Dear Cali Chica:

I attentively read all your posts from yesterday. I will quote you and comment, starting with the 5 year-old-exercise:

“I am 5 years old and I am sitting on my porch… Mom, it is so nice to sit outside in the sun. I feel sad when it is not sunny. In India it is always sunny.. but not here. Here everyone closes the door and sits inside all day by themselves. They don’t want to be nice or include me… Sometimes I go to play with my neighbors, they have lots of brothers and sisters… They are lucky that they can always play with each other… My mom said it is sad that we have to be alone. Other people always have each other”-

– your mother’s focus was over-there, over there people have each other. But what about over-here, what happened in her own home?

Did she experience that softness we’ve been discussing as she interacted with her husband, with you, later, with your younger sister… did she experience softness with anyone, longer than a fleeting moment here and there, perhaps?

She wanted more people while she was not experiencing  joy with the few people she did have at home.

But five year old doesn’t understand that her mother is closed off to all people- people here, there and everywhere. The five year old erroneously thinks that her mother is sad because her mother doesn’t have more people in her life. She thinks so because that is what her mother said.

Five year old CC loves her mother deeply, not yet mentally separated from her, and so, her empathy for her mother is perfect. Her mother is sad and there is nothing at all that the little girl will not do to make her mother happy. She will do anything.

Mother says she needs more people to be happy, so CC gets on a mission: to bring more people to her mother’s life, to make friends, to socialize and accumulate people.

CC doesn’t understand that her  mother is  lonely because she is hard, not capable or willing to get close to anyone. CC doesn’t know that more people will not make her mother happy when it is impossible for her to intimately, softly connect to a single person.

In general, people think of the ability to make friends and keeping friends as a sign of mental health, but in your case, it was a compulsion fueled by your love for your mother.

Because you were one mental unit with your mother early on, and yet to be separated enough, you don’t realize that you are still compelled to make friends, to keep the ones you have, to socialize with others as your number one priority, because you are still trying to make your mother happy. Even while not in contact with your mother, you are still driven to bring more people into her life.

To have a close, intimate relationship with a single person, that softness is required. “It is for sure that from a very early age, I had to hardened any of that softness”. You were a soft five year old. Within the context of your first and most significant by far relationship, the one with your mother, you were repeatedly rejected.

I know you were rejected because the child CC was soft and her mother was hard. I don’t think you remember the many incidents of being rejected by her. Your focus was always her focus- over there, not the over-here hardness.

What took your softness away was your mother rejecting you many, many times. As a result of her rejections, you felt hurt again and again, and angry “when I think about my mother or any people that are similar.. I am filled with anger and frustration”.

What happened over-here, in your childhood home, all that you don’t remember? It is right here: “Here everyone closes the door and sits inside all day by themselves. They don’t want to be nice or include me”- over here, in your childhood home, behind closed doors, you were alone, by yourself, not included. You repeatedly reached out to your mother and your efforts hit a wall, a hard, cold wall.

“It is so nice to sit outside in the sun”- inside, it is cold. “In India it is always sunny”- not behind closed doors, with your mother.

You shed your softness as a way to indeed survive hardness, your mother’s. But you are not like your mother, Cali Chica. You are not vicious. You are… well adjusted, that is all, and still driven to make her happy.

anita