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What can I possibly say in response to or in rebuttal against my mother’s words as posted earlier in +ANOTHER ‘NASTY GRAM’ FROM MY MOTHER TO HER MOTHER RE: 6 YEAR OLD ME:

November 26, 1957 Tuesday

“Dear Mother,

I am glad I wrote my recent letter and hope you fully understand so I won’t have to repeat myself in the future.  You’ve always been far overly concerned with LINDA’S actions anyways.  I am not nearly as concerned with ‘tom boyishness’ which is not as prevalent now anyways as with poor behavior in school and traits and personality.  It takes far more anyways than ‘a pretty dress and a pretty face’ to be nice. ”

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Because I actually FOUND these words written in my mother’s handwriting across a 50+ year old piece of paper the other night, they are now visibly lodged in my waking mind rather than ONLY being carved into my ‘invisible being’.

What these words reflect is my mother’s HATE for me.  They reflect the fact that I was born DOOMED as her daughter to a life in hell.  What these words reflect is the fact that my grandmother was the ONLY person in the universe who knew that fact.  Our move to Alaska effectively removed my grandmother’s influence from my life as I have mentioned before, yet his letter my mother wrote  even further banished Grandmother into the remotest distance away from me.

There is no place far enough away in the universe that I can run to or hide in to make these words go away, as much as I might wish to or think I SHOULD be able to escape them now.  It is the echo of these words within every fiber of my being that bothers me now.  I want to ignore them.  I want to pretend that things were somehow ‘different’ for me from the time I was born – but 18 years in hell, as I tried to grow and develop my body-brain-mind-self is a long, long, long time.

Every time during those 18 years that I tried to grow even the tiniest part of who Linda is – into my self and into the world – SHE was there to bash me, to crash me, to smash me.  HATE is a destructive power nearly beyond imagination, especially when an infant-child is hated by its own mother (and father, in my case).

The fact that I was at least able to access a little tiny bit of my Grandmother’s concern and affection (even though she must have had a major influence on creating the monster my mother was from the start) before I turned six when we left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska was the only life preserver I ever had except for the love my 14-month-older than me brother radiated upon me.

My body-brain internalized my grandmother’s influence on my behalf, but it clear as day that my mother HATED the fact that my grandmother loved me.  How could she NOT, given the fact that much of my mother’s demise was rooted in the ways and times that her mother despised her as she grew and formed.

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I don’t feel like I am standing at the gates of hell gazing at the devouring inferno’s flames as I try to write something in response to these words of my mother’s I just found in her letter.  I feel like I am standing in hell’s inferno itself, and there is nothing I can do to stop that fact because I have the first years’ of my life experience being exactly in that place.

But what about today?  I have a thought about burls growing on some trees in some forests.  I remember seeing those burls carved into bowls.  Those burls hold the most interesting and beautiful patterns of wandering wood grain within them.  I didn’t know as a child what formed those burls.  I guess I don’t really even know now.  But at least I have a glimmer of a grasp on the process.

As some trees grow in the forest, and send out their tiny new branches, sometimes something happens that causes the branch to turn around so that instead of it growing freely in its extension out into the air freely, it turns around and begins to grow back into itself.  That’s where those wandering lines of grain within the burls come from.

I feel like one of those burls this morning.  I can see that the resiliency of who I am and how I am in the world (and have been since I ‘got made’) – coupled with what little support I could glean from my brother and my grandmother – kept me alive so that I could endure and survive my mother.  But I had to grow my branches inward where my mother could not get to them-me – as best as I could.

Knowing that fact, and knowing my growing process was probably very similar to any other severe infant-child abuse survivor’s – I can see that within us is held the most beautiful patterns and lines, colors and swirls, the most spectacular wonder in the tracks of our survival that appear in the ‘burl’ that is us – that anyone could imagine.

A tree branch that turns around and grows into itself cannot be as easily seen as a fully stretched and reaching branch.  It is compact, and less vulnerable.  We (survivors) grew closest to the trunk that contains our very life force within it.  We grew closest to the root source that fed us life then and feeds us life now.  We must ACTUALLY have the very shortest route to take to find out who we truly as are separate, unique and wonderful individuals because we did not get to grow ourselves in any extended far reach into ‘that world out there’.

We perhaps did not lose ourselves in that outside world the way others who could romp and play, grow and thrive while being loved, cherished, supported, encouraged from the time they were born.  We are tough.  The wood grain of a burl is dense and hard, being close to a rock than any vegetable matter.  We had to be that strong, that tough, that endurable, that unbreakable, that self- and inwardly-protected – – and THIS special, unique and beautiful.

Which brings me back in my thoughts to my mother’s few brief words in her letter to her mother about me and my relationship both to my mother and to my grandmother.  There is an unbelievable universe of terrible abuse contained in those few words – as if they contain the terrible dark and destructive seed that was my mother’s hatred.  At the same time I read them, at the same time I can feel all the echoing and resonance within this body-brain-mind-self that formed itself within THAT hell, I also know that nothing my mother ever did to me – or ever could possibly do – could in any way remove from me ANY portion of who I AM as a human being.

My mother’s treatment of me DID change HOW I am in my lifetime because her treatment of me changed the way I physiologically grew and developed.  But she did not change ME.  I just grew into a different kind of branch, one with most of its health and beauty held close within me on the inside – exactly where she could never actually reach me.

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