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Because of my mother’s particular kind of mental illness, I did not exist as a person separate from her.  How did I be a person anyway – in spite of her?  It wasn’t like she let me develop into a part-self – so she could take that part-self away from me.  She never saw ME as a person at all, a fact that might have been my greatest protection from her and from what she did to me.

She never saw ME – so she could not touch ME.  There was no protection for the body that was me, but the ME that lived within that body was invisible to her because of the very psychotic delusions that prevented her from being able to know I WAS NOT SHE!!

Mildred saw things that did not actually exist when she ‘considered’ anything that had to do with me.  She saw things that never happened – beat me for things that never happened – for things I never did.

As I tried to fight my way to writing about my childhood with Mildred yesterday (I was trying to work with this ‘crime’:  *Age 4 – THE BEDSPREAD) I thought about one particular statement from the 43 BPD characteristics mentioned here:

+DID MY MOTHER SUFFER FROM BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)? (this is eerie)

(43) — Accuse others of doing things they did not do, having feelings they do not feel, or believing things they do not believe?

Well – DUH Linda!  Start at the beginning!

The devil did not send me to kill her while I was being born.  I was not the devil’s child.

Well – my life went down hill from there!!

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Yesterday I tried to get busy writing some of my ‘crime report’ ‘stories’ to include at the start of “The Demise of Mildred” series.  I got nowhere.  When I look at what happened to me I see HER reality.  Of course I suffered from what Mother did to me – but what matters to me is that inside my own MIND I knew – always – what I had done – what had happened – and nothing the monster could do to me could or did change my reality.

I was hence always doubly beaten and ‘punished’ because to her – I lied.  I would never apologize to her for something I knew I had not done.  I would not admit to something I knew I had not done.  (There is proof in my baby book within my very first spoken sentences as Mildred recorded them that these patterns had been going on before I was old enough to talk.)

There are huge cracks in my memories between what I now see as Mildred’s delusional reality in which (I now realize) she really DID see happen what she accused me of – and my own reality.  While we were literally both in the same physical world – we were not in the same universe, not the same reality.

Because Mildred’s psychotic break regarding me happened as she was giving birth to me I was born into this split world — HERS and MINE.

I paid a great great price for living in my own world.  For some reason I do not comprehend I could not (like I can’t flap my arms and fly) compromise my own self (integrity) I had evidently been born with.  I could not admit that her version of reality is what had actually happened – because I had my own version.

It was not my fault these two realities did not match.  I realized yesterday that it could not have possibly mattered to me if she had beaten me to death.  I had nothing to lose.  Not that I knew of.

But looking back my life WAS my own MIND.  My intact mind that knew what happened in the world I lived in.  Was I defying her?  No.  That was never my intention.  All I knew how to do was to be true to my own self from BIRTH – at way, way, way too young of an age to have ever been ready to face and to cope with such conflicts.

I could not compromise myself.  It was not in me to do so – not even to consider doing so.  I did not ever agree with Mother’s delusional version of reality as she accused me of doing things I didn’t do – because I COULD NOT.

Somehow this fact is very important to me.  How this is translating into my thinking today is that these patterns of horrific abuse tied to being ‘punished’ for things that had not happened, things I did not do – led to my lack of developing what I suppose others do:  An Ego.

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What do other people do with an ego?  What is an ego good for?  What am I missing if I didn’t develop an ego?

I don’t waste time in pondering what loss or benefit not having an ego gives me.  I only care at this moment about one thing!

If this is true – that I don’t have an ego – it explains to me why I cannot go backwards in time (as it seems to me) to reread, rewrite or in any way edit anything I have written in the past.

It seems to me that I would have to have an ego to do this with – that it would be my ego that would stand face to face with the me that does my writing in the first place.

No ego = no editor.  No self-editor.  No ego to give a dang about what I have thought or said or expressed in the past – because I don’t have an ego to be invested WITH or IN my past self.

I am reminded of one of my favorite books within which for the first time I saw my own reality, my own worldview, reflected back at me:

Eskimo Realities by Edmund Snow Carpenter, Eberhard Otto, Fritz Spiess and Jorgen Meldgaard (1973)

Carpenter describes the language and worldview of an arctic people just before ‘white’ contact changed their reality.  He describes how prior to the dollar culture moving in, artists carved the most exquisite forms out of ivory – and when the group moved on these pieces were left along the side of the ‘road’ as if they had no value as objects whatsoever.

