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At one point during my intensive chemotherapy treatment for my breast cancer the chemotherapy affected my vision.  I had previously heard a man who had this experience with his treatment say that once the treatment was finished, he threw away his glasses and retained perfect vision.

How strange it was on those days, sick sick sick sick from the chemo, that I could look at the trees on distant hillsides and actually see their individual leaves.  Not even with glasses could my vision have been this corrected.  My eyes did not keep their distance detail ability.  Yet today in the midst of my inner turmoil I think about this experience I had.

As strange as it might seem to many, I truthfully cannot say that I can tell right now the difference between my abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother’s story and my own.  I do not have that detail ability to pick out which parts of this story I am looking at and say, “This detail belonged to me as a child and therefore belongs to me now as an adult.  This detail was not and is not my mother’s.”  At the same time I cannot look at ‘the story’ and definitively or definitely say, “This detail belonged to my mother and it is a part of HER story, not mine.”

I hate this fact.  I hate the feelings, the thoughts, the questions, the doubts and the confusion that are a part of this inability to distinguish myself from my mother.

I was born into this state.  I was designed, built and developed within this state.  This state is a part of my story, and I hate it.  This essentially means not that I hate my mother, but that I hate what happened to me — and yes, I hate those parts of myself that were affected on their most basic molecular, neurological level by what my mother did to me.

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The closest I can come to truthfully and seemingly accurately describing both WHO I am in the world along with HOW I am in the world is to say that I am closer to being like a ‘wild child’ than I am to being like anyone else.  I was ensconced (meaning sheltered and concealed) within my mother’s delusional universe.  ‘Sheltered’ seems like a strange word to assign to the insane and abusive ‘place’ I grew up in from birth.  Yet for as horrible as it was, I could not escape it and my mother did everything in her power to keep EVERYONE else out of this ‘shelter’ she kept me in.

This shelter was the wilderness I was born knowing nothing about but was taught to accept from my first breath.  I had very little chance to experience anything outside of the range of my mother’s reality that had put little tiny me at the core-center of the mad hate and fear and pain filled hell that SHOULD have simply been hers alone, and had nothing REALLY to do with me at all.

But I had to live ‘in there’ with her.  For 18 years I lived in her hell.  She built her hell into every fiber of my being, beginning with my growing and developing brain.

How much of her hell is still inside of me?  As much as she could humanly cram into another person who was not her own self.

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When looking at a group of trees in the distance, even if a person does have the vision to see the details of their individual leaves, it is impossible to tell which leave exactly belongs to which tree.  Only by moving ‘up close and personal’ could we make these distinctions.

I know I have before me a daunting task.  ‘Daunting’ – ‘tending to overwhelm and intimidate’.  I hate this task.  Yet I know this hatred is just the other end of the bizarre umbilical cord of contamination from my birth still connected to my bizarrely messed-up mean mad mother.

I think about what it might be like should I have to dive deep under water without aid of oxygen supplement to retrieve something critically important lost down there.  Or what it might be like to have to enter a raging inferno to do the same.

Yet it doesn’t feel this simple:  I am going ‘in there’ to retrieve myself.

Myself is sitting right here, right now.

Yet what exists, with the exception of the external information contained in my mother’s papers and photographs, DOES lie within me.  Myself has the memories and the intelligence to pick my way through these old shards, these old skeletal remains, these old cinders and ashes — for what?

For two things:  (1) my own story as separate from my mother’s, and (2) the factual truth as far as I can discern it about my bizarrely messed-up mean mad mother.

But wait!  There IS a third component, and this is the hardest one:  (3)  In what ways am I like my mother?

As an infant lies within the womb of its mother’s body it would take a professional expert to be able to know and describe exactly where the mother ends and the infant begins.

Under normal circumstances after birth the infant is allowed and assisted to develop its own self.  Once the shelter of the mother’s womb has been left behind, the offspring is meant to become its own entirely separate entity.

My mother never let me go.  Leaving the shelter of her body in no way allowed me to escape the hell of a shelter that her mind kept me captive within.

I strongly suspect that this pattern is true for any infant-child that experiences severe abuse and maltreatment from its mother.

‘The chord that binds’ these infant-children to their mother was never correctly severed.  Such a mother still believes her offspring not only belongs to her, and is an extension of her, but in severe cases fundamentally IS HER.

As I wrote this sentence I realized that on a foundational level ALL insecure attachment patterns-disorders happen because some degree of inability to recognize the infant as being separate from the mother has occurred.  If a mother does recognize the separateness of her infant fully, she will respond to it as such.  If a mother does NOT recognize the separateness of her infant fully, she will contaminate her interactions with her infant with her OWN — well — CRAP!

The crap that exists within the relationship between a tiny infant and its earliest caregiver does NOT COME FROM THE INFANT.

According to attachment experts the end-goal and consequence of safe and secure early attachments is the development of a healthy AUTONOMOUS self.  Any problems in the earliest relationships an infant has with its caregivers is taking aim at this ‘end goal autonomous’ self of the infant — and wounding-damaging-altering it.

On its most basic level these facts SHOULD not be that difficult to understand.  Dr. Allan N. Schore describes the correct attachment process for infants and their caregivers perfectly in his articles I frequently mention:

Here:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

At http://www.atlc.org/members/resources/schore1.pdf

And here:

Early organization of the nonlinear right brain and development of a predisposition to psychiatric disorders

At http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreDP97.pdf

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In approximately half of our population these optimal safe and secure attachment patterns DO happen, and those offspring DO grow into adulthood being mostly whole, healthy autonomous selves.

