’t put it down. The descriptions were perfect. I loved everything about this book especially the humor. It was funny, sad at times, and I loved it.”
~ Patricia Quinn
“It was cute and fun to read. I really enjoyed the story because I liked it was charming and cute, a little humorous. I thought this story was a great kept my interest, had to finish the story I would recommend it to friends and family.”
~ Carol G.
“A playful and true view of a recently divorced woman. Every woman who has gone through a divorce after more than one-decade long marriage identifies with this story. The insecurities about going out single again, the difficulties in relating to previous friends as most of them are couples (nobody likes to be the third wheel), the feeling that you are viewed as a competitor (by a previous friend) and the list goes on. Not everyone has a supporting net as Ruby – the main character – does and even though her life coach has quite a few shortcomings about relating to people and finding love she does help Ruby to get on with her life. There are quite a few steamy parts but most of the book is written with a lot of humor and the characters are easy to get fond of. It’s a true picture of modern newly divorced women and it was a fun read!”
~ Claudete Takahashi
To enjoy on Amazon: getbook.at/SexWithStrangers
To enjoy on iBooks, Barnes & Noble and other great bookstores: https://books2read.com/u/4EkM6z
To enjoy on Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/sex-with-strangers-13
Audio
Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/sex-with-strangers-14
Audible
USA
https://www.audible.com/pd/Sex-with-Strangers-Audiobook/B08BTKHJ61
UK
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Sex-with-Strangers-Audiobook/B08BTSSB6L
Australia
https://www.audible.com.au/pd/Sex-with-Strangers-Audiobook/B08BTKDD8R
Would you protect a murderer to save your family? Three women. Three lives. And the lies that bind them. Why is everyone afraid of the truth?
When a lonely young American woman inherits a painting she discovers her whole life was a lie. Desperate for the truth, she goes in search of her true identity. The painting is her only clue. But everyone is determined to keep its secret past repressed, including Vitaliano Rossi, the Italian gold tycoon, unnaturally suspicious of her motives, who wants the painting vanquished. How can she discover who she really is and convince him that his love means more to her than gold?
“I loved the premise that she needs the hero to unlock the secrets to explain her past—it’s great conflict.”
“The Italian Billionaire’s Scandalous Marriage,” by Mollie Matthews was an interesting read, to say the least. Ms. Matthews brings two characters to life in this enchanting tale of personalities that clash through much of the book. Determination not to give up shows the strength of these characters. This is a well-written novel. The author has done a wonderful job. I highly recommend this book and I think you will find it a good read.
“When Alexandra receives a lawyer’s letter informing her that the father she has no knowledge of, has left her an inheritance, including a very special and priceless painting, her world is thrown into disarray. Alex leaves the comfort of her home in New York to investigate her past in New Zealand where she is confronted by the unusual painting she names Lost Love. The painting stirs up more questions than answers and the simple investigation into the life of her father turns into a multidimensional mystery. It also brings an angry Vitaliano Rossi across her path and before she knows it, her life is intricately bound with his. In a relationship where both Alex and Vitali mistrust one another, theirs is a battle of wits as Vitali wants the painting every bit as much as Alex does, but neither will divulge the reasons as to why they do. The attraction between Vitali and Alex is electric and although the book is relatively clean, there is enough passion between them to boil water. As truths emerge and they come to an understanding of each other’s motives, the love that has been simmering between them comes out in full force. I loved both Vitali and Alex and even though Vitali was arrogant and seemed to be self-serving, he is nevertheless an exciting hero, whilst Alex is the kind of woman we can all identify with. This is an excellent and somewhat suspenseful read.”
To grab your copy from Amazon>> getBook.at/ScandalousMarriage
To grab your copy from Ibooks, Barnes & Noble and other great bookstores,>>https://books2read.com/u/mVNdn5
To grab your copy from Kobo>>https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-italian-billionaire-s-scandalous-marriage-1
AUDIOBOOK
The Italian Billionaire’s Scandalous Marriage
US
UK
AU
KOBO
https://www.kobo.com/en/audiobook/italian-billionaire-s-scandalous-marriage-the
The audio version of this book is also available from all online bookstores and also libraries
Enjoy other full-length contemporary romances by Mollie Mathews:
The Italian Billionaire’s Christmas Bride
p.s.
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