They didn’t.

They had no “I” in their culture prior to white contact, no investment whatsoever in what ‘western’ culture so fondly calls an ego.

I leave my writings behind me in the same way.

I would say, “So what?” But if I at the same time feel that any collection of my thoughts is to be published in book form, I struggle with the conflict of lacking the capacity to work with my own words.  I can write things in the moment.  I can add word after word.

But just as I survived the unbelievable hell of my childhood being continually attacked by a psychotic, delusional MAD WOMAN – because I had the capacity to (1) know my own reality, (2) never lose my own reality and, (3) never compromise my own reality – I seem unable to do anything any differently now:  I moved forward in time THEN.  I move forward in time NOW.

Is it an EGO that lets people connect their past to their present to their future in ways that I don’t think I can?  If I want to complete books I better figure this out for myself.  I do not call this ‘healing’.  I can’t ‘heal’ the fact that circumstances of my childhood in hell prevented me from developing anything like an ‘ordinary’ ego.  (If I had to choose between having an intact SELF or having some kind of an EGO – thank you, but SELF works fine for me.)

But if I don’t have this EGO-thing and this loss/absence is preventing me from accomplishing something I want to do – feel destined to do – what are my options?

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I have had another change in my thinking this morning as I prepare to write book one of “The Demise of Mildred” series, in which I need to place what I have so far always thought of as ‘my stories’ about child abuse I experienced at the hands of my mother, Mildred.

What have I been thinking?

These are not STORIES!  What I have to say does not belong to any genre related to stories!

As I mentioned to a blog comment this morning, what I have to say should have been written in police reports.  What I have to say is a description of crimes committed against me.  These are not stories!

Why would I ever feel – why have I felt in the past – that I need to write what I have to say about the truth of what Mildred did to me in some kind of ‘entertainment’ format for any reader, even for myself?

All of a sudden today – TODAY!  I realize how sick my thinking has been, even though I have never before today been aware of it.  I figured out some years ago that the crimes of physical attack and assault Mildred did to me should have earned her a minimum 15,000 year jail sentence.  Yet I still understood that what I might say about these assaults would ‘only’ be a story?

How minimizing is THAT?  How inaccurate!  How ‘inside the abuse’ has my own thinking been all these years!

Just because what I know might exist inside a memory does not mean what I know is ‘a story’.  What I know is a record of crime.

I needed this clarification in my thinking before I begin to present any kind of a record about the truth about Mildred that no reader will see in her own writings – ever.  I know that in order for this book to be created I have to be as clear as I possibly can be about what I expect myself to do – and why I expect myself to do it.

I am my own witness.  As the victim of child abuse crimes I will always be the best witness to what was done to me.  I experienced and I witnessed CRIMES.  Those crimes will only ever be recorded as I record them.  What I will say, then, will be in the form of statements for the record.  There cannot possibly be any ‘entertainment’ value in that kind of writing.

OK – so I have to think about this some more – from my new point of view…..

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What is it about being myself in my body in my life that I don’t like today?  Today – so far – seems to be one of those days when just being myself makes me feel crabby.  At least I can feel grateful I don’t recognize this feeling very often.  I wonder, “What is the source of my irritation at being me today?”

Now, the one word that is stuck in my mind – as irritating as a burr would be stuck under the saddle of a horse, or a pebble inside a person’s shoe — is this one.  OBLIVIOUS.

I can’t say that I understand how this word, ‘oblivious’, could possibly be making me feel so irritated and crabby at myself this morning – except to say that because I think of myself as a ‘writer’, I expect myself to be able to beat words at their own game – at least most of the time!

Struck dumb by a word?  By THIS word?

My main train of thought these past few days is about the silence of child abuse – the silence that surrounds its reality, the silence of the suffering child, the silence even of adult survivors of child abuse – the silence of the society that lets child abuse continue – and on and on and on….

Does our society choose to remain OBLIVIOUS about the reality of child abuse?

