I haven’t posted anything in a long time because I’ve been having such a bad time. I still don’t understand what’s going on well enough to talk about it. I haven’t the faintest idea how to heal the gap that’s become obvious between the “real me” and the person Mother taught me I am. I’m afraid it’s going to take years. So I’m feeling scared and vastly discouraged. This is the first time I’ve wanted to die since I started work with Erica, which is an indicator of how miserable I am. I know it’s more than a month since “Mother’s Day,” I wrote something at that time, and I’m not sure why I didn’t post it, but I didn’t. So here it is now because I think it’s relevant.
Mother’s Day. Barry suggested we write things about our mothers and send them to him or bring them to church. I thought about telling the truth, and then spaced it out. Hearing people talk about how supportive their mothers had been was painful. Two of them talked about gardening this morning, and I felt painfully jealous. Gardening is something that I would love to be able to do, but the reality is that if I go outside and try to work with the soil, with plants, I quickly get breathless and have to stop. I believe this is a result of PTSD, though I don’t know exactly why.
I was traumatized as an infant, I don’t know what happened, I expect that I was left alone too long and too often. Unfortunately, an infant can be traumatized very easily because it has no defenses. Its brain and nervous system have not been fully developed yet. Early traumatization means that the development of the brain and nervous system is negatively affected by the trauma. When I was born, my father was across the Atlantic fighting a war. I’m sure this was extremely hard for my mother, but I also know that she dealt with her pain by abusing me.
My mother was also alcoholic and probably a narcissistic personality disorder. She said a lot of very damaging things to me, such as “Nobody wants to listen to you,” “You’re too sensitive,” “No one will love you if you act like that,” etc. She did her best to squash my creativity (“don’t make a mess”) and my enthusiasm (“don’t think you’re so great”) and only much later did I understand that she was really jealous of me. She did her best to ruin my life, and I’ve spent all of my life trying to heal.
The last time I saw her was when I went to see her at the nursing home on my way to the airport to come back to New Hampshire. It was about 8AM, and she didn’t try to wake up. I’m thinking that this could be the last time she would see me, and she doesn’t care enough to wake up. Then the nurse came in, and Mom woke up immediately for the nurse. I never went home again, except for her funeral. The casket was open, so I went in. I told my inner child that she was really dead, even touched her to make sure. Since then, whenever I get scared that I’ll do something wrong and get punished, I say to myself “Mother is dead. She can’t hurt us any longer.”
Sitting in Church, thinking about how badly I was wounded, I think of how I have used my wounds in creating a better world. I was part of “Journey Into Courage,” a theater piece about domestic violence. I know that we woke up a lot of people. And I created Neskaya, where people say they feel completely accepted when they walk in the door. I tried to give others what I never got myself.