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This is what my mother forgot to say in her letters to her mother in November of 1957, two months after my sixth birthday when I was in the first grade. She forgot to tell her mother that she had beat her skinny little daughter so hard that she could barely stand up and until it really hurt her to sit down.
She forgot to say that she left bleeding gashes in her little girl’s arm from digging her sharp fingernails into her skin as she dragged her around the kitchen while she beat her with her other fist. She forgot to say that she slapped her face so hard it made her little girl’s nose bleed all over her crying face and into her mouth. She forgot to say that she screamed her rage so loudly that if there had been any neighbors in hearing range maybe they would have come racing through the woods to see what all the terrible noise was about.
She forgot to say that she propped her little girl on the tall kitchen stool in the dark back hall and made her sit there while she returned to the kitchen to make everyone else some supper. She forgot to say that the rest of the family ate all that good smelling food but Linda didn’t get any. She forgot to say that Linda was ignored by everyone, even her father, not only during supper, but for all the time the dishes were being washed and the others watched TV and then went to happily off to bed after all the lights were turned off.
She forgot to say that her firstborn little girl spent the whole night awake even though she was very tired, sitting on that stool. She forgot to say that her little girl’s stomach hurt very much, not because she was still so hungry, but because the terror stayed in there growing and growing and growing.
She forgot to say that her little girl needed to go to the bathroom but stayed frozen on that stool, terrified to move because she had been told to SIT THERE OR ELSE.
She forgot to say that she was a stupid, evil, very mean mother for buying a little girl who traveled more than two hours a day on a filthy Alaskan school bus some city girl’s turquoise jacket with white fake fur ruffs on the sleeves and around the bottom edges and inside the hood. She forgot to say that it was IMPOSSIBLE for this little girl to find a way to keep this jacket clean but that didn’t matter and nobody told Linda THAT.
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Stop the Storm 
3:57 post above–My understanding of your explanation: your behavior was not the problem. Even if you were a “perfect” child, your mother would have found some other justification to abuse you. It had nothing to do with you and everything to do with your mother’s sick mind.
Yes, and the other half of this, then, would have been that everything SHE did had everything to do with her sick mind, as well. That her sick mind was entirely grounded in altered-changed physiology including her nervous system, vagus nerve system, autonomic nervous system-stress response system meant – to me – that in cases such as hers-mine there would have been NO SAFE WAY for anyone from the ‘outside’ to have changed HER or the dynamics that were operating in our ‘relationship’.
I think what worries me most is that in today’s more child abuse ‘enlightened’ era those outsiders who might seek to change (i.e. heal and make safe for children) environments where THIS kind of pattern is operating are misled and misguided. I believe a very clear distinction needs to be made between parents who can be ‘made safe’ and those who absolutely cannot.
Because my mother’s mental illness – and her severe abuse – was so cleverly and thoroughly hidden (except perhaps from my grandmother) patterns like hers was would be, even in today’s world, extremely difficult to detect. Then, even if detection DOES happen, the complexity of the mental illness, the impossibility of true positive change, and continued destructiveness of these parents can very difficult to monitor without 24/7 audio-camera surveillance.
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This reminds me of something I detected in a side-track project I am working on (though I am taking a break from it at present). As I go through this small town’s weekly newspaper archives from 1985 gleaning out tid-bits of interesting ‘news’ I found all the articles regarding the opposition to the continued operation of a copper smelter in the area that was effectively shut down after 80 years of operation. It employed 350 people, and the closing was very controversial.
I found the EPA info that stated the arsenic emissions were expected to kill one of every 500 people from cancer. Was this to be ‘an acceptable risk’? Eventually, NO.
Then I found a Letter to the Editor from a local man who was in his 90s who harangued the ‘tree huggers’ – after all look how old HE was and he’d lived near the smelter all of his life.
If the public continues to refuse to recognize that there are some parents (such as my mother was) who are and always will be as dangerous around their children as they would be if they were child molesters – or more so. If these parents are not recognized along with the impossibility of ‘reforming’ themselves, their children fall into this same controversial group: Are there ‘acceptable risk’ allowances that make it OK to sacrifice the entire well-being for a lifetime of infant-children being abused by parents like my mother was?
Or – do we learn to detect and recognize their hazardous toxicity AND SHUT THEM DOWN?
As long as the public pretends that all child abuse is ‘the same’ and that all abusing caregivers can be ‘reformed’ I believe the most dangerous and severe infant-child abuse among us will continue.
My mother had no more ability to change herself to ‘make things better’ so the abuse would stop than I did.
