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It takes courage for me to publish here this link (below) because I do not have any answers when it comes to my own ongoing, internal, personal experience with my childhood traumas with my mother.  I have returned to the task of transcribing my mother’s 1958 letters, a job that I left behind several months back.

My efforts TODAY to deal with further discovery in my mother’s letters of her beliefs about me as a six-year-old disintegrated me even further than they did last night when I first re-encountered her writing.  The internal process going on for me as contained here and in this link make me feel like I am dying, my guts torn out and strewn on the ground as Hitchcock’s birds fly at me to peck my eyes out.

I guess I could say, “This post may trigger” — it certainly triggered me:

*Age 6 – Jan. 1958 First Grade in Mother’s Letters

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background information:

Diagnosis of Trauma and Abuse-Related Dissociative Symptom Disorders in Children and Adolescents

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This is what I wrote when I found that the first words of the first 1958 letter of my mother’s that I picked up to work on transcribing last night was about me:

I feel icky and contaminated as I start back to work on my mother’s letters, a job I abandoned awhile back because I was SICK of the memory of my mother.  These are the 1958 letters from the year I was 6, in first grade, the first year we were in Alaska.  By August 31, 1958 I turned seven and started second grade that fall.

My mother – with her twisted, tweaked, twilight borderline distorted view of the world – the one I grew up thinking was normal because I had no frame of reference to the contrary.

As soon as I begin work again with my mother’s letters I can feel conflict between knowing the truth NOW that I didn’t know for the first 30 years of my life, and my feelings of what, fear?  That I ‘should’ respect my mother, and “Who am I to make up all these bad things about her and slander her good name?”  Bad Linda.  Bad, Bad Linda.

Horse pucky.

These feelings are difficult to identify and to face head on because I have spent most of my life avoiding them.  It’s like getting caught in a time warp, reading that my father in January of 1958 just went out the door to start the car to warm it up and is coming back into the house in a minute to get the note my mother is writing so it can be mailed to my grandmother.  All dead, all of them dead now.  How, really, can a person criticize a dead person’s life?

What values of my own do I confront here?  They certainly aren’t around to care what I say about anything.  Is all that I have here before me in these tattered and tanning envelopes really nothing but the passing of time – soon to be 52 years of it with this particular batch of mother’s letters.

Yet it does matter.  These people’s lives formed mine, and I in turn formed my children’s lives.  We all just march on down the road of our lives leaving one little tiny, miniature less than an ant sized footprint along the pathway after the other.

Yet I know I am not far away from my own deep sadness as I transcribe my mother’s letters:  I wanted my parents to love me and they did not.  I want to reach my hands back through the passage of all this time gone by, grab them each by the shoulders as the big person I am now.  I want to shake them, looking them each straight in the eye.  My face would follow theirs closely if they tried to look away from me when I ask them, “Why?  Why could you not love me?  I am your CHILD!  Why did you HURT me?”

I never really was my parents’ child.  I was their hated stranger.

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