Well, I thought I could use this word correctly in this way – until I began to look at the connection between OBLIVIOUS and OBLIVION.

– OBLIVION evidently relates as a ‘measurement’ of degrees of forgetting.

1. : the fact or condition of forgetting or having forgotten;especially : the condition of being oblivious

2. : the condition or state of being forgotten or unknown

– OBLIVIOUS is about not remembering – PLUS

1. : lacking remembrance, memory, or mindful attention

2. : lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness —usually used with of or to

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Strangely, by looking into the root connections to these words another word comes up that I had never heard before –

– LEVIGATE

1.: polish, smooth

2.a : to grind to a fine smooth powder while in moist condition

b : to separate (fine powder) from coarser material by suspending in a liquid

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Do we ‘forget’ (pass into oblivion, become oblivious to) things we have known about in an effort to make smooth a path of life – take out the bumps – ‘make nice’ our lives by leaving things out that don’t fit the picture we wish to have of – whatever – both as individuals and as a collective society?

Is this denial?  A handy kind of forgetting what we do not want to remain consciously aware of — WHY?

If I choose a word related to OBLIVIOUS am I really saying that people know perfectly well what infant-child abuse is, that it exists, know of the damage it causes a survivor for a lifetime – as they choose to conveniently FORGET that they know/forget what they know?

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As a writer I do not often stumble upon – no, trip and fall flat – from words I encounter.  What is it about this word, OBLIVIOUS, that has me stuck in Crabby Ville today?

Never mind this word first appeared in my thoughts with a demand that I place if first in this book I am intent on writing next – as I mentioned in my last post.  This word (Can words talk?) said to me, “I want to be the first word in your book.  And then I want a period to follow me.  Just that. Just this.”

Oblivious.

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Well, what to do when a word becomes so troublesome in its demands it will not let me simply SKIP it and move on?  It won’t let me ignore it.  I have always believed I know (of course) what this word means – but do I?

I am writing this current book as the introduction to the multi-volume series of “The Demise of Mildred” because I know perfectly well that for 18 long years her abuse of me remained (evidently) invisible to anyone who could have stopped it from happening.

Or – nobody cared.  Nobody had any kind of vested interest in looking after my well-being.

This is true for everyone that has ever been abused as a child – true for children (and infants) that are being neglected, abused, traumatized, terrorized NOW.

OBLIVIOUS is an issue!  Nobody is going to see Mildred’s abuse of me in her own writings.  Nobody saw it in real time when it was happening to me.  I can’t change the past, but I am going to do my best to prevent readers from being OBLIVIOUS to Mildred’s abuse as they read her writings.

Or – are we survivors supposed to comply with the status quo, keep our mouths shut – and let the abusers continue to ‘get away with it’?

Of course – this is exactly what we are supposed to do!  Let abuse fade away into oblivion, let everyone remain oblivious to the reality of abuse of innocents within our society that does not, frankly, give a damn.

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OBVIOUS:

Synonyms: clueless, incognizant, innocent, insensible, nescient [not informed about or aware of something], ignorant, unacquainted, unaware, unconscious,uninformed, unknowing, unmindful, unwitting

Antonyms: acquainted, aware, cognizant, conscious,conversant, grounded, informed, knowing, mindful, witting

OBLIVION:

Synonyms: forgetfulness, nirvana, obliviousness

Webster’s does not list antonyms for this word!

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After a very long troubling sleepless night I finally dozed as the fall sun crawled slowly into the sky.  Sometimes writing a book takes doing battle I realized last night.  Who gets epiphanies?  Those who are able to struggle long enough to make it to the place where an epiphany awaits them?  I LIKE epiphanies   I detest the uncomfortable process I seem to always have to go through before I am ready for the next step in my learning-growing-healing process.

Today I find I see what I am doing in my book writing process completely differently that I did yesterday.  It took a combination of being unsure of myself, of what I am doing, of why I am doing it, of how I am doing it — along with timely words coming to me from people in my life.  Why do I so tenaciously cling to the telling of ‘my story’ of abuse which includes the telling of my abusive mother’s story?  Because I am not going to throw out something of highest value – just because my culture says I ought to ‘let it go and move on’.