I also think that given my mother’s mind, the justification to ‘abuse’ me existed BECAUSE I did. Because I was her projection-personification of her own badness, the justification simply EXISTED with a life of its own and had nothing to do with me – again, what I did or did not do. Breathing was bad enough.
Like when she used to violently wake me from an exhausted sound sleep, drag me out of bed in the middle of the night by my hair and beat me because I was sleeping on my back with my arms up beside my head. She woke and beat me because I was ‘trying to be a baby’ and ‘wanted to be a baby’ which meant in her mind that I did not want to ‘grow up’ or ‘take responsibility’ or ‘be responsible’. This was also tied in her mind to me supposedly ‘wanting to stay a baby and be spoiled’, and that I ‘wanted to be the ONLY child’ (something my father actually repeated to me as being a ‘fact’ when he came to visit me when I was 34 years old – and at that time I did not even THEN have the ability to rebuff him).
No REASON and NOT reason-able — ever, no matter what — yes, a sick, sick body-brain-mind!
Your mother had no clue about anything to do with a normal child or normal childhood behavior. She wanted you to be perfectly still, perfectly well-behaved, a perfect statue! I’m sure your mom biased your teacher toward you and your behavior at the start of first grade. All your perfectly normal, inquisitive, gifted behavior in first grade was interpreted as “bad” because that’s what your mother said it was! Your grandmother had some idea that your mom did not treat you well. I’m glad you wrote this post and told us what your mom “forgot” to tell your grandmother because now we all know! You did nothing wrong in first grade! Your mother did plenty wrong! This should never happen to any child and I’m sorry it happened to you.
Of all of the hundreds and hundreds (and more) similar ‘incidents’ occurred – this is the ONLY one that shows up referenced the way it is in her letters – I’m still trying to wrap my thoughts around THAT fact.
All Pelzer’s books, “A Child Called IT” etc. have been bestsellers for 15 years! The woman who is doing editorship on ‘stories’ book is getting a decent computer this weekend – Even getting NEAR the truth of what happened in my childhood so scrambles me up I cannot write coherently – but this book needs to be written!
Your ongoing affirmation of ME – big me, little me – is appreciated beyond words. Linda
There is something in your observation that is touching on a ‘nerve’ of a point that I need to make — one that feel extremely important but that is also extremely subtle because it is directly connected to my experience of severe abuse with my mother and her twisted mind.
It greatly troubles me that I cannot elucidate this point – not in my thinking clearly and not in my words. This fact seems to be an actual part of my experience. I sense that in some important way if I could CATCH the point, I could separate myself from it.
“Your mother had no clue about anything to do with a normal child or normal childhood behavior. She wanted you to be perfectly still, perfectly well-behaved, a perfect statue!”
This is VERY true, and it was equally true for all six of my mother’s children. Yet even if I HAD been able to “be perfectly still, perfectly well-behaved, a perfect statue” her abuse of me WOULD NOT HAVE STOPPED AND WOULD NOT HAVE LESSENED. This abuse (NOT a ‘big enough word’ for what she did) HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ME at the same time I had no other reality.
In my mother’s twisted mind, I was fundamentally evil, not human and INNATELY BAD. This evil badness that she attributed to me (and projected from within herself onto me) was BIGGER than anything I could possibly do or not do, did or didn’t do.
Her other children were not perfect, either, but she did not react to them the way she did to me.
This is a forum for my thinking related to this missing point
To suggest or to believe that ‘if only’ I had been able to be or do anything in any possible OTHER way and the abuse would have stopped – or my mother would have loved me, or welcomed me as her daughter
is to miss this missing point – and when I ‘get it’ (what this point actually IS) I will know it because I will FEEL its truth
At this point in my thinking process I would say that to believe that IF ONLY Linda had ‘been better-done better-been different’ is to also say at the same time that my mother COULD have been different – AT ALL – but particularly in her reactions to me
She could not have been different, no matter what
No matter what I had done, etc.
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This ‘point’ I need to discover must have something to do with the nature of my mother’s mental illness – that it WAS a certain way and did not and could not be changed – as long as she lived in her body in this lifetime.
Her hatred of ‘me’ (her projection) was a ‘done deal’, was a ‘given’, was a fundamental fact like any other FACT in existence.
In other words, there was no possible ‘bargaining’ regarding how she felt about me or in how she treated me. I see this as a different KIND of child abuse – again in a way I can’t yet quite define – but it’s different than MOST child abuse as if it belongs to an entirely different species of abuse.
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And maybe THIS is part of what my ‘missing point’ is all about. As long as the kind of ‘abuse’ my mother did to me remains unrecognized as being the entirely different species of abuse that it very well might be – it carries the greatest risk of continuing to cause unimaginable ongoing harm among children NOW.