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I watched a spider scampering across the stubby lawn grass this morning as I sat in the shade drinking my coffee. Somehow, and this puzzled me, this spider noticed I was near even though it was a good six feet away from me. It froze in place at the edge of the dirt pathway it was about to cross, and it stayed there completely still.
I wondered how the spider knew of my presence. I, too, froze and was careful not to move a muscle, but my stillness did not fool that little beast. I watched and I watched to see how long it would take before the spider determined I was no threat, but my attention wandered away from watching the spider without me even noticing. The next I knew, the next I looked, the spider was gone.
Most spiders in the southwest are harmless to mammals as I imagine this one was. The ones to pay most attention to are either obvious as the Black Widows are with their masses of obvious, very messy webs, or the ones that hide in quiet, untouched places like the Brown Recluse. Spiders that cross open ground in the daylight are probably not dangerous. But, even so, how do I know for certain when I meet a spider who is prey and who is predator?
A few moments after noticing the spider had vanished, the form of a little lizard, also seeming frozen near me on the dirt caught my eye. “Go away, little one,” I said to it. I was thinking that it might be intent on heading toward the single step that rises to the back door, and as nice as it is to have these bug eating reptiles running around in the yard, I certainly don’t like the idea of one surprising me under foot inside my house, or popping out from under the appliances in the kitchen.
I tossed a pebble in the direction of the lizard thinking I could startle it into movement along with a change in its direction. The lizard didn’t move. One of its tiny front feet was placed in front of its body. The other one was bent with the foot behind the lizard’s shoulder. Again, frozen in place, the lizard seemed to be in its survival-based state of visual suspended animation.
As I moved toward the lizard, thinking I could scare it away with my hand movement, I noticed its tail. Nature designs lizards, as you probably know, with a detachable and re-growable tail with the hopes that a tail catch by a predator will leave the lizard free to run away. This one’s tail was half gone and all dried up, which seemed most strange to me. I didn’t ‘get it’ until I actually touched the lizard and realized he was entirely all dried up and – well – completely D-E-A-D.
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I guess I have an enquiring mind that feeds on the obvious as I try to understand the mysteries of my infant-childhood. It’s not that I particularly CARE about my mother, or even about the details of the horrific abuse she perpetrated against me. What I care about is having a body-brain that cannot keep me in the mainstream of life, that leaves me nestled in the safest place I can find (my home) without the physical, mental or emotional stamina, resources, or resiliency to be able to handle anything like a social demand or a stressful situation. Those dis-abilities, I know, stem directly from how my body-brain developed under the constant trauma of living as my mother’s daughter.
So as soon as I knew the lizard was dead (and had been for some time), my next thought after, “I wish my cats would leave these poor little lizards alone, but cats will be cats,” was “Well, if that isn’t just like my relationship with my mother!”
My mother. The truth is I never had a mother. I might have imagined that woman was my mother, but she was as dead to me as a mother as this dried up, petrifying lizard IS dead. My mother was dead to me as a mother from the first breath of air I ever consumed.
My mother could no more mother me than this lizard can ever move its tiny legs and go off for another bug.
As for the frozen spider obviously afraid of me: If something as small as that spider could detect threat to its life from me, how could I not have known from the moment I was born that my mother was a threat to me and to my life?
But my mother never lost interest in paying attention to her prey, me. Her mind and her attention never wandered off to other things so that I could somehow escape and go on with my business of being an infant, a toddler, a child, a teen.
When a woman who is SUPPOSED to be one’s mother is instead a predatory monster, the laws and by-laws of the natural order of life are obviously turned up-side-down. There are very real physiological developmental consequences to having a monster for a mother, as infant-child abuse and trauma survivors well know.
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This brings me to the point of needing to speak about the ‘hidden monster’ mothers. These neglectful, abusive and traumatizing mothers might SEEM to be the real thing. They might SEEM to be living, breathing lizards. The trick is to identify when these mothers are/were as inadequate as my mother was – and just as dead to their position of being a mother.
The information I posted yesterday about Borderline Personality Disorder as it may or may not be tied in its origins to early abuse, bothers me”
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From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder
Child Abuse and BPD– Understanding the Link
– “Parents of BPD teens and adults often ask why their child has the disorder, and sometimes feel blamed for their child’s symptoms. Yes, sometimes BPD is caused by child maltreatment, but that isn’t the full story– parents are not always to blame.”
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In thinking about my mother’s early years as her mother’s daughter, even though NOBODY in the family would have EVER dared to suggest that my mother was abused, I KNOW in my mind and in my heart of hearts that she was. Leaving a tiny infant alone in a crib crying and not being heard or responded to is abuse. Not loving an infant enough to cuddle it, coo to it, talk to it, and glow with joy over the infant’s existence is abuse. Propping a bottle and disappearing is abuse.
My grandmother relied on the ‘main-nanny’ to care for her newborn daughter. Throughout the years of my mother’s childhood the patterns of abuse and neglect reappeared in many stories my mother told us, though she never put the two-plus-two together and arrived at that conclusion that she had been abused.
