Dear Stacey:

I read what you shared about your childhood, and I don’t want to repeat it here, it feels like it would be disrespecting that horrific experience you mentioned, for  me to type it on a public forum with a smiley emoji on the same page (a pervious post).

I will tell you then about my childhood experience, I don’t mind sharing it here: it was night time, I was about five, my mother was having a very loud fight with my father (the only memory I have of him living at “home” as they divorced soon after), I remember it was very, very loud and she announced that she was going to kill herself. Then she left and he left, and I was alone and I walked outside the small apartment, down the stairs in the dark, and then I looked for her body on the small path leading to the street, looked to my right, to my left. I guess there was some light, maybe moon light. As I did that, I suddenly imagined that I was in a movie and saw myself from the point of view of a camera, filming me, and I felt better, like a movie star in a movie.

I finally found her on the street, I woke up from my movie dream, and said out loud, ecstatic: “You are Alive!” and ran to her. But she pushed me away angrily. She didn’t take me into her arms, she pushed me away and accused me for doing something wrong, for saying out loud something wrong.

After that, my mother said many times that she wants to kill herself, that she will kill herself, that her life is not worth living, and that I was a bad person, that I wanted to hurt her, that I was pushing her to kill herself, and no matter how much I tried to tell her and show her that I loved her, she didn’t believe me and she kept getting angry at me. T

As an older child, I remember walking outside when it was dark, picking a star and praying to the star that she will be alive when I get home, or that she will come back from work (instead of being dead and not coming home).

Her behavior went on into my adulthood. The most intense part of my lifetime suffering has been the guilt  I felt for making my mother so miserable and for not rescuing her from her misery. I’ve been in an ongoing healing process since 2011 (I ended all contact with my mother in 2013) and it is only recently that I made the greatest progress on the matter of getting over my mother.

And now, back to you. I re-read your posts. Following are quotes from you and my thoughts:

“I tried to reach out and I apologized for every wrong that I could think of- multiple times.. I tried to reach out multiple times expressing love, apologies etc. I mailed him a card expressing my love. No response. I foolishly thought he did not receive it or any of my messages.. I felt he was mad at me.. I apologized because I didn’t want him to be mad at me. I wanted to reconnect. I don’t know if I am making sense.”-

– these quotes remind me of how desperately I tried to make my mother see me, notice me, notice that I loved her so much. But “No response”, day after day, night after night, year .. decade after decade: no response. All the love for my mother.. none of it reached her. And I too apologized in so many ways, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that I wasn’t willing to do, so that she will forgive me, for whatever it is she hated about me, so that she will love me, and be alive.

Like you, I “foolishly thought” that if I send her another and yet another message of how much I loved her, that she will finally receive that message. But all my turmoil, all my decades old suffering, she knew none of it. It is so strange to love someone so much, and that person knowing none of it.

About the man, three years after, you are focused on him for a reason. He means way more for you than a man you met (I assume) as an adult. It is a relationship with/ about a parent that I see projected into him, as is often the case: relationships with parents projected into romantic relationships in all ways emotional.

He was wrong to ghost you and then to verbally attack you. I don’t know how he was able to receive your messages and .. ghost you, as if you were a ghost, not a living and breathing woman in love. I wish there was a way for you to send him a message he will hear, but he is married now, three years in. If you send him any message, you would definitely look what he said you were, emotionally unstable. So what to do, how to heal from this, how to move on???

Only one way comes to my mind, and that is, healing from the original hurt, that traumatic hurt from childhood. Nothing less than that worked for me.

This post is an intense post for me to write, and I don’t even know if you will respond to it. I imagine some people will freak out receiving this post. It feels risky for me to send it. To me it feels almost too  intense. Nonetheless, these are my sincere thoughts.

anita