Jail, Rehab

[Scent of Cedar *]

Clearly, I must have been groomed to assume this posture. And understanding this, it is apparent why I had to distance myself from her in order to live an adult life. I cannot say normal, because it was not.

Groomed, yes. Twisted and hurt and shamed into absorbing and accepting as valid invalid reflections of negative grandiosity: Yes. For me, that is true.

Why did you have to distance yourself from your abuser.... Because you had courage; because you were confused about what was real, and about what your role in whatever that was could possibly be. Because you were honest, and because you have integrity and because you refused to willingly interact with someone you love as much as you love her, your mother, in a way that was not real.

As usual, I know everything this morning again. Please excuse me.

"I cannot say normal...."

But can you say "courageous"? Can you imagine what it was to be us, to be what it is to be a young female on her own and without advice or compassion for herself or support in the societies we have created, where mysogyny is every woman's unspoken name?

But it's almost like you want to put her bad choices on your shoulders.

I did that. For sure, I did that all of my life from the time I was little and could not protect my (younger) sibs. Or myself, although I think that, unless we see our abusers abusing others that we are very certain do not deserve what is happening to them ~ unless we are given that small mercy of knowing the abuser is wrong, is evil, even ~ then I think we will have a harder time coming back from it.

Whose guilt was I carrying, and how did I happen to pick that up? I was protecting my mother (who could so easily do away with me altogether) from my (imagined) vengeance and rage and hatred for her, for who she was, for what she was intentionally doing to those I was supposed to protect, and to me. If I had taken after her ~ say I had attacked her with my teeth or something, back when I was a little girl of say, fifty pounds ~ then my mother could very well have taken me down ~ maybe forever. And if that had happened, then I would have known, for sure, that even the vengeance I believed in and harbored, and that was all I had to protect me from the unending chaos and hurt and fear ~ I would have had to face then, that this thing I had imagined was real, and was strong enough to make her stop, that thing, that lust of vengeance that was so awful a thing that I needed to protect her from it ~ I would have had to face it and to know, every time the monster was loose, that I had no protection.

Then, I would have had to acknowledge that I lived through all that in a truly defenseless position. That would have been too much vulnerability for a little girl or a little boy or even, as it turns out, for a sixty three year old grown up person to face without an adequate support system to hold me up when I was ugly or ashamed or guilty or cowardly or any of the other thousand obscenities that happen in situations like ours.

I needed something like us.

And here we are. And we are doing it ~ finding true compassion for ourselves, for those brave, terrified little children we were when the monster was loose.

Thank you.

I get too well that this same need to take responsibility for all of the hurt that accrued to my mother, is at play with my son.

That's okay, Copa. It is what it is and we are done trying to patch everything up and make it look normal. What I can tell you that may be of some help is that I think we go too far in the opposite direction from what was done to us with our children. So, we loved them, not too much, but without a sense of discipline and expectation. It took me a very long time to be angry with my children about what they were doing to themselves.

It took a very long time more before I could even begin to see that I have a right and an obligation to be openly angry with them over what they have done, over how they are interacting with and responding to, me.

It was SWOT's post about abusive adult children. That is when, typical of me and maybe, of all people with savagely abusive pasts, I leaped first into the standing up part and then, figured out the why of it later.

I did this, the leaping into the standing up part, for both my son and myself. He needs a mother he can respect.

I needed to be that mother. And because I wasn't there yet, I stood up and came and posted here immediately.

And we got me through it, because here I am, today.

None of this is easy, Copa. You are (and this is a quote I got from somewhere, but I don't want to go look for it, now). You are fighting for your spirit, for your sanity, for your soul.

This matters.

For you and for your son too, it matters that you do this.

We are all doing this.

Hold on.

Like your son, your mother did what she wanted to do, not because of YOU, but because of HER.

True.

Copa's son may just be practicing his addiction. Or my son may have been tormenting me on purpose, too. (That is okay, baby. I am strong enough to do this and that means you are, too. Same bloodline.)

I see that I still feel quite protective where my son is concerned.

