+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For as long as this part of my project will take me, I am going to do something that is extremely difficult for me to face.  I have a collection here of a few of the letters my mother saved that I wrote to her in my adulthood before I disowned her.

I want to tear them up, throw them away, burn them to ashes.  I want to do anything but read them or to face them head on.  Yet, I think now about what my daughter told me the other night about my struggle in facing my mother’s letters she wrote in the years that I was in my teens.  She told me  that just because my struggle is so great there is probably something important I can learn by going ahead with my project.  Well, the struggle seems greatest when I am faced with myself in my own adult letters.

Am I this afraid of actually seeing the lies of my childhood continued into my adulthood?

Yes, I am.  I feel as I might should I be standing outside of a burning building ready to race inside to try to save myself, no matter what the cost.  I feel sick inside.  I fear there is sickness in these letters, and I will not only see it there, I will feel it here today in my own body as I re-read my own words.

It is one thing to take a hard, close look at my mother’s writing because they are ‘out there’, outside of me.  But my own words?  Do I have the courage to examine the extent that I bought the lies about Linda, the extent that I ate them, swallowed them, internalized them until I could not tell the difference between where my mother left off and I began?

What are my hopes?  What goodness do I think I might be able to gain by spending time with past self?  How much of my past self remains with me today?  Can I see what I hate and change it?  Is it an absolute, stupid and complete waste of time working with my own letters?  How do I see the process as being different from examining my mother, and my grandmother, through their letters?

What am I afraid to learn?  Do I have the courage, willingness and perseverance to find out?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I suspect at this moment, before I step into this next unknown contained within my own letters, I am afraid that I will face within myself something that tells me that everything that happened to me in my childhood was all my fault and that I deserved it.  This fear is not reasonable.  This statement is not reasonable.  There was no REASON in my childhood.  That is what my mother’s severe mental illness was all about.

I fear I will see from my vantage point today how completely rotten and faulty the foundation of my self was, and therefore of my life was,  as I passed out from under the shadow of the roof of my parents’ home into my own dim adulthood future.  I bought the lies of my childhood because they were present with the first breath I ever took and I had no way of knowing this.  I was raised without being loved.  I was raised being told that I was evil, not human.  I was raised to believe that everything about me was wrong.  I did not leave those lies behind me.  They were built into me.  They became a part of me.

It was bad enough that what happened to me for 18 years at the hands of my mother ever happened to me at all.  But what feels worse to me is knowing that I carried it all within my body-brain-mind right out of my childhood with me — and I didn’t even know it.

It comes down to being raised and ‘built’ in a world of darkness.  My mother’s darkness was not my own, yet I had to find for myself a light that allowed me to survive her.  Her darkness was put onto me and into me, it surrounded me and permeated every aspect of my childhood from the time of my birth.  But from my side of the story it was a false darkness to me.  I didn’t know this.   I didn’t know the darkness came from my mother and not from me.

I didn’t know that in the insanity and abuse of my childhood I came to find and create my own false light to endure in false darkness.  I know this now because I can see that if someone had removed me from my mother’s care when I was born, there would have been no darkness for me to adjust to.  I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of it.  I would be a different person.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I can’t explain this right now, I guess.  I can’t explain how the darkness of my mother’s mental illness robbed me of the light of love, hope, trust, safety and security that I needed in order to grow into my own strong, healthy, happy self.  Being robbed of this light forced me to come up with my own light, but it was a false a light because it was designed to fight my mother’s darkness, not my own.

I could not simply step out of my childhood and into my adulthood, into the ‘ordinary’ light of a benevolent world as if I had lived in it my entire life.  I had been formed in and by an entirely different, dark and malevolent world.  I did not have eyes that were designed to see in the bright light of ‘ordinary’ day.  My eyes were designed to see in a world of my mother’s pitch darkness.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What will I see when I step into the world of my own early adulthood letters?  With whose eyes will I look at the world, in and with what light?  Whose darkness might be hiding in them?  Or, better yet, whose light?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++