+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My mother certainly made it undeniably clear that she hated me.  On the topic of HATE in regards to how I feel (or have ever felt or will ever feel) about my mother, I went looking this morning for the Webster definition of HATE.   The root origins of the word are connected to CARE.  Maybe I don’t, and don’t seem able to hate my mother because I just don’t care enough about HER to achieve that level of investment.

++++

HATE (noun)

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hete; akin to Old High German haz hate, Greek kēdos care

Date: before 12th century

1 a : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury b : extreme dislike or antipathy : loathing
2 : an object of hatred

HATE (verb)

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to feel extreme enmity toward
2 : to have a strong aversion to : find very distasteful: to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility

— hat·er noun

— hate one’s guts : to hate someone with great intensity

synonyms hate, detest, abhor, abominate, loathe mean to feel strong aversion or intense dislike for. hate implies an emotional aversion often coupled with enmity or malice <hated the enemy with a passion>. detest suggests violent antipathy <detests cowards>. abhor implies a deep often shuddering repugnance <a crime abhorred by all>. abominate suggests strong detestation and often moral condemnation <abominates all forms of violence>. loathe implies utter disgust and intolerance <loathed the mere sight of them>.

++++

About a month ago I had a conversation with a young man who was finishing a painting job on the wood-faced mall complex that contains the laundromat café where I go most Saturday’s morning to visit with my friend while she does her weekly washing.  This Hispanic young man explained to me that his entire family, including his girl friend and young daughter were still living in San Diego.  He had left the area searching for a new place to live and for a better life.  He hopes to eventually convince all the people he cares about to join him once he solidly locates employment.

This young man told me that in the two months that had passed since he left San Diego six of his friends had been shot to death.  He explained how all the homes where his family lives have barred windows and doors.

“It doesn’t do any good to replace windows once the haters have shot them out,” he told me matter of factly.  “Once they see the windows are back, they drive by and shoot them out again.  No place is safe there.  The haters cannot be stopped.  I do not want my family there.  I have to find a new place for us all to live in peace and safety.  Let the haters have it out there.  They already do.”

When I first heard this young man use that word ‘haters’ I wasn’t sure I heard him right.  I asked him about it.  He told me that there used to be a reason for the haters to hate, but there isn’t anymore.  Now they hate simply because that is who they have become.  It is who they are.

++++

I have spent hours thinking about the comment made to yesterday’s post about hate and my mother, trying to find my own truth about the topic.  I’m not sure that truth even exists where I will be able to consciously find it in my lifetime.

I cannot find a place within myself to stand on from which I can hate my mother.  Maybe that means “I cannot stand to hate my mother.”  Maybe it means “I cannot understand hating my mother.”  I am not at all sure, thinking about it, that I have the physiological capacity or ability to hate my mother – and I mean this exactly literally.

Differentiation of emotions from birth happens as the brain is built in the earliest caregiver interactions an infant has with its primary caregiver, most often its mother.  Because my mother (and her psychosis and mental illness) meant that she began to hate me while she was in labor with me, her hate for me met me at the door when I entered this world.

Obviously, her hatred completely overwhelmed little tiny me, and it influenced every interaction she had with me and (again, obviously) influenced the way my body-brain developed.

Differentiation of emotions happens at the same time and through the same process-interactions that the ‘jelling’ of the self happens.  As our earliest caregivers resonate with our infant (and childhood) emotional states, they mirror back to us our self.

My mother was not capable of doing this for me.  As a result, I never went through anything like a normal process of developing either a self or of recognizing, discriminating, identifying, discovering, defining or naming my feelings.  Because The Monster made me in interaction with her, there is no possible way that I could have even began to form an emotional space within my own physiology (brain-body-nervous system-mind-self) where any hate could have existed – most certainly, not toward her.

