Dear joanna:

There are a few things in your recent posts that I didn’t attend to or not enough, and would like to do so this morning, your quotes and my thoughts:

March 26: “if only I had thick hair she wouldn’t have bullied me about it”- she would have bullied you for having thick hair, or hair that is too dark or too light or unruly, or too straight. If she didn’t bully you about your hair, she would have bullied you about your body posture, and she did.

“If only I knew grammar better she wouldn’t have yelled at me”- she would have yelled at  you for not knowing math, or for not writing your “a” the way she prefers it written.

“She was angry at me that I made errors in homework”- everyone makes error in homework. She did too when she was a child. But notice what a huge error she was making terrorizing you as she did, causing you all this misery. All those homework errors are forgotten and of no consequence. Her yelling at you, on the other hand, is not and can not be forgotten.

“when I was born she was so happy to have me”- how do you know that? You weren’t there. She told you that she was… and you believed her. We do believe what our parents say. We don’t question them. Not as children, we don’t. Question it now.

“That she barely let anyone else hold me. she wanted to be the only one to hold me”- does it mean that a mother who lets other adults hold her baby is not a loving mother? Her  motivation can be possessiveness, such as: this is my doll, my toy! I am not sharing!

“Loved this idea of a baby that was born”- a doll, a toy to play with?

“then I started to disappoint her as I grew up and started becoming ‘a person'”- and not a doll to play with as she wishes, an unchangeable doll, a toy that looks the same all the time, same expression, moving only if she moves her. Total control of an object.

“She started to notice those hair, me being skinny, my defects in speech, not standing straight”- the first three read to me like consequences of her behavior and the last one, a consequence of a very thin girl carrying a heavy backpack to school.

Notice, your mother’s hair can be criticized, and everything else about her body can be criticized if there is someone motivated to do so.

March 27: “I also was born with footling breech problem, and my mother was very skinny and didn’t care about herself during pregnancy”- I must have been very tired yesterday to miss this remarkable similarity in our experiences. What are the chances? Less than 5%, I read.

So you were a very thin child because your mother didn’t eat well when pregnant with you. And then she blamed you for the direct consequences of her behavior.

“she never directly blamed me for that” (the footling breech birth)- neither did my mother. She told me the story repeatedly, that is all. Children take the blame even if it is not stated.

“she started to be ashamed of me because I had some issue with one leg… for couple of weeks after birth”- you were born breech, like me, most likely as a result of your mother not eating enough and you being underweight. She felt ashamed of the .. consequence of her behavior.

“All children slouched at school because of carrying backpacks”- would have been nice if your mother talked to the principal at school so to reduce the weight in your backpack, wouldn’t it, instead of blaming you and taking you to hospital.

“When someone says I am not guilty of having thin hair I can’t understand it. I have thin hair, it’s a fact”- it is also a fact, no less definite of a fact, that you are not responsible for having thin hair. It is likely that your mother is responsible for that, not you. Because she “didn’t care about herself during pregnancy” and she caused you a lot of unnecessary distress throughout your childhood.

“for last 12 years I didn’t want a desk in my room because I hated doing homework”- a consequence of her behavior (“she ‘helped me’ doing it, yelling at me and bullying me”, March 26).

Summary: what she criticized about you were things that were not only not of your choosing, not your responsibility, but often, the consequences of her choosing, her responsibility.

I gave you an example a long time ago, a person stabbing another than blaming the person stabbed for bleeding.

anita