Continued:

I realized lately that expressing my pain in regard to my mother was never enough because when I shared about it/ her, the intensity of it was suppressed or repressed. I shared from a dissociated state. So, it’s been like having a puss-filled wound, and you let only a bit of it out.. the wound is still full of pus.

Talking about my mother and pus… a mother.. and pus? That’s not pretty. Warning, trigger alert:  not pretty!

I want to get the pus out of me, and with it the anxiety, more of it gone, peace instead. So, here it is (facilitated by red wine):

The truth is my mother loved ___ me. The missing part is: my mother loved to hate me. I was her place to project her rage at the people who hurt her. I was that place. She needed me for that purpose and she used me for that purpose.

Scared, scared little girl, scared big girl, scared.. there I am, there she is in front of me RAGING. Oh, how unexpected, poor little girl.. oh, the fuming mother-monster-creature, a wild animal about to kill.

You know about wars, wars raging these days.. that was my war, my mother raging. I was so scared, I had nowhere to run to, nowhere but there. Oh.. no!..  me, prey, about to be killed, she’s predator. Danger. Murder.

Strange how I forget the fear of death, the real-and-present danger of that time, it was nothing less than the fear of imminent death.

“I WILL KILL YOU!”, she announced and I believed her, no reason not to, and she hit me, didn’t kill me (I am alive to be telling about it), but there she was about to kill me, I didn’t know the result.

In those times, it wasn’t a daughter-mother situation, it was a prey-predator situation.

I think that I’ve been holding my breath ever since.

Looking back, I see the predator was my mother.. oh, what does it mean? How can it be that one’s mother would be one’s predator? Here come the explanations, but they don’t change the predator-prey trauma, that is, the prey kept alive to re-experience the not-yet finalized death.

I am alive, but I didn’t yet fully exhale, still holding my breath, the predator still there somewhere. Danger ongoing, anxiety.

May I exhale, knowing she is no longer my danger. It’s still hard to overcome the Betrayal, the fact that my predator was my mother, that my mother was my predator. A mother should never threaten to kill her child, yet this threat was something I lived with, and died with, so to speak, day in and day out.

I don’t want to be dying anymore. I don’t want to see her as a mother of any kind.

I didn’t have a mother.

anita