Today I understand the great difference between a QUEST and a MISSION.

My mother was – quite sickly – on a QUEST her entire life.  Her mental illness gave her ways to divide that which was BAD from that which was GOOD (as I wrote about in my previous post).

Her abuse of me was meant to ‘take care of’ all she could not tolerate inside herself — while her Alaskan homesteading was meant to complete her quest by letting her live in a perfect kingdom where no ‘bad’ either existed – or could reach her.

I think about my writing.  I see today that I am on NO healing quest whatsoever as I shape and reshape words into stories that come from my memories of abuse.  I don’t write to heal!

NO WAY!

I write because I am on a MISSION!

Now, unlike the kind of continual stream-of-thought writing I do on my blog, the troubles I have been having with my book project is that I have to make THOUSANDS of decisions as I do that work that I do not ever have to make as I blog.

It is this decision-making that I don’t like!  I don’t like it because I am unfamiliar with that ‘way’ of writing.

Defining clearly my own difference between being on a quest and being on a mission allows me to now take varying pieces of information to combine them in new ways.

Mildred’s quest was not only for survival.  It was for healing.

All the she knew and all that she did – including her abuse of me and her homesteading – was a part of this healing quest.

I realize most importantly that perhaps the most significant contributing factor to why I was able to raise my three children without continuing the intergenerational pattern of traumatizing them through abuse was exactly this fact:  I left my abusive home of origin intact and autonomous.

Mildred did not break me.  She did not make me sick.  For whatever reasons – I have always had my own self present with me.  I was not, therefore, on any kind of a ‘healing quest’ to solve my own inner troubles through the actions I took toward my children.

Rather, I had a MISSION clearly in my mind, heart and soul as I raised my kids.  I didn’t need to think about this consciously except in an occasional passing thought, “I am not going to raise my children like my parents raised me.  I am going to raise them so that they know clearly WHO they are, as they grow up to LOVE who they are.”

That was it.  My mission was clear and defined.

This does not mean that throughout the stages of my adult life as a survivor of 18 years of terrible child abuse that I have not ‘quested’ for healing – for information – for knowledge and for wisdom about what happened to me and what that means to me.

But today I would question my use of ‘quest’ even in that regard.  I was – truthfully and accurately – on a MISSION to become the best me I can be no matter what happened to me.

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So as it applies to the stages of my book writing I today understand that my mission is to give voice to infant and child abuse through exposing what I can discover about the abuse that happened to me.

The truth about infant and child abuse lies behind the scenes in our society.  It lies in silence.  There is only one way I know of to break this silence – and that is to use my words to SPEAK from behind that wall of silence.

Punch holes in silence.  I am reminded of a dream I had over 30 years ago.  A poet professor I had was in this dream sitting on steps that went over a wall – pondering.  I saw him, stopped to ask him what he was so deeply in thought about.

“This is the wall of silence,” he told me as he gestured to a pitch dark wall stretching to his left and to his right.  The wall was darker than night time.  It blocked out the light of the stars in the sky.

“But,” he told me.  “Look.  Look closely.  There are holes in the wall of silence.”

True enough.  If one looked closely enough there were spots in the wall where the star light shone brightly through.

I awoke hearing my own words I spoke to the poet, “I didn’t KNOW there were holes in silence!”

This was an epiphany to me.  It applies here as I rise to move forward to complete my book writing mission using what this dream taught me.  With the telling of my stories I am punching holes in the silence that keeps the reality of abuse of infants and children flourishing in our culture.

What I know about Mildred also creates holes in this silence.

My mission is to keep to my own path.  Yes, I realize ‘life is short’ but I will never say it is ‘too short’ to keep with us our own stories until we learn from them what we need to, and until we use what we have been through – what we know in consequence – as great tools of power toward the healing and protection of our species.

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In writing here this morning before I return to work on manuscript #4 for “The Demise of Mildred” I am collecting some thoughts that, quite frankly, I don’t know where to put in this book which is being written in a series.  It might be that the thoughts I have this morning will need to be placed in an earlier volume.  Perhaps they will need to be put into the series introduction.  It frustrates me to have an insight come to me at this stage of my writing that I wish had appeared much earlier!  Oh, well – now to think this all through a little bit more.

