Dear Maria:

You feel anger at your mother. Good thing. You feel anger at your mother and you express it here. Very good thing. Even better, you left, no longer living with her, it gets better and better.

It in natural to feel anger at a person who hurts you. Other animals do, this is our nature. The biological reason for anger is to motivate animals to protect themselves from abuse.

Regarding “other authority figures in my life, who I thought knew what they were doing, said ‘Being a mother is hard.. cut her  some slack’ when everything was clearly f*&^ abuse”-

It used to be that it was legal for parents to kill their children, and for any reason (no questions asked, no eyebrows raised, so I understand). It has been illegal for quite some time. Then it was legal for parents to beat their children, even to beat them hard, mercilessly. Then it became illegal so parents avoid doing that in public for fear of being arrested. Nowadays it is legal for a parent to abuse a child otherwise, that is, to keep them alive, to not draw blood or break bones, but to break their hearts. That is still legal. Not okay, but legal.

And so, those “other authority figures”, they are the descendants of the authority figures that believed it was  okay for a parent to kill her children. No questions asked.

Your anger doesn’t make you a bad person. It means you are a person, that is all it means.

anita