Good.

I like that about me.

I just don't want to enable. Since he will not ask for money regarding these issues he knows nothing about, I am probably okay to feel this way.

As long as I keep it secret from him.

He believes I am like, a biatch, now.

Good.

Imagine my despair as what afflicts my son morphs to ever more concerning and less fixable conditions.

Copa?

Same bloodline.

Your son will be fine.

And, in her case, maybe near the end of her life she was sorry because...who knows why? But what she did, she owns.

Why doesn't matter.

Whether she was sorry doesn't matter. That we be able to view our mothers with compassion. That matters. For me. For my sake not hers. For me, for how I will put all this away, for how I will declare my name going forward, that I come to view my mother with compassion matters. Because she is my mother and for no other reason.

It's complicated. My mother / myself complicated.

I was thinking compassion for the male who beat my daughter, or for my sister, who stalked and hurt my child when she was already so broken. I do not have to find compassion for them. That would be the job of my daughter, as she is the one who sustained the injury.

That is all I know, about that.

But I do know this about those two: I see you. I will never believe in you, again. That's a pretty big deal, for me to say that. To say someone is who they are and cannot change.

So maybe we are dealing with that vengeance place again.

For now, I am okay with that.

For now.

free of the sins of others that you had no hand in.

Yes!

At last.

Free of it.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

She had no right to screw me up to that degree ~ to the degree that my sanity, my sane response, was unbalanced.

That is why everything had to be perfect. I could not risk a real response. Everything had to be censored, had to be kind. Because of the hatred, and because of that lust of vengeance I had to believe was real to survive the horror of those things I lived.

I lived.

And now, I am coming alive in all my imperfectness.

And I am so proud of that little girl I was, and of that young woman who chose kind every time, and of that frightened young mother, flying by the seat of her pants with her heart in her throat.

Good job, Cedar.

***

So, this must be what it feels like to stand up, without having to force it. Without having to pretend that we have legs, and firm ground to stand on, when we don't.

Now, we do.

And it just feels like, pretty normal. No fear, eating away at the heart of my integrity about whether what I'm doing is okay, or is my stupid mother.

There's ~ I don't know. There seems to be alot more room in here, now. Like when you move into a really big house, and it turns out to be that Victorian mansion you have been exploring in the scarier dreams.

Here is something that may or may not, apply: So, Carlos Castenada wrote a story about a shaman who changed his hero into an earthworm. And, when the hero was back, the shaman asked what he knew now, about earthworm life. The answer: "I was all powerful. I moved the Earth with my motions, I consumed the Earth."

And some other stuff I cannot remember now, but you get the idea.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

My mother is deceased. She was my first husband's mother and somewhere she is an angel, a shining star who babysat for Bart when he was a baby when I had a medical emergency and E. wouldn't do it. This wonderful woman was beloved by all and taught me so much. I looked to her for guidance.

Like I have D H mom. And like, when I was little, I had my grandmother, far away, but loving all of us ~ all of us, all of the cousins ~ unconditionally. I can see her at the door to this minute, her arms wide open and her eyes so happy to see us, and her skin so pretty.

I am so glad you had her in your life, SWOT, and that you were able to receive what she could give to you, to help you know how to be whole.

Those people in my life made all the difference for me, too. There were more, I am sure there were more, but I was too hurt to receive it, to believe in it.

To believe that could be real, for me.

***

There is something about grandiosity I am looking for in reviewing this thread this time. Something SWOT said about grandiosity and the mother's brother and her son. It is hard to hold the places where we can see things differently; hard to track it down.

It has something to do with my grandmother loving us all unconditionally. My mother splits us, isolates us, isolates anyone who trusts her. (Writing about the elderly lady friend who does all the driving and etc.) The lady friend belongs to the same small, intimate group my mother does. The lady was there first. It is a public group and anyone can join, but this is a very small town. My mother has told me stories about what she has said about this woman, who is older than my mom and not in good health and lost her husband and still grieves him ~ about the way she is sabotaging the way the other members of the group are able to see this woman.