“When opportunity knocks.”  Is this an idiom?  A cliche?

At the end of one of Mildred’s letters I worked through yesterday she wrote about the combination of thrilling highs and heart wrenching lows she is experiencing as she first moves up to her Alaskan wilderness mountain homestead, “I know I can’t have my cake and eat it too.”

Those are her words that evidently triggered a whole chain of thoughts for me that I don’t know what to do with at this moment.

I have tried hard thus far in these volumes to explain and describe to readers what I mean when I mention “Mildred’s BPD-matrix litany of words.”

Long, long ago I identified that it WAS an abuse litany that Mother created as it concerned me.  The launch point of this abuse litany was her delivery of breech-me as she suffered a psychotic break, believing that the devil sent me to kill her.  It didn’t help that I was born alive and that she made it through this delivery alive, as well.  All that meant was that the second addition was made to her litany:  “You are the devil’s child sent as a curse upon my life.”

I was NEVER human to Mother.

I deeply – and finally – now understand how her psychosis operated as she abused me from my birth until I was expunged from the family home when I was 18.

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Yes, if I were to be gentler and more supportive of myself I would let myself know that I am working deep within a pitch dark mine that was my severely mentally ill mother’s mind as it expressed in the hundreds of thousands of her words left somehow with me when she died in 2003.  I would let myself understand that I am doing a darn good job at finding absolute gems of truth about Borderline Personality Disorder as I examine this one massive case study of Mother.

No, I am always having to battle my way forward through what I DO NOT YET KNOW as I write my own version of Mother within her words.

I so rapidly shove what I discover behind me as I move forward in this book writing process because it is always what I DON’T KNOW that I am searching for.  Thus, when an insight like the one I have now appears out of order (as I see it) and too far down the line from where I think I SHOULD have been able to see it — I am very frustrated.

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Mildred’s verbal litany, as I have discovered in writing “The Demise of Mildred” series did NOT ONLY apply to me.  Mildred had a litany of words for everything!  These litany words appear in segments as phrases that are repeated over and over again in her writings as they were in her life.  Watching which segments appear in which context in which combination allows me to see patterns of her illness — and thus, see her BPD-mind at work.

I so far believe that Mildred lost her ability very early in her life to grow and develop a healthy self.  Instead her disorder replaced her self.  Instead of a ‘real’ self she was consumed by and trapped within what I call her BPD-matrix mind.

As I move forward in my forensic biographical work on Mildred I have come to understand that her BPD operated in EVERY SINGLE aspect of her life.  There was no part of Mildred that was not influenced by her mental illness.  Why was that so hard for me to see?

And why, then, did it surprise me that she had a litany of words for EVERY part of her existence – not ‘just’ for me?

And, how to I explain what her litany WAS?  Let alone her BPD-matrix that was all Mildred had of a mind?

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So, back in full circle, I think about idioms, sayings, expressions, metaphors, cliches that I suspect have infiltrated and have been created within every language spoken within every culture on earth.

Some are so mundane we would not question them:  moving lock stock and barrel; a stitch in time saves nine; a penny saved is a penny earned; it’s raining cats and dogs; you have me over a barrel; make hay while the sun shines.

Others appear obtuse because they were generated in an older era:  make no bones about it; grease my palm; a chip on your shoulder; can’t cut the mustard.

There are over 7,000 idioms used in English explained in The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms.  But we all know they exist.  We have all used them ‘at one time or another’.  What has struck me this morning is that these segments, these phrases are actually patterns of a language litany of words that hold no sinister meaning within their particular combination of words.

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I postulated to my daughter the other day that I would not be surprised if in the future when Borderline Personality Disorder is far more understood, that  it will be found that one of its underlying components is a language processing disorder.  I would also postulate that as researchers work to determine some of the major abuse-related common origin points for this disorder that they will find that verbal abuse is perhaps the MAIN shared early abuse for people who develop BPD.

Researchers have already found that of all abuses done to children it is verbal abuse that outruns them all – combined – in its power to change the brain development of little people within traumatic environments.

