*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY
**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE
**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO
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I also wanted to mention, in the light of my recent housecleaning that removed my mother’s writing from this site over to the Take Care of Mothers site, that I made the decision to put the 1953 diary among my personal story pages because it is mostly about my brother and I, and my sister Cindy just after she was born.
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Stop the Storm 
Did she ever write of your birth? I’m wondering if it was the succession of children, bills, responsibilities that caused her to eventually unravel and act out in violence.
(Not just the difficult labor involved in your birth).
I would say there are at least a thousand letters here, not including loose papers. I see bound 1945, 1955 and 1957 journals here, none of them completely full, for sure. I thought there was a 1951 book, but maybe not — I don’t see it.
Any mother that could flip out in the middle of the street as Brother 1965 described is NOT ‘normal’, and he was the baby of the family and just about her favorite. Yet she could still do that to him! She was never ‘normal’. She repeatedly told me about how I tried to kill her when I was born. I SHOULD have had her write the story down, even as late as 1980 when I listened to her tell me that story for the last time.
I believe from the time of my birth there was always a ‘psychotic’ mother somewhere — either in the background or in the foreground — but she WAS always there, somewhere — waiting.
Yes, I agree with you Linda. This is not the type of behavior that just “happens”. She had such a low threshold for violently acting out (re: brother 1965) and such an ability to make a non-event into a catastrophe. She considered the most innocent of actions to be a threat to her “perfect” mother image. She was entirely unregulated.
I hope, in 1980, you told her where to stick her story!
No, I listened without comment, but at least I clicked the phone button and hung up on her! Her 19-year-old writings in her 1945 diary I am transcribing today are providing some insightful background…..soon to be published online.
It was so strange to hear your mother speak (write) of you with such affection. It seems like she adored you. Do you think the abuse actually occurred in these early years? (Certainly seems like it in thinking back to the story of Cindy’s homecoming and your sickness at your grandmother’s house–the cruelty she showed to you could not have come out of nowhere!) Do you think the diary entries are B.S.? She was painting the picture perfect family in her diary!
At this point I am thinking that my mother adored the ‘image’ of her children as she had created them within her own mind from her own childhood when she was so alone and so wanted her mother to have more children. Mom got the dolls instead. When we were pretty and perfect, we fit that image. Being real children, anything LESS than being her image meant trouble. It surprised me to even read in her diary words like “cross” and “spanking,” because I know what was behind those terms. I don’t believe the entries were consciously B.S. I think to a large extent she was overwhelmed. The more I understand dissociation, the more I understand how she really did have ‘split personalities.’ I think the more children she had, the older she got, and the more pressure and stress she was under — the more she deteriorated — the harder it was to ‘keep the perfect image’ alive. Things began to get very, very real. I don’t think she ever wrote during her worst days, and never wrote THOSE days’ truth.