Dear Cali Chica:

Lie: Cali Chica was a difficult child.

Truth: It is your mother who was difficult, a difficult person to live with, for your father, for you, for your sister and for anyone in a relationship with her.

Lie: your mother was an abused woman, her life as an adult has been tragic.

Truth: your mother was not an abused woman and as an adult, she lived a privileged life that millions of women envy.

Truth: as a child, your mother was abused. As an adult she was more of an abuser than her own childhood abusers. As an adult, she felt entitled to abuse, which is a hallmark of abuse and abusers, a sense of entitlement… now that I can (do to others what was done to me/hurt others), I will !

–“the mother voice was never questioned”- young children never question their parents, it never happens.

If your father hit her early in their marriage, well, she wasn’t scared of him hitting her when she had an affair with another man, so unafraid that she and her husband drive peacefully to meet the other man in her life.

Your mother was a spiteful, vengeful, entitled-feeling, selfish woman who had no regard for others’ well being, including her own daughters. Yes, she was the difficult one, very difficult, bad news really, for anyone having the misfortune of marrying her and worse, born to her

Your mother’s focus was always.. her. She was her own focus. It doesn’t matter to her if she does wrong by another, what matters to her is that she feels badly. If she has an affair and feels badly, then she is the victim. I will exaggerate so to make a point: let’s say she murders an innocent person and her arm hurts because of the physical exertion involved- in her mind, she is the victim because her arm hurts.

Lie: “she has dedicated her whole life to us, blood sweat and tears”.

Truth: she has dedicated her whole adult life to revenge, to punish anyone and everyone available to her anger.

Lie: “we are not allowed any judgement”

— – Your dominant angry and vengeful mother and her passive victim and co-victimizer of you and your sister did indeed distract you “from your own personal needs/thoughts very early on” because in your mother’s brain you didn’t matter, your needs and thoughts were none of her concern. For her, no  one mattered but herself. Of course, you learned “to avoid, and ignore these Innate feelings… ignoring what I am feeling and moving forward. Running- not just the body but the mind“-

-within that mental unit of child/mother she mattered, you did not. As you became a woman, still she matters, you don’t. Her life was not about you, it was about her. Your life was not about you, it was about her. One mental unit.

“I feel a small flicker of joy.. a microsecond.. my brain quickly jumps to the next thing… not able to pause.. to sink and savor. Even in the middle of the night when there is no other task at hand”- your mother is there, still, demanding as always: my life/your life is about me! Look at me! Here I am! Attend to me! me! me!

And when she gets a person’s attention, she then proceeds with her revenge objective. So you look at that box, feels a microsecond of joy but you can’t stay there, can’t relax into it, because you have to attend to your mother and her agenda: to punish, take revenge, pay the price of her long gone childhood.

No one stays in place for revenge, everyone runs away, if not in body, then in mind.

anita