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Meanwhile, “back at the ranch” if not out here “in the back 40” I think about BPD-Mildred’s matrix replacement for a mind.  Mildred spoke in her own matrix-generated idiom litany segments because she THOUGHT in them.  The more important a concern was to Mildred’s BPD-matrix, the longer its corresponding litany became and the more likely that part of her overall BPD-matrix litany was to appear — over and over again.

Because Mildred needed to separate her upper ‘heaven’ world from her lower ‘hell’ world, her matrix litany of me as her proxy in hell was MASSIVE!!

At the same time it was Mildred’s matrix search for ‘the perfect kingdom’, for ‘the perfect home’, for ‘heaven on earth’, for Shangri la, that fed her Alaskan homesteading obsession.  Homesteading and Alaska were described in an ever-growing corresponding litany of word phrases/segments.

People don’t CHANT idioms – not normally, anyway.  BPD-matrix litany phrases – at least for Mildred – became mantras that both described and had the power to motivate her life, her actions.  A BPD-matrix mind is a closed system.  Mantra-litany repetitions are not, therefore, subject to moderation or modulation once they are formed.

I suspect that much of the power for harm that comes from verbal abuse to children is that the phrases used, the segments of a litany of abuse, are not said JUST one time.  Oh, no!  How many times, for example, does a verbally abused child (or any adult who is in an abusive relationship) hear something repeated over and over again like, “I hate you!  I curse the day you were born!  I wish you were dead!  I wish you had never been born!  You are so STUPID!”

And on and on and on such abuse litany word segments go – over and over and over again.

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Even though, as I mentioned, I identified Mother’s abuse litany of me years ago, it is only as I write these book manuscripts now that I understand that her BPD-matrix mind THOUGHT in litany patterns of words.  That is how her mind worked.

This explains to me why it is impossible to ‘reason’ with a BPD-matrix mind.  Because the matrix exists as a replacement for a healthy self, it is an entirely closed system in which nobody or no important thing (in Mildred’s case, a thing like a home, a house, her belongings, her children, her mountain, etc.) ONLY existed as a BPD-matrix THOUGHT.

Which also explains to me that even though it is often said that borderlines ‘fear abandonment’ – this so-called pattern has NOTHING whatsoever to do with actual people!  A BPD-matrix mind has NO PEOPLE in it.  It has IDEAS – only.  In order for such a matrix to provide ‘order and orientation’ of ongoing experience for a BPD person in the world, the matrix must have what it needs to function.

Having ‘people’ in particular ‘places’ within a BPD-matrix mind is essential for it to function.  ‘Fear of abandonment’ is an outsider’s way of describing the great quaking that such a matrix mind will undergo if one of it’s ‘thought-ideas’ (say, a person) is removed from its functional place in the matrix.

This also explains to me why BPD people cannot accept responsibility or blame.  A BPD-matrix ‘sorts’ things out – anything ‘bad’ simply cannot exist in the upper matrix and hence is banished to the invisibility of the lower part of the matrix.  (I see the matrix in 2-D as a diamond shape; in 3-D as two pyramids, one extending upwards from a platform base, the other downward.)

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On and on this forensic biographical study of my severely abusive BPD mother Mildred goes, complete with my study of her litany.

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I just added this thought into a comment:

I realize that I am working with the patterns I see that are particular to my own BPD Mother. I KNOW she suffered a psychotic break while she was birthing me, probably under the influence of the drug ‘twilight sleep’ that I most strongly suspect she was given during labor.

I cannot generalize to BPD in any way what I am coming to understand about Mildred.

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“Mandate with suffering.”  Not like saying “hamburger with fries.”  Yet having written the story presented in my last post I have a need to look more closely than ever before at ‘forgiveness’, a word that I don’t really understand.

That doesn’t matter, evidently.  I will learn.  Meanwhile, those who have suffered greatly through abuse know this mandate that comes with such suffering.  Either our memories eat us alive – or we find our way to forgive.

Because working with Mildred’s own story as she presents it in her writings spares me the worst of the worst that I will face should I move on to finish my own childhood story once I have published the volumes of “The Demise of Mildred.”  I sure got a taste today of what my own story telling might do to me – I continue to need to be very, very careful of how I handle my memories of severe child abuse.  So be it.

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