So when someone like Salters-Pedneault throws out that ‘life line’ of sustaining the illusion that no abuse ever occurred in certain Borderline’s early life, I listen in the same way I look at a petrifying dead lizard. I could wish all I want that little lizard was still alive, but that IS NOT going to happen. I can pretend my mother was a living, breathing mother to me, but she wasn’t. I can imagine that my grandmother was a true mother to my mother, but she wasn’t.
“Dead lizards tell no tales.” (This dead lizard barely had anything left of its tail.) Dead is dead, and my mother was as dead to me as a mother as any woman could be short of performing the act of completing murder. Mrs. Lloyd shared her genes with me and incubated me. That’s the extent of her mothering contribution. What she did after that belongs in the category of PREDATORY terrorism, not mothering. It took me far too long to figure this out.
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Stop the Storm 
Wow! The balance of your very dysfunctional family profoundly changed when you left home. As disturbing as this sounds, your mother was able to function in her role as a wife and mother somewhat effectively because she acted out her shame-based and toxic childhood through her abuse of you. Was she finally confronted with her own rage/shame/violence? Was your father finally forced to see your mother differently because the “buffer” was gone? It does not sound like your mother or father ever found equilibrium in their relationship or their family after you were banished from your home! After 18 years of trying to destroy you she failed and ended up destroying her family and ultimately herself.
Astute, and so well put!!
Since you were such a focus in your “mom’s” life for 18 years, I wonder how she felt when you left home? How did she release her rage after you were gone? Who did she turn to next because we know it wasn’t about you–it was about her!
An event my sister told me about coincided very closely with my leaving home. Shortly after my parents ‘put me in the Navy’, my father for the first time lost it with my mother.
My (‘mild mannered’) father became enraged at my mother (FINALLY), and putting both his hands around her neck lifted her off of the floor (she was not a small woman), and while pressing her back into the ‘family room’ stone fireplace chimney wall, nearly throttled her to death. When my sister came home from school my mother was still shaking and sobbing, with nasty red marks around her throat.
My sister told me that nothing in the home, between my parents, or with my mother was the same after that. Because my father’s rage outbreak and the choking happened so closely to the time I left the scene of my mother’s crimes, I do suspect these events are related to one another, and to your question.
According my sisters, my mother never showed anything but the most minimal interest in her children after this (my leaving or the choking?) event. She ignored my sisters who did anything they wanted. The abuse incidents that my baby brother described (see: https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/my-siblings-comment-page/brother-1965s-pages/family-time-by-brother-1965/) happened right around this same time, showing that her capacity to abuse had not diminished.
Her following disinterest in life and in her children was a far more fortunate turn for my siblings than more of what my brother described. My mother took the children to Tucson for the rest of my sisters’ high school years, and there was great strain in the marriage though they did not divorce for another 10-12 years.
I made the mistake of taking my year old daughter for a Christmas visit to Tucson when I was 20. My father was there, not sure what the actual living arrangements were between my parents at that time – but my mother was right back into her terrible abuse of me mode with my father supporting her. Among other things, I was accused of traveling all the way from Fargo to my mother’s home just so I could USE her – to give my baby girl a bath in my mother’s bathtub.
When she flew into her abusive rage I was as terrified of her as ever! She did not hit me, but her verbal abuse was substantial. My father ‘snuck’ me and my daughter out of the house in the middle of the night. He drove us to the airport, bought a return ticket home for the next available flight for my baby and I, and left us to wait alone in the airport for hours before the flight left.
At that time I still had no mind of my own to even THINK about her abuse of me. There was no space, no distance, between me, my mother, and my experience of her abuse. That visit to Tucson, even after all that happened to me as a child, remains one of the most traumatic memories that I have – I think because I was older and the memory never became dissociated, and because my father took such an active part in it.
At one point, after she had stood at the guest room door with me and my baby cornered in the room, screaming at me about what a horrible daughter I had always been, how I had destroyed her life and her and my father’s marriage, how I was a curse on her life, the most evil daughter anyone ever had – she screamed for my father to “come here” – and when he reached the doorway my mother stepped to the side and told my father, “Tell her. Tell her you agree with me. Tell her I am right.”
I have never forgotten watching him take her place in the doorway as he mouthed her exact litany against me, not with raised voice and wild, wide eyes like my mother’s, but for the first time in my life he SAID her exact words to me. I was stunned, horrified and hurt beyond words.
So, things no doubt DID change when I left home, but there was no possibility of those changes actually being GOOD ones. There really was no potential for goodness in my mother (and I mean that PHYSIOLOGICALLY). My mother never stopped talking to my siblings about how BAD I was until they finally, one by one, severed their contact with her as everyone aged. I was ALWAYS her chosen target, and because her full-blown psychosis had me at its core, nobody else could take that place. My mother became more ‘strange’ as she aged, more distraught publicly until she withdrew into the confines of her shabby motel room where she went through the rest of her living and dying alone (with the exception of the one Alaskan woman who kept some contact with her until my mother died).
(By the way, this visit to Tucson was the first time my parents had seen their first grandchild. I guess I would have to add ‘Dead Grandparents’ to the title of this post!)