Dear Helcat:

“I don’t think that your mother knew what love is, so for her to love you, sadly is impossible“- she knew what she valued. She valued people of a certain ethnicity, a certain look, a certain mannerism, a certain social class, etc., and treating them with admiration and flattery. I was none of those things she valued, so she didn’t value me. Think, if you will, of a Nazi guard in a concentration camp back in WW2, being a loving father perhaps to his own Aryan-race children, but having no problem mistreating the prisoners in the camp, seeing them as less than human, or not human at all.

As a matter of fact, early on, I referred to my mother (in my own mind) as “my private Nazi”, and to my childhood, as “my private holocaust”.

“What matters isn’t her… I feel like people like that, hate themselves… They cope by… They don’t have the strength… I don’t know if you would agree?“-

– like you said, what matters isn’t her, and therefore,  I don’t want to talk about her emotional dynamics: whether she hates herself,  how she copes, whether she has the strength, etc., because I wasted so much of my life focusing on her, trying to understand her. This focus was a big part of my sickness.

“I learned recently that my mother was an untreated paranoid schizophrenic. I always knew that she had a severe mental illness. As a teenager I was desperate to know what it was, feeling like it would explain what she did to me. Maybe even absolve her of it somehow. But learning her condition ultimately didn’t change anything“-

– trying to understand your mother (“to know what it was“, in the quote above).. didn’t change anything for you, did it?

“It is good to hear that you are sleeping better now. Thank you for the advice!“- you are welcome. I didn’t sleep well last night.

anita