Dear eris:

I’ve been thinking about your post often in the last hour plus, talking to you in my head, so I am back to stop that talking.

The Happily-ever-After dream and she, your mother neatly removing herself from the story. It makes me think of my redo dreams. It is as if I was saying: “No, no, this cannot be it, this cannot be My Life. It is all wrong. If I will make her happy, then she will like me, then I will have the life I am supposed to have. I wanted so badly to just BE, care free, to no longer suffer.

But I had to suffer, so I believed, because I was bad, I was making my mother hurt and bad. If I suffer, if I make it up to her…Oh, that happily-ever-after dream: my mother happy, smiling at me, liking me, liking ME, of all people.

“From now on” I said to myself thousands of times, “From now on, I will be perfect. I will do nothing wrong. I will be very careful. And she will like me.” And every time I failed. There it was, her explosion, hell on earth, death and destruction. I say death because she histrionically threatened suicide, not someday, but right there and then. I was there at five and twenty five, with her. I had to be until she was not going to kill herself. Or me. In the quiet of the night.

The intensity of the fear, the despair cannot be described with words. I believe you felt it, you know it. I’ve been dizzy since I felt it in your post, in your anger at her. Of course, we didn’t have the same mother, or the same story but I think we experienced the same hurt and it is a mind boggling kind of hurt, such that expressed as anger, will make it possible for me to pick up a huge rock and squash the world in one drop of that rock.

anita