Dear Linarra:

The similarities continue to emerge: “Our mother warned us about her own experience of being abused and exploited when she was sent away herself because her mother was too mentally sick to take care of her and her siblings“- my mother was sent alone to an institution for abandoned children after her mother died and her father turned to alcohol and other women. Later on, she lived with her oldest sister who terribly abused her. Extreme childhood experiences can create extreme pathology.

“I felt guilty for the mean words I told her when she was hurting me“- when she hit me she said: the only thing I like about you is that you look down and you don’t talk back when I hit you. I never said mean words to her, but at one point on, I purposefully looked at her anger showing on my face. (One time when she hit me with her arm, she said: you are hurting my arms, look what you did to me!

“I was hiding a crime, almost… I kept the most dirty parts of our relationship secret“- my mother was very loud when she screamed at me and hit me in the small apartment, the neighbors heard, no one said anything. At that time, where I was, parents owned their children. What a parent did to her/ his child was the parent’s business. No child protective services existed, and no police involvement.

One time, to “protect” me, she made a huge scene in my Elementary School where all the children and all the teachers were outside the classrooms, watching her hit and yell at a teacher for a long, long time. It was of course horrified and humiliating (The teacher’s crime: she called me “auntie”- that’s all I was told. There was no legal consequence or any follow up to the event).

“I was younger than you when my brain followed the thoughts of ‘so do it, do it already, just do it…’ ..there are no doubts that I thought those things“- after I submitted the post to you yesterday, I became certain that I thought those thoughts at the time, in my early 20s, I remembered clearly. I remember being tired of it all. After she did NOT jump under a truck, I had to hear her talk and talk emotionally for hours until she was tired. Then at night and  next few days she was eerily quiet.

“My mother told me she would die and I would have to replace her, to be my siblings’ caretaker…  I made her promise to wait until then, something along the way of ‘you can do whatever you want after I am 18, but if you do it before there’s no way I’ll be able to be legally chosen as a caretaker’)”-

– she gave you a job then, she .. sort of trusted you to do an important job, which fits with what I said before: that your sense of meaning and personal power is (still) in the household where you live with your mother and siblings, and not outside of it. Having been entrusted with a job, with a sense of personal power, you were able to use that power to negotiate with her as to the timing of her future suicide.

My mother was not… generous enough to entrust me with any job, to give me a meaning and a sense of personal power. She said that I can’t do anything, that I am a “Nothing”, and a “Big Zero”.

“I think the part of me that is able to love her is the part who sees the human, not the mother“- and the part of you that is your mother’s little girl, who for a long time early on looked up to her mother, worshipping her.. what does that part feel for your mother (?)

“Loving fully is giving someone the opportunity to twist it against me, to use me, or to leave me… it is not easy to actually express the love, since it could hurt someone“- I strongly relate to both parts.

“I feel both dreadful and unspeakably joyful at the idea of loving and being loved back. I think it’s a good way to summarize“- fear and joy are both forms of neural/ chemical excitation. For the longest time I was very uncomfortable with both, and calm was my only objective. Recently I am able to endure and enjoy… some joy here and there, like right now. It is a quiet, pleasant joy.

anita