Anita,

I had my walk early today, took the mostly non-icy route from town back home, walking on paved roads.

I appreciate that you share those everyday-life details. Thank you for that. Makes me smile.

It inspires me to change my routine and incorporate daily walks.

 Imagine someone stabbing another person and when the victim bleeds, the one stabbing says: you are too sensitive; if you weren’t too sensitive, you wouldn’t be bleeding!

That is exactly what my mom was doing. Additionally when I tried to defend myself she came up with another term: that I was hormonal. She used it for years, to shame me, to humiliate me. Her partner shouted at me and I responded? – Hormonal. My hands were shaking after she yelled at me and I replied back to her? – Hormonal. Around high school I learnt to not reply – now still fighting to un-learn that.

She disgusts me.

 Seems to me that I was born breech and low-weight (and remained lower weight than my peers at least through elementary and middle school) because she was underweight during her pregnancy with me.

My mother used to be very skinny (grandma used to go with her to doctors to check what is wrong with her), also was skinny while pregnant, also wasn’t showing for huge part of the time. I believe she never cared for her pregnancy. She never expressed that. Being underweight and not caring enough would be a reason.

Underweight women are more likely than those of normal weight to have a preterm delivery or a low-birth-weight infant“.

I weighed 2 kilograms at the moment of birth. She always felt sorry for me but in a cute way.

I am thinking that the silent treatment she gave you must have been very loud, so you hummed to cover the loudness of her silence.

I took a moment to remember her silence. It has been 3 years, I think, since she last gave me silent treatment. Her face, her angry face.. No, angry does not describe it, it was more than that: contempt, hatred, disgust, repulsion combined with anger.  At some point she almost entirely stopped yelling at me and used only silent treatment, only her face expression, it was so powerful, all she needed to do is give me the look.

My mother was silent toward me for days after each rage attack, deathly, loudly silent.

Anita, there are times I confuse your memories with mine. I will repeat after you: “as if I wrote this”.

She used to tell me how grandma was giving her silent treatment and my mother would “wake up at night, feeling like she was going crazy”. I had the same feeling. That’s why I took Xanax as a drug for years. It was too much for me to have this feeling at night – I refused to feel it, for years.

Earlier, when I was a young child I had this weird feeling.. I can’t describe it exactly because I still do not know what it was. Something like a dream, but I wasn’t sleeping, maybe half a dream. Imagining something, like a fantasy. I apologize if this is not clear. I read about dissociation many times but it does not quite fit.

I would have been very grateful if it wasn’t for the fact that… she hated me so much. What a shame, what a waste… there could have been love instead of hate. There could have been a loving relationship between me and her, a loving mother-daughter relationship, something I will never know. I wonder how it’d feel.

How simple and perfectly said. Yesterday after we talked about tics I was lying in bed calmly and thought about how would it be like, if those ticks just disappeared.. There were couple of seconds I did not move my eyes, I thought “what if I magically make those ticks disappear forever, right here, right now”.. no sudden movements, no being tired of doing it every day all the time. I felt it to be true for a moment, it felt so powerful.

It would be delightful to know how life would be.

I felt her warmth and listened to her gentle humming (she hummed to the pleasant, relaxing music playing in the background) and I thought to myself: this is probably how it feels.

This must have been nice. I was in a bus today and saw this girl and a mother. The girl (around 9/10yo) was sick, I think, was not feeling well. Mother was checking on her again and again, could not do much about it I assume, but hugged her a couple of times. Did not even say much. It looked so selfless, she was not looking around to see if anyone saw that, to be praised for that. So nice. Costs nothing.