I don't know why she told me.

She is very, very supportive to the woman's face.

She also asked me point blank whether I thought she should use the man who wanted to marry her and over whom my mother and sister are battling away.

But I digress.

Or about my sister when her back is turned or about the way she creates such intense feelings of shame for her grands, and for her great grands, by blatantly displaying and insisting that others display too, a belief in the chosen child's ~ and the chosen child is changeable ~ value. Value is the word I am looking for here. Not the child's lovability or accomplishments or anything with an emotional component to it. The chosen child's value. Well, you cherish or love a child. You value a tool.)

Something to do with grandiosity; something to do with making you watch a child perform. Something to do with abusing the time and attention of family. Something to do with twisting that time into something filled with glass shards.

Something to do with keeping us isolated, one from the other.

My sister does this with and to her children and now, to her grandchild. I have posted before about my sister dominating (?) presuming upon the goodwill of the occasion to draw the attention from family, and from acceptance and bonding and goodwill into an irritation. Into, into making it not real. Into making that family time where everyone has taken time out of their lifetimes to come together and be together there, just seeing those faces around the dinner table or coming to the door, coming home ~ something about stealing, about usurping those generous energies into a vehicle for destroying that generous thing, that so pleased identity and collective approbation and approval and easy happy that should happen with family into ~ into you don't matter. Into only I matter. Into "see my child / only my child and through your attention to her, see only me / only me."

My mother was always that way too, about anything having to do with herself. About her work, and about how important she was there, and about how smart a person has to be to hold a job like that. And about how ~ for heaven's sake. She used to bore whoever was stuck talking to her half to death with the same stories, the same conclusions, the same eyes on attention required to listen and listen and listen. I could do so many things, as long as I was in the area where she was, while my mother would just keep talking.

She was like the sound of a river. Something in the background that just keeps making meaningless sound.

But that was my lifetime she was using up to do that. And it was a presumption on the time I had made for all of us to be together.

I can still hear her, can still see her in any of a thousand places we might be.

Talking.

Forever talking about herself, repeating the same stories almost word for word, over and over and over again.

Yuck.

I don't know where I am trying to see myself to, here. But it has something to do with grandiosity in abusive parents (or sisters, I guess). And it is an important thing having to do with that destruction of the generosity and warmth and strength to be found in family. It has something to do with seeing to it that no matter how many times we try to come together, mistrust will be the word that comes up, like a bad fortune in one of those eight balls that has some kind of liquid in it and brings up a word when you ask it your future.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Copa?

Same bloodline.

Your son will be fine.

Cedar, I adopted my son who I first met when he was 22 months, in the orphanage where he had lived since he was 2 weeks. He was taken from his parents' care when his mother threatened to hurt him.

While his genetics may be good, there was a mixed picture. While I believe grandparents on both sides were productive and moral his drug using birth parents' both had diagnoses of mental illness and his prenatal exposure and first 22 months were horrendous. There were multiple concerns about him developmentally by the time I met him.

That said, I take heart that our bonding and first 15 or so years together were sufficiently strong and stable to prevail.

That I am aware of he has done nothing criminal (although as I write this I remember I could have called the police on him more than once) and is averse to those who do, seeking instead to identify with good and productive people.

He does not yet see or take responsibility for changing, the reality that his lifestyle, as a vagabond, unproductive, and marginal, throws him in with people just the opposite than those with whom he identifies.

But can you say "courageous"? Can you imagine what it was to be us, to be what it is to be a young female on her own and without advice or compassion for herself or support in the societies we have created, where mysogyny is every woman's unspoken name?

Yes, Cedar. I lived it. No internalized mother or caretaker with whom to identify, or model, to guide me to set limits. One day, not today, I will reflect upon the how, I survived and on some level thrived.

unless we are given that small mercy of knowing the abuser is wrong, is evil, even ~ then I think we will have a harder time coming back from it.

All my life with my mother that I remember, I had a voice that challenged her, whether silent or not.