++++

Through all my thinking about my response to the comment made that I just mentioned, I feel like I have turned my inner house upside-down and inside-out, just as I would if I were searching and looking for something necessary, vital and needed.  I have combed and sifted, moved things around, hunted for it, and I cannot find even a glimmer inside me – nowhere – of hatred toward my mother for what she did to me.

True, as this commenter pointed out, I was nearly 30 years old before I was even able to recognize that I had been abused.  It was only 6 years ago that I began my neurologically-based own research about what damage that abuse TRULY did to me.  At that point I began to understand dissociation, disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorders, and I began to understand that the level of abuse, trauma, isolation and deprivation I had experienced from birth until age 18 had changed my physiological development and changed how my genetic potential had manifested itself in my body – and still does.

As I processed what I know about myself and the abuse my mother did to me, I also began to understand that my mother had a different, ‘evolutionarily altered’ body-brain-mind-self herself.  I realized that the minimum sentence my mother COULD and SHOULD have received for what she did to me would have to have been a 14,500-year sentence.  I realized that what I experienced, what I have to consider in my healing, and what was done to me is so far past normal, so far out of the range of normal or ordinary, that it barely, just barely fits anywhere on the map of modern life’s ‘being a human being’.

Even so, perhaps if my capacity for emotion had not been so pervasively, and evidently permanently altered by my mother, maybe I would have the capacity to hate her.  But – reality is reality and it appears that I simply don’t have that ability in the same way that I don’t have brown eyes.

++++

Even when I reached the point of disowning my mother, there was no emotion involved in that process.  As the Webster definition of ‘hate’ mentions, whatever hate is it ‘usually derived from fear, anger, or a sense of injury’.  I felt none of those feelings, nor was I in any related state of mind.

What I recognized through my experience of (unintentionally) abusing my own little son was that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me.  If there is anything that might be useful for me to examine and understand, it has nothing to do with hate.

Maybe there is something HERE that I can eventually sink my teeth into in some useful way.  What actually WAS it about realizing so profoundly, fundamentally and absolutely that my mother never felt remorse for anything she ever did to me that created such clarity within me at the instant that realization hit me?

If that momentary instant of abusing my son had never happened, I’m not sure I would ever have reached that instant of clarity about my mother and her relationship with me.

At the instant I ‘snapped’ with my son and lashed out at him in blind rage that I NEVER saw coming, that I never knew I was capable of feeling or acting out in such a way, it was like crossing a line where I – for the first time and I think the ONLY time in my life – FELT like I was sharing in the experience of how my mother acted toward me.

As soon as ‘I came to my senses’ and realized what I had done to my son, an entirely new experience consumed me:  remorse.  I felt so completely shocked at what I had done, and so profoundly SORRY for what I had done to him that I have no words to express it.

What HAD to happen at that point is that ACTION needed to follow the experience.

(1) Fully recognizing the WRONG I had done and that this WRONG was WRONG.

(2) Apologizing to my little son the best that I could in my attempts to REPAIR this horrible and horrifying RUPTURE that I had created in his life.

(3) Vowing from the essence of my being that nothing like this would EVER happen again in my lifetime.

(4) Disowning my mother.

++++

I think I instinctively realized at this moment that something was terribly, terribly WRONG WITH MY MOTHER that she never once, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of instances of abuse of one kind or another that she perpetrated against me, not one single time felt remorse.

Looking at this word I find it fascinating that the word is fundamentally tied in its roots to BITING:

REMORSE

Main Entry: re·morse

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French remors, from Medieval Latin remorsus, from Late Latin, act of biting again, from Latin remordēre to bite again, from re- + mordēre to bite — more at mordant

Date: 14th century

1 : a gnawing distress arising from a sense of guilt for past wrongs : self-reproach
2 obsolete : compassion

synonyms see penitence

++

On the most profound and REAL level I was my mother’s PREY.  She was a predator, and her hate of me gave her full permission to BITE me.  She exercised her predator instinct as fully as she could without actually risking consequence from ‘the outside’.  She was profoundly self-centered (a physiological brain-based reality) and did not kill me, I believe, because of the consequences she would have had to endure if she had.  She was not stupid.

