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Perhaps I should feel honored that I had such a central and starring role as a player in the trauma drama that was my Borderline mother’s life.  She was, of course, not only the Leading Lady but the writer, producer and director of this trauma drama.  It is a significant problem being raised as the daughter of my mother that because I was born into my role from before the first breath of my lifetime, there was no possible way I could know that I was in a trauma drama at all!

My mother believed this drama was real and I had no choice but to believe this fantastic lie right along with her.

My guess is in severe Borderline Personality Disorder cases like my mother’s was one of the biggest problems for those whose lives are intimately intertwined with such a mother is that her Borderline constantly shifted.  For all the thousands of hours I have spent researching her ‘condition’ in her letters and writings I still have a nearly impossible task of pinpointing exactly where her Borderline actually was.

Her Borderline did not allow her to define other people (her children and mate included) as being individual and autonomous people separate from her.  ALL of us were HER CAPTIVES.  We were FORCED to play our assigned part in the never-ending trauma drama she enveloped everyone within.

Her children were her Prisoners of War.  For all the shady shifting of her Borderline mind, that fact remained consistent along with one other:  Her nearly constant moving created the shifts between the scenes of her drama.

I suspect that just as my mother projected her own mind-psyche out onto the members of her family so that we were all assigned ‘parts to play’ as characters that we could not escape from, her psyche externalized itself in her continual moving around.  The overall primary theme of my mother’s trauma drama seemed to be a ‘search for a home in heaven’.

The secondary theme that involved me as the irredeemable child of the devil was tied to her primary theme of ‘looking for a home in heaven’ – because if all the BAD in her life could be eliminated, ‘heaven’ would appear.  That all that BAD actually existed within her own mind as she then projected it onto me was simply the WAY the play unfolded.

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So, I have decided that I will most likely title the book of my mother’s writings,

“The Many Moves of Mildred:  Her Alaskan Homesteading Tale in Letters“

or “Mildred’s Many Moves”

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My mother’s physical moves from location to location provide the most obvious single clue that something was terribly wrong ON THE INSIDE of my mother.  The moving around cannot be ignored or rationally explained even though within the family the ‘explanations’ were always built right into the pattern of the moves as they happened.  Nobody could or did ever question her moves – we had no power to do so.

The far less obvious ‘mental moves’ of Mildred are of course much harder to detect because the Borderline that could define what these ‘other moves’ actually were as they were happening constantly moved itself!

I suspect that for every physical move my mother ever made a corresponding shift, no matter how subtle, within her mood and mental state happened along with it.  My mother used moving to regulate her emotions because she lacked the resilient capacity to flexibly adapt, respond, change and ‘move things around’ within her own self.  My mother’s moving was a pattern of dissociating from one ‘place’ to another ‘place’ – externally with an internal echo.

From my point of view, my mother’s life story is probably one of the most profound examples of how an early-forming unsafe and insecure attachment disorder can rob a human being of the ability to EVER feel truly safe or secure.  My mother completely lacked the healthy sense of ‘being at home within’ in a safe and secure way.  As a consequence, the theme of her trauma drama that WAS her life demanded of her that she constantly, constantly, constantly QUEST for her ‘safe and secure home in heaven’ outside of herself.

My mother followed this pattern – alone once her husband divorced her and her children were out of her life – until her lonely dying day in that last pathetic, shabby, run-down, ugly Anchorage, Alaska motel room.

I personally know, even if I do not say a single other word about my mother’s severe ‘mental illness’ within the text of the main body of her own writings, that the title I am assigning to ‘her book’ contains the truth about HOW my mother was in the world because she lacked the capacity to truly be a WHO.  That title describes her Mercurial madness as she blindly followed an invisible Hermes  from place to place to place.

No matter what people might think as they read my mother’s writings, even without my saying one single word to alert readers to the TRUTH about what living with my mother was actually like, my mother’s life was a terrible, terrible tragedy.  From my point of view, my mother didn’t DIE in her infancy and childhood.  She was never actually even born.

And for all the thousands and thousands of words contained in her writings, not one of them names the infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment that stole her life away from her as it turned her into a roaring, violent, TERRORIST CAPTOR of a mother.

This is the reason I have chosen the word ‘tale’ rather than ‘story’ for her title.  What is NOT in my mother’s words, or perhaps what barely glimmers a few times here and there, is the true story of her life:  There was early damage done to my mother that meant she never reached any healing no matter how unconsciously and desperately she chased after it.

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This post follows the previous three from earlier today:

(1)  +OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE

(2) +TRAUMA AND ABUSE SURVIVORS: TROUBLE WHEN WE ARE ALONE WITH OUR PATIENCE TOO LONG

(3)  +TRAUMA WILL NOT SHUT UP UNTIL SOMEBODY LISTENS (TRAUMA DRAMAS SHOUT MOST LOUDLY)

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