Ten years ago my mother had a roof collapse in her Condo and felt my duty was to assist her. I was on my way to live in Rio de Janeiro. I went.

My Mother was angry. Felt abandoned. She was jealous. She maligned me to my sister for leaving secure employment, and for what all, more, I do not care.

I called her from Rio.

She said this: I don't want you to ever call me again. I don't ever want to talk to you. And hung up on me.

I waited a week or so and called again. She hung up on me.

I called a week later, same response. I decided to hold her to her word. And did not call again. For years.

This was by far not the first nor the longest breach in contact that we had.

At some point in the year or two before she died I spoke with her of this.

She said it never happened. She denied she would ever do such a thing. She was not angry or defensive. Only that it had never happened and she would never have acted in such a way. So, of course, it had never happened.

For much of my life it bothered me that my mother presented a reality of my childhood and her role in it...that was contrary to my memory of it...what I think of as fact.

I accept it now. I bear my own memory. And feel sadness for all of us.

I have pictures of my mother in old age that are on her dresser, in my home, now. All of them in her "out of the house" guise. My mother too was beautiful and kept her beauty even in death.

I have said before that my mother had a persona for "going out." With makeup on and dressed up...like a plant...she oriented towards the light, the sun.

Each of these few pictures that I have...has this outside persona.
Except one.

The picture for some reason, though she is in a nightclub, and all dressed up and pretty, captures her tough arrogance--her cruelty. Each time I enter the room where it is I feel a chill. I have thought about removing the photo. But do not.

I need to remember how I was killed over and over by this person.

I do not deny what happened to me. I could not. It happened for my whole life. And for my whole life while my mother was alive, I remembered and I lived my life protected from her. But, I forgot for a spell, after she died.

I think that, unless we see our abusers abusing others that we are very certain do not deserve what is happening to them ~ unless we are given that small mercy of knowing the abuser is wrong, is evil,

I never believed that I deserved what was happening to me. But I did believe that if it was happening to me, I must have deserved it.

I do not think that it is possible for a baby and child to think otherwise. To believe that a mother, on whom you base your self is so infallibly and unreliably corrupt, is a reality that no young child can tolerate. In my case, I was able to trust myself...who knows how...but I could not trust the world.

I have known that I grieved a mother I did not have.

Is it possible to separate out the parts of you that you have constructed in spite of your mother, from that which was fashioned in opposition, from that of her that has always been there? For me, I think not or choose not to.

There is a choice involved, to love, not hate. To feel gratitude for surviving. To feel gratitude that at the end, there was love and responsibility. In me.

I am acknowledging that it was always me.

 

[BusynMember]

She said this: I don't want you to ever call me again. I don't ever want to talk to you. And hung up on me.

I waited a week or so and called again. She hung up on me.

What is it about dysfunctional people who feel the need to run, run, run? This no contact crapola is just running scared. Oh, for some who are really in harms way by a person, it's for safety. I get that. But these are for reasons that have nothing to do with safety. We didn't do or say what they wanted us to.

How sad for them that they can never talk to anyone in a frank way, probably not even their friends or SO, if they have any, or even their own siblings. The conversation I wanted to have with Thing 1 and 2 could never have happened. They would have been freaked out and would not have answered directly or it would have turned into a session about me, not bout them and why.

"Why? Why didn't you even one time, both of you, tell E., she's mys sister and I love her. Stop talking about her that way."

Thing 1 was not in my life much after he moved away so we were not close. But 2 kept calling me, even after I was used to not hearing from her, and she told me she loved me, she ACTED, when she wasn't angry at me, like she cared about me. If she did, why did she keep her mouth shut? I would have challenged E and said, "If you talk about 2 that way, I don't really want to hear from you." I was and am a mother bear and would never have put up with hearing second hand stories about 2. So the elephant in the room was that. And it was there from my 30's...me always wondering why the hello 2 bohered with me when she couldn't even say once, "Stop talking about her that way! I love her!" Just once.

