Dear Anita,

“unless a person is suffering a psychotic breakdown, he/ she is aware-enough of what is happening, this is why a violent parent beating their child stops short of hurting the child badly enough to kill the child, or badly enough to require hospitalization.. and why parents avoid beating their children in public (where child protection laws exist), etc.”

I agree. Yet, there were times during her crisis she really seemed to lose touch with reality, enough to make us wonder if she weren’t on edge of a temporary psychotic breakdown. And other times she can seem to be aware and manipulative. It is a thing I was never entirely able to determine with certainty with my mother, how much she was aware and how much she was unaware. The only sure thing about her was her instability.

I thought about the difference between humans and objects a bit more.

Some people would lash out at an object if it ceases to function like they want to, but they would like the object alright when it works well for them. An object has no feeling so it isn’t technically a problem to lashing out at them. If someone considers a human as their possession, as an object, they wouldn’t care to break it if it isn’t working well, or be violent to make it work right again.

I guess you’re right, there’s no love there. Some humans can chose to love and care about an object. So I guess she could have chose to do so for her children. But she didn’t. Or only temporarily.

“One more thing, my mother, as mentally ill as she was (no less than yours, I imagine), told me that one time: “You think that I don’t know that what I am doing is wrong? I am not stupid, I know. But what are you going to do.. you have nowhere to go”!”

My mother also knows what she does is wrong. I think it is part of her motivation for self-destruction. I do not remember mine telling something as obviously incriminating about herself that the thing you mother said, not without any remorse at least.

Remember when my mother hit me last week and I was alright? I defended myself, just by putting my arm in the way to prevent her foot kicks to reach another part of my body. Just pure reflex. Her foot hit my elbow. She hurt herself by trying to hurt me (at the instant it happened, I could only laugh at the idea of karma. Then I thought “oh no, she might use it against me, say I beaten her up or some kind of bullshit”, because she very often told people about how abusive and controlling her children were towards her.) I came out without a bruise, she came out with (maybe?) broken toes. She didn’t use it against me this time. But she refused to go see a doctor when I told her to. She said she had worse when she was a child, she said that “maybe she didn’t want to heal it as a way to punish herself”.

My mother’s choice to regret and to be a victim in order to wash out of her wrongdoings is a confusing factor. It always was been. She is very confusing in her ways of doing things. Trying to make sense of actions, especially in times of crisis, was making me insane. She makes everything look unreal and insane.

I will never know if there could have been any truth in her regrets because we are in a very specific situation of balanced powers.

We are (the children only) the owner of the house we’re living in, not her. That was the heritage of my father, it wasn’t very legal of him to disinherit his wife so she could have opposed it, but she let it happen, playing the self-sacrificing heroic victim.

Long after, we discovered she secretly stole a lot of money from my brother’s heritage while he was a minor. While she was doing so and we ignored it, she used the fact she was paying for our food and for the bills to, well… make us shut up when we were expressing anger at being abused? While I was disagreeing with the “I feed you so accept the abuse and shut up” logic, I accepted it, because there’s not so much we could do about it. We were paid/feeded to be abused. If she wanted it to be a transaction, well it could be. This kind of logic was the thing that killed the love for me. When we discovered she had been stealing money, it was a turning point for us. Because it couldn’t be a fair transaction anymore if she’s been twisting the rules.

She has been afraid she would be thrown out by us. Probably because she’s aware of her wrongdoings. She has been afraid in spite she has been the one to make sure we knew we couldn’t legally throw her out as long as she paid the bill of this house we own. And well, legal possibility or not, we aren’t heartless enough to throw her out. Even if we were heartless, we aren’t able to function without her yet. And she knows it. And she uses this power to keep the abuse going. But, you know, not too much, because she fears the day we’ll be able to function without her. She fears an act of revenge from us.

I personally wouldn’t do that, I don’t believe revenge or long-term resentment would do any good. My siblings? She better not push her luck too much… They are tired of fighting, but if she breaks them down until they got nothing to lose she has good reasons to fear. That might be why she’s more comfortable to take ‘’ free abuse turn’’ on me than on my siblings, my need for inner peace is stronger than the short-term satisfaction revenge could bring. If anything, revenge would hurt me more, I don’t like conflict and I don’t feel good about hurting someone, even if I had been hurt by. Because, unlike her, I know it isn’t a good enough reason.

Whether the empathy and love she expresses sometimes are genuine or fake, twisted or inexistent… in the end, she broke the relationship and the trust to a point of no return. It doesn’t change what she did. It doesn’t change I do not want to be a part of that or a part of her. Just like I wish she weren’t a part of me, within the mental wounds she created in me.

” I am scared too, I don’t want my input to scare you too much… It took me years to understand these things about love that took me minutes to type out for you. I hope you are okay, I want you to be okay!”

I am okay, I will be. The hurt cannot be avoided, it has to happen at some point. And it is helpful to have your input to help me think and I appreciate you’re keeping me company during this exploration, it would be harder to cope alone, the distress would have been greater I think.

I am mature enough to take those things, but I am not guarded enough to be above getting emotional or vulnerable (not during this conversation, not with you). If someone else had given me this input, in other circumstances, I would probably had been too focused on controlling my reaction to give the input a real thought. But I’m allowing it with you. And emotions like fear, pain, or distress can happen. But I trust you, and I trust myself to be okay once the emotions are done expressing.

The idea of being loved by her, even unhealthily, was among the few good things she brought to me. Even if it was for wrong reasons or an illusion. The idea some part of me could be lovable was reassuring, and I chose to believe that and built confidence in that. It is a bit shaking, to remove some foundations/reinforcement of these beliefs. But I guess it doesn’t make them untrue. I can be lovable, her feelings about me shouldn’t be more relevant than anyone else’s, or my own’s.

I can be okay with the idea she never loved me. But the act and the deception are scary. I guess I can still learn to recognize better, to not see what I would prefer to see in order to not risk being endangered again by an illusion of love.

Linarra.