Dear Cali Chica:

Amazing: your thoughts were my thoughts, my goodness! What I am going to type next will take only a few moments and a few lines of a post but it has taken me months and years to realize after I cut my contact with my mother. It is going to be a condensing of my experience of countless hours into a few moments. Of course I am not expecting my sharing to affect you much or have any effect on you because you are not the one experiencing what I have experienced. Can’t get the affect or effect from just reading it. Here it is nonetheless:

1. I too thought that my mother will fall apart if I cut contact with her. I too thought she needed me so very much. I thought she couldn’t live without me. (and she did express such ideas very passionately at times)

What a surprise it was for me it was when I realized the following: it was me who needed her all this time (remember my couldn’t breathe without her experience I shared with you this very morning?) She didn’t need me. I needed her.

My goodness, I am still amazed at my discovery. All along I was focused on her, she was my number one. I was not her number one, far from it.

2. I too thought of my mother as ill and insane, that is, not in control of her abusive behavior, a victim of her own childhood, of her own life, of her own illness.

Again, what a surprise it was for me to realize that in addition to the truth I just stated, she was also cruel. That is, when she was angry at me, she intended to hurt me. This is what anger is about, there is a motivation in it to hurt. She was cruel because she repeatedly intended to hurt an innocent child who loved her desperately, and who needed her so very, very much. And then she followed her intention with action.

Repeatedly, over the span of years and decades.

I had great trouble understanding the two exist together: being a victim of her own childhood and being cruel.

anita