060709

+DO I KNOW MY MOTHER WAS CRAZY?

Some part of me wants to write about this topic while another part of me wants to say, “Don’t ask me.  I don’t have a CLUE!”

Even thinking about this question causes me to feel disturbed inside.  Knowing what I knew from birth was forbidden to me by my mother.  As I begin to gain new understandings about myself I am also gaining a glimmer of new understanding about how life was for my siblings as they were raised by my mother.  It’s as if the more I learn about how they experienced life in our family the more I can understand both what was similar about our experiences and what was far different.

Sometimes these new understandings go through me like shock waves when I ‘get them’.  As the shock waves go through me they change me on so many levels that I still do not understand.  The first time I had this experience was when I learned that my siblings always knew that something was wrong with my mother and that she was nuts.  From my side of the equation, I could not understand how they knew this.

This discrepancy might seem odd to anyone else who might look from the outside and see that such a mean, hateful, unpredictable, controlling violent mother was OF COURSE nuts.  But I NEVER had this thought growing up.  Not one single time.  I didn’t because I couldn’t.

It’s a strange feeling knowing that my siblings had this massive piece of important information within their own heads while I did not.  I feel cheated, just by this one fact alone.  But if it isn’t enough just to know that to me everything that went on between my mother and I was the ‘truth’ and ‘inevitable’ and therefore correct, there’s another piece that’s even harder to know than it is to verbally admit.

I REALLY still don’t KNOW IT.  That is, to me, what the personal work of going through my mother’s letters is all about for me right now.  I find that on some deep level it is even hard for me to give myself permission to even read her letters, let alone to transcribe them and, heaven forbid, actually PUBLISH them, even online!  The words that scream themselves out inside my head as I do this work with her writings are her words, “HOW DARE YOU!”

Who do I think I am?

Well, that is the trillion dollar question, isn’t it mother.  Who is Linda?

++

Working with my mother’s actual words brings me about as close physically to her presence as I can get at this point in time.  They remain as external presentations both of her having been in a body at some point in time so that she could hold a pen in her hand and stream those words across pieces of paper, and about the process of her thinking as it is reflected within her words.  Because I existed in her world as a target rather than as a person, the basic fight that goes on inside of me right now is about ‘turning the tables’ so that she now becomes my target instead of it being the way it ALWAYS was, and in many ways STILL is that even within my own mind I am still the target of her.

It’s my turn now.  On many levels that scares the pajabbers out of me.  I write about this today because I intend to move forward, not backward.  I intend to empower myself to be ever more increasingly aware of what I feel on the inside of me as I read her words.  I am going to give myself permission to insert my [Linda notes:  ] within the context of her letters as I transcribe them.

Who?  Linda?  Linda have permission to DARE assume she has any rights at all?  A right to my own opinion?  Any right to know what I know?  I feel like I have to defend myself TO my mother while I transcribe these letters.  Might that be because I never had the ability to defend myself AGAINST my mother when I needed it most?

++

I have no doubt that my mother believed that she owned me like she would own a possession. She most certainly owned me as a target for any abuse of any kind that she might choose at any time to attack me with.  Right now I have hundreds of her letters and other writings here in my home.  Does that mean I now ‘possess’ and own them the way she once owned me?

Does that mean that I own some part of who she once was?  She’s dead.  She can’t even roll over in her grave because she was turned to ashes and spread over the homestead.  She isn’t here.

Or is she?  I believe that because of the kind of abuse she was able to perpetrate against me, because of the way she had nearly constant access to me, the way she controlled every aspect of my being in the world when she wanted to (even my freedom to use the bathroom, depriving me of food, of sleep, waking me from sound sleep and beating me randomly when she felt like it, depriving me of my freedom of movement by making me sit on a stool all night, stand in corners, lie in bed, even lock me in the car or in a shed when I was older, preventing me from playing, from playing or talking to my siblings, from seeing my grandmother even when I was very young, by intervening to prevent my father from ‘noticing’ I was alive, on and on and on) that she particularly formed herself so far within who I am that her thoughts have, on deep and profound levels of my being, become my thoughts.

If in some strange yet generous way the circumstances of life not only imprisoned me in the first place but also designed that I have these letters in my possession because they contain a key to my release from the prison my mother created for me, a prison I am still in if I cannot find my own way to my own thoughts so that I CAN KNOW WHAT I KNOW because what I know is mine.  It is not my mother’s.  It is not my mother!  I am not my mother.  I am not who my mother thought I was, and it’s time for me to find a way to give myself permission to know this – from within myself in the same way that my siblings were able to know it themselves from the time they were old enough to think – MY MOTHER WAS NUTS.

I can mouth the words.  I can speak them.  I can run them through my mind.  But I do not YET know the truth of them.  My mother was crazy.

+++++++

Be sure not to miss Blog Carnival’s newest monthly edition on healing traumas and abuse, including this great article on raising a highly sensitive child!