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I shared a long telephone conversation tonight with my daughter about the writing work I am doing, and between us something has become clear for me regarding the ebook I will soon be ready to publish that will contain my mother’s writings.

I have decided to remove any editorializing I might be tempted to do with my abusive Borderline Mother’s writings and let them hit the road of publishdom intact as she wrote them.  That isn’t an easy thing for me to do.  Yet, given the truth that virtually no one can really understand the mind of a Borderline, I understand that at this point it really does me no good to try to convince anyone about what was really going on between the lines of the words my mother wrote in her diaries and letters.  I am not even going to try.

I know what went on between the lines of her writing.  But if I were to try to tell that truth along with her words, nothing good can come out of that.  A book published with what’s between the lines of her writing would literally have nothing to say.  The words between her lines are invisible, and for now I need to leave things that way.  I need to just let my mother’s voice speak from the grave – 8 years now since the day of her passing – in her own words as she wrote them.

Perhaps by opening my hands and letting go of my efforts to convince anyone of the truth about my mother, and about her life the best of what might come out of my efforts might come about in surprising ways.  If I can’t show anyone, can’t tell anyone, if her madness really was unspeakable (to her!), then I give up.  I simply give up and let go.

It seems strange to me that I can say at this moment that my mother has a right to be heard exactly in her own words with none of mine added except for the smallest amount of clarification concerning physical details of her story that might not be clear to readers.  I am making this choice.  I want to publish all of her writings first time around intact.  That means, as those who have read her letters on the blog know, that the text will be bulky.  This makes ebook (kindle, ipad, etc.) the perfect medium for her work.

The pages can ramble and flow.  Readers can scan and scroll in the ebook format.  No tree will give its life.  I can live with that.

Readers will be able to read her version of her life.  Then I will publish my life.  These two versions of reality will not match, as my readers here certainly know.  I will give no clue to readers of mother’s writings about her Borderline condition or about her abusive nature.  Only at the very end, in an epilogue will I introduce the truth and steer readers toward ‘the rest of the story’.

As I prepare to set my mother’s writings free of me, I prepare to set myself free from her.  She had her story, her version of reality within her Borderline world.  I am free to have my own.  There is no way to build a bridge between her world and mine.  There is no way to translate her words or her reality.  I am not going to try.

I do hope to publish a final volume to these letters.  In that volume I will describe and discuss how divided my mother’s reality was from mine – and from others.  But for now I am OK with this.  In fact, I don’t see that her writings can be published in any other way.

Readers will come to their own conclusions.  My mother’s story, and our family’s story is unique all by itself.  I will let it stand, and do my own writing my way.  (Of course I don’t have any idea now what title mother’s writings will be published under, but that will come).  I just need to finish this transcription job, and get her words off of my table.

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