I could understand it if she had done her famous and constant disowning act and done it for good. Then, yeah, she isn't being a hypocrie, at least. She isn't talking to me in a friendly way and listening to E. talk about me in heinous ways. But, like a boomerang, she always came back and I always forgave her because I did love her so much. I did have the elephant with me at all times though and finally, in our last interaction, I was strong enough to bring up the elephant. I'm glad I brought it up, even if she doesn't care or thinks I got what I deserved or whatever she feels. I SAID it. I texted it to her and I still have copies of that conversation (I never delete anything, yes, I should learn to do it). It's still there.

Because of that elephant we were going to have a bad ending the stronger I got.

She had no obligation to stick up for me. But that she never did make that choice to do it ruined us way before she knew. Same with 1, although, again, I have had little to do with him for maybe thirty years and at least he was not being a hypocrite. He was so entrenched with E., her word was gold. That was something I understood. But 2 kept coming back.

ANd then just when I think we're both done with each other because this time the elephant walked to my side and I was truly done, she starts reading my thoughts, showing a very unhealthy obsession with me (shudder) and giving me the creeps. I think she probably still reads. It wouldn't shock me.

I want nothing to do with reading her thoughts. But she is free to read mine. Even if she makes fun of them. Even if she calls me a liar to her social worker. I don't care.

Ok, sorry to hijack a good thread.

It is getting easier and easier to release these people from the present as I understand more and more what they were to me. I can "talk" about it here without crying. I'm not anywhere near crying now.

I will never take their abuse and shame and feel sorry for them. If I feel sorry for them at all, it is for other reasons.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Ok, sorry to hijack a good thread.

You are not hijacking the thread, SWOT. If anyone did that, back in the beginning of it, I did. I cannot imagine how Wendy23 must feel about it all. Would it be appropriate, do you think, to begin a thread asking how her children are, and how she is, now?

You are entering into it with us, validating our experiences with and through your own.

I would never have been able to believe the true things I am facing head on now, without knowing the others of us were out there somewhere in case I got in too far and couldn't pull myself back.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

My mother splits us...

Splitting, yes. Cedar, I do not understand trust in relation to my family, of whom, I only trusted myself.

the way she creates such intense feelings of shame for her grands, and for her great grands, by blatantly displaying and insisting that others display too, a belief in the chosen child's ~ and the chosen child is changeable ~ value. Value is the word I am looking for here.

I was the most valuable child. I looked like my mother. You must, too, Cedar, or else your Mother would not so prize your appearance.

That I was pretty counted as a demerit. She could not take pride in me. I always sensed she was jealous.

When I was a teen, my mother felt I was not sufficiently capitalizing on my looks. She enrolled me in a modeling school, like a charm school. I remembered my shame at the initial interview. I like my mother was big busted. Not the body for a model.

My mother, the entire interview, laughed uncontrollably. Really, could not, would not control herself. Hysterically. She could not speak. Just laugh.

Of the two of us, my sister was the loved and protected one. I became Cinderella. My sister had taken on the parts of my mother that I rejected: Avaricious, materialistic, vengeful, hard, grasping, plotting, blaming others. I believe I was the moral center of the family, and that this went over somewhat poorly. True or not. I do not know.

My sister's daughters were the crown jewels. As I had no genetic children, my sister could lay claim to my genes as well as her own. She could gloat that her eldest twin, looked like me, had my brains.

This twin traveled to the same somewhat out of the way foreign country, city, even neighborhood where I had lived, learned the language, studying in the same school. This I sometimes thought was a little strange. After all, there was no real relationship between us. I had kept far, far away.

This was victory. Stolen bounty, not sisterhood. It felt like my sister had through her daughter successfully usurped not just my appearance, but through her children, the ability to make history through a bloodline.

I am in touch with my hatred of my sister, here. How she used her daughters for a narcissistic victory, by feeling that she had stolen and usurped what was me. *And remembering here, her cruelty, by stealing all of my baby pictures, so that I could not have my own visual history. And those of my son.

How my son would FB my nieces and they would not reply. He never could understand why they did not love him.

