Dear Anita,

” Fast forward, you are now Guard, and your mother is more like an Inmate. You are in charge, you are in a position of power.”

I am not functional and respected enough to be considered in charge, I don’t think I have much authority as an individual within the household. I’m just a voice among all of us. I would say we are all inmates at this point, because I think it’s true  to say my mother had lost her authority at some point. I didn’t replace her. There was just no more authority. Maybe the fear of the outside world only and the remains of the internalized past abuse.

Though, my mother’s version is sometimes: She is the prisoner (the only prisoner) and her children are her prison guards. She has been projecting my father’s abuse on us for long.

As an inmate, she is problematic because she’s making a mess out of every little fight and would pick fights too much. A “rebelling inmate” as you say. But I am no guard, I am just equal. We are scared of her like any inmate would be scared of a scary unpredictable harmful inmate, and there’s no real authority to stop her. Just collaboration and smartness to deal with her.

“Outside your home- in the outside world- your position of power is taken away from you.”

It isn’t power that is taken away from me. It’s support. In my home, what I cannot do because of my dysfunctionality (go out for groceries, phone calls, making decisions… basically anything I struggle with because I am paralyzed with fear/anxiety or do not manage to take actions for some other reasons), someone else will be able to do it. Maybe.

The other family members aren’t too functional either so sometimes we’ll just drop it. Keep it to the essential survival stuff. If there’s a long-term danger we won’t take care of it until it happens we have not a choice to deal with it. And even there we might not do it. But until then we didn’t die so even if we’re not efficient and will suffer the consequences for it, it’s still better than being alone without any support at the moment.

” although I didn’t have the thoughts you pointed to right here in this paragraph, I was disappointed (and angry) at the thought that maybe your mother was not as scary or tragic as mine, maybe not even close, because I could find nothing funny about her behavior. It was as if, in my mind, you took away our commonality, our parallel experience!”

I understand.  The parallel feelings we shared previously are real for me. Blurred under a lot of confusion and coping mechanisms. But I wasn’t dishonest about them.

I think though there’s a lot of subtleties and differences in our experiences. That wouldn’t remove the similarities for me, your inputs are still relevant to help me understand my mother who has impacted my life forever, and from who my mind had difficulty to separate sometimes… but I understand how finding out differences among our experiences would be upsetting for you.

“ being away from her for good (no visits) was and is the right thing for you, if you had the irl social support that you would need outside.”

I agree.

“But how will you force your way through it when you are not motivated to do so… something about you will need to start to care, to get un-numbed. The object (“being an object”) will need to come to life again (like it did when you were at university and had the social support/ help of a friend).””

I acknowledge the problem there, and I am unsure of the solution. I don’t even know how to build irl social support as I have a hard time trusting people… I don’t want to rely too much on people because I am afraid of being betrayed again.

“I wonder if living with your mother.. if you feel that you are protecting her from the outside world, and I wonder if you would feel guilty if you leave her”

I was kind of hoping she would be dead before it would become a thing I’d have to worry about (if I ever find a way to get out of here), to be honest… Might be a bit crude to say, but she had been going on saying she wouldn’t live long and had a ton of health problem. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go through this one moral dilemma.

“I do hope you are less or not anxious like you were earlier, are you?”

I had my share of random anxiety scattered throughout the day. I cannot say if the cause was this discussion or if it was because of my mother being stressful. Or just my random brain chemicals acting up. It should be alright for tonight, though.

Linarra