My mother did not feel any guilt for wrongs done against me, no ‘gnawing distress’, no self-reproach, no compassion.

++

This leads me to the most important word of all, and that word is WRONG, not hate:

WRONG

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English wrang, from *wrang, adjective, wrong

Date: before 12th century

1 a : an injurious, unfair, or unjust act : action or conduct inflicting harm without due provocation or just cause b : a violation or invasion of the legal rights of another; especially : tort
2 : something wrong, immoral, or unethical; especially : principles, practices, or conduct contrary to justice, goodness, equity, or law
3 : the state, position, or fact of being or doing wrong: as a : the state of being mistaken or incorrect b : the state of being guilty

synonyms see injustice

++

WRONG is just what it is – WRONG.

I knew what I had done to my son was WRONG.

My realization about my mother coincided at the same instant as I realized she felt no remorse and evidently did not (for whatever reason) EVER consider what she did to me was WRONG.  Not wrong = no remorse.

At this same instant I realized that I had done WRONG, and realized how WRONG my mother had been, how WRONG what she had done to me was, I in effect came face-to-face with the reality of a VOID within my mother where this ‘knowing I did something WRONG in hurting my child’ did not exist within her.  It was at this instant that I realized down to the bottom of my soul that “something was terribly WRONG with my mother.”

++++

I find it interesting that is the exact word my youngest sister had used on what was the very first time anyone in my family had ever talked with me about the abuse I endured as a child.  My sister had come to visit me I believe in 1980, and had said to me, “Linda, if you are not very, very mad for what our mother did to you while you were growing up there is something terrible wrong with you.”

I had nothing inside of me at that time (I was 29) to connect her words to.

++++

I am left here with the thought that this entire hunt about why I don’t hate my mother reminds me of reducing numbers contained in fractions to their lowest common denominator.

I don’t believe (evidently) that the important point for me has anything whatsoever to do with HATE.  Reducing all the terror and trauma, the pain and suffering and torment of my childhood of being hated and abused by my mother reduces down to just that one simple word for me:  WRONG.

I have never in my life personally felt so WRONG as I did the instant after I abused my little son.  At that instant I not only DID the WRONG, but recognized the WRONG, I knew without any possible room for doubt what WRONG really and actually was.

At that instant I finally knew what my sister had tried to tell me.  I finally knew how WRONG my mother was because I finally FELT what WRONG felt like within my own self.  That was the end of any denial I might have felt about my childhood and the end of any foggy inability I had up until that instant to know the truth about my mother and her treatment of me.

I could not ‘ignore’ or ‘pretend’ any more.  I had, for that instant I abused my son, fully become The Monster my mother had always been toward me.  I had become the predator who ‘bit’ my son.

I might not ever really know what HATE is, but I know now what WRONG is.  My WRONG was intimately connected to REMORSE.  My mother’s wasn’t.  Evidently it has never been important for me to hate my mother.  It was important that I learn this single fact:  WRONG and REMORSE belong together.  When they are dissociated from one another it means that something so much bigger is so terribly WRONG that unless some fundamental repair can be made at this level there is no hope for health, wellness or for healing.

I also know in my reality that that none of this has anything to do with HATE toward either of my parents.  Perhaps because I spent 18 years being ‘bitten’ and eaten alive by the hatred my mother had toward me, I see hatred as a predatory state of being I wish to avoid in any way that I can.  I believe I see hatred as being an attribute of The Monster.  I believe it is an endangering state.

Even looking at it physiologically, hate (a stress response)  does not promote compassionate operation of our calmness, caring and connection vagus nerve system.  I would ask, “Why entertain an unwelcome guest?  What goodness does hatred bring to the betterment of life?  Who does hate benefit?  What grows and what dies as a result of its presence?”

In my thinking, if we care enough about something to hate, we can care enough to care in some other, better way.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++