That leaves the other approximate half of our population with some degree of damage which has created trauma altered development in their entire body-brain  which leaves them in their lifetime being LESS THAN AUTONOMOUS.

When an infant’s earliest caregiver is NOT a fully autonomous self, they will NOT form a safe and secure attachment with their offspring, and will pass onto their children not only a lack of whole, healthy autonomy, but also the insecure attachment disorder itself.

The ONLY way these repeating patterns can be avoided is if the infant has MORE than one primary attachment, and SOMEONE important to the body-brain development of the infant IS AUTONOMOUS.  With that autonomous caregiver the infant can form a safe and secure attachment (which then builds THAT circuitry into the body-brain).

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I am therefore saying that in every case where an insecure attachment disorder exists within a person’s body-brain, a corresponding degree of non-autonomy is present — and BOTH conditions exist in response to some degree of toxicity and deprivation within an infant-toddler’s unsafe and insecure earliest caregiving malevolent environment.

My story, and the story of my mother, is an extreme example of the patterns I am describing.  My mother was not ever able to let me be fully born.  She was not able to let me leave the shelter of her own existence.  Her lack of autonomy as a self translated into depriving me of mine.

Yes, plain and simple that means the work I am doing right now is a LABOR that has the potential to set me free so that I can give birth to my own self as a differentiated person autonomous from my mother.

That all sounds nice and fine, but in reality, it is only possible to degrees because by being my mother and my primary earliest caregiver,  her interactions with me built my body-brain and the same time they built themselves into me.  It is this non-autonomous body-brain that I must use as I attempt to create my own autonomy.  There is no magic here.  It is not possible to go back to the beginning and start this entire story over again from the start.

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I have in my possession my baby book.  Some of you already know something about the significance of this fact.  I have written about it before, and I am now very near the point where I will have to unequivocally find out within myself my own truth about what is in this book.

To review, all of my childhood, and my sibling’s childhood, we were all told that “Linda does not have a baby book.”  My siblings had one.  My mother repeated over and over again as a part of her abuse litany:  “Linda, you were such a bad, horrible, difficult, impossible child from the time you were born that I could find nothing good about you to write in a baby book.  If one has nothing good to say it is better to say nothing at all.  Therefore you do not have a baby book.”

Fast forward to 2002, the year my mother died and one of my younger brothers retrieved  a massive amount of her belongings from a long term storage unit she kept for many, many years in Phoenix.  (There were three other storage lockers full when she died.  One was in Tucson, and two were in Alaska where she died.)

As my brother and I went through this collection, three baby books showed up in that locker.  One belonged to my youngest sister, one to my oldest brother, and one to me.  (The other three books were stored elsewhere).

There it was.  The nonexistent baby book.  I mailed the other two off to my siblings.  When my brother received his in the mail, he told his wife, “If my sister Linda does not have a baby book, I don’t want mine, either.”  He threw it in the trash without opening it.  His wife secretly retrieved it.

I sent my baby book home with one of my daughters years ago for safe keeping because I feared I would destroy it.  Last month when she came to visit me I asked her to bring it back to me, and here it is.

I took it to show a friend of mine when we had lunch last week.  After she carefully read it and looked at all the pictures, she said, “Linda, if I didn’t know you and your story personally, and I looked at this book your mother made, I would not believe a word you said.”

I will probably scan the baby book and post it here, though the small writing on the pages might be hard to read — and it is in my mother’s writings that I can clearly see her madness — though few others would or could.

This all matters to me NOW as I begin work on my own story as it is all blended into my mother’s.  Where is the beginning of this story?  I can’t simply say that my story began with my birth — though I would like to.  Yet I was born into a pattern like a single note appears in the midst of a song.  That pattern was of BOTH of my parents’ insecure attachment disorders — and their corresponding lack of whole, healthy autonomous selves.

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When I visited my oldest brother last summer his wife surprised him by bringing out his baby book.  My brother and I sat side by side and went over every picture and every word our mother had put in it.  All the while my sister-in-law sat across the room from us and watched and listened in her very wise silence.

When we were done oohing and aahing over the book, my brother’s wife said, “You don’t hear it, do you?  Neither of you.  Neither of you hear it.”

“Hear what?” we asked her.

She responded, “I can hear hysteria within every word your mother wrote in that book.”

I found this experience comforting.  It helps me to know that someone on the outside of our family, herself sensitized by severe abuse in her own childhood, could detect my mother’s madness in the words she wrote about her darling, precious, much favored first born son even BEFORE she gave birth to me.  Of course anything Mother wrote in his book after he was 14 months old (his age when I was born) would also have been further influenced by whatever happened within my mother when she gave birth to me.

But there my brother and I were, completely oblivious to any shade or tone, any flicker of a clue that our mother’s madness had found its way into HIS baby book.

It is only by finding and recognizing the clues that I find in my work with my story and my mother’s story that I can even begin to know what questions need to be asked.  I have done my research up to this point the best I can about attachment disorders and what trauma altered development can do to a person so very early in their developing years.

At the same time I find patterns that show me what kind of damage was done to my mother, I will also find how her patterns affected my own development (and that of my siblings, although what happened to them is not my story).

Right now I have to give myself permission to accept the fact that I don’t know whose story is whose.  What I do know is that as I looked carefully last night at my baby book, I wanted to snatch that beautiful baby and toddler ME right out of those pictures and whisk her away from her monster of a mother.  As strange as it might seem, I know that the work I am doing right now has the power to accomplish  exactly that act — as much as is humanly possible.

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