Continued (trigger warning, as always):

The simplicity of feeling angry at an enemy who is a stranger vs the complexity of  feeling angry at an enemy who is one’s mother. When the enemy is a stranger, there’s no longing for love, no hope for love that’s in the way of running for one’s life, or fighting for one’s life. When the enemy is one’s mother, the longing for her love is a curse.

It takes the full understanding that a mother (the person, not the idea) does not mean a friend, or even a neutral party, not to many, many of us. And when she is an enemy, it takes the full understanding that the love/ longing we feel is for the idea of her, it is not for the person that she is. And so, it’s okay to feel the love and longing .. for the idea of a mother.

When I have her image in my mind, as I do now, and I have this loving feeling attached to this image, I no longer feel threatened by the loving feeling because it will not motivate me to reach out to the person and get hurt again.

Instead, this loving feeling will motivate me to be this desirable idea of a mother to other people, people who are not enemy.

Who is my enemy? A person who desires to inflict pain (criticism, shame, guilt, a beating) on me and then proceeds to do so, because she/ he is momentarily free of HER OWN pain when observing it in me.

She used me that way, aka abused me. She helped herself to me, taking advantage of a child who loved her, a child who had nowhere to go.

She said one time, and I quote (translated): “You think I don’t know I am wrong? I know, but what can you do? You have nowhere to go”.

Quite cruel, isn’t it? Unfair, unjust… day after day, month after month, year after year, never to stop. Never to apologize, decade after decade. Never to relinquish her unfair advantage/ her selfish, cruel use of her power as mother.

The RAGE, my rage is about all those endless moments, days years, eternity of abuse, subjugation, humiliation, soul-rape is a term that just occurred to me, soul and body rape, is more accurate. Again and again. Unrepented.

The idea of mother and empathy are synonymous. I didn’t have a mother. I had an obscene twist of a mother: an enemy.

anita