That he could never understand the danger of my family I hope indicates I did not recreate it with him.

QUOTE="Scent of Cedar *, post: 657165, member: 17461"]it is an important thing having to do with that destruction of the generosity and warmth and strength to be found in family. It has something to do with seeing to it that no matter how many times we try to come together, mistrust will be the word that comes up,[/QUOTE]I have never seen before a better representation of what my family came to be. I cling to the belief that when my grandparents were alive and we were babies, in their arms, a loving and protective family existed for me. I believe it did. Or else where did this survivor come from?

She had no obligation to stick up for me. But that she never did

My Mother stuck up for my sister. Until the end when my sister abandoned her completely. I stuck up for no one except myself.

Only at the end, when my mother was vulnerable, did I protect and care for her, but stick up for her or defend, how could I? And to whom?

Myself, I guess, as she was dying and after her death.

I loved her.

 

[BusynMember]

You're doing a good job, Copa. You're doing great.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Cedar, I adopted my son who I first met when he was 22 months, in the orphanage where he had lived since he was 2 weeks. He was taken from his parents' care when his mother threatened to hurt him.

I remember your posting that this child was adopted, Copa. His life has been very hard, and now, that awful mix of addiction and/or illness on top of everything else. He will be very strong, when he comes through this.

Has he changed the nature of his responses to you, now that you are reacting to him differently? I don't know whether you were here with us when we were posting about detachment parenting seeming to result in our children being able to reclaim their senses of efficacy and personal power. I think that is what happens though, once we stop believing they cannot walk through the hardness of their paths without us.

They can.

You must, too, Cedar, or else your Mother would not so prize your appearance.

It is my mother's voice I hear running those negative tapes from KFCD. (That concept is from Anne Lamott. It has been helpful to me in tracking down hidden negatives and self-sabotage.) That is why you should take the tango classes, Copa. Ballet classes and martial arts classes taken as an adult have been instrumental in self reclamation, for me. Yoga classes, too.

But especially ballet.

It has to do with facing the parts of us we were taught to be ashamed of and reclaiming ourselves.

I started a karate class last week. (This is not a new thing. Just another series of classes in the same kind of thing. I enjoy martial arts.) I am looking into dressage stables. There is one near us, and I am thinking of taking lessons. I have always loved the idea of horses, but have never learned to ride with courage and joy.

I think that will be next, for me.

I remembered my shame at the initial interview

Not the body for a model.

I am sorry that happened, Copa. It is a difficult thing, to have been put on display and assessed, and judged. We are so vulnerable when we are young, and everything to do with being a young woman ~ with the incredible wonder of it ~ is new and uncertain.

You are here now, Copa.

You lived; you can choose to re-mother, and to nurture yourself, now.

No internalized mother or caretaker with whom to identify, or model

That is why we are creating mentor mothers. So we can know how it looks and feels to internalize positive, strengthening affirmations from women who are wise and loving and kind. Once we can know the feel of that, we can know we are here on purpose. We can identify the negatives our own mothers left us with, and counter them. If we can identify the trauma in the memories that come up, if we can witness through our own eyes, or through the strong, compassionate eyes of the woman we have chosen as our mentor mother instead of siding against ourselves and seeing what happened to us through the eyes of our abusers, we will heal.

From the moment we are born, human beings are hard wired for challenge. Brene Brown says that. I find it strengthening to think that way. For me, and for my kids, too.

There is a way. Find it. That is a good way to think.

As we have discussed here before, one of the women I am plugging into those places where I miss my own mother is Maya Angelou. Because she has worked through this herself, because she has written extensively on all things that matter, because we can access her thought processes to help us confront our negatives, and because she understands and holds a compassionate heart for those experiencing mother hunger ~ that lost child feeling ~ I suggest Maya Angelou for you too, Copa. And for SWOT and for all of us with these issues. Maria Harris and Karen Armstrong are excellent mentor figures.

So is Charles Williams.

Ettie Hilesum will be for later, when we are healed enough to risk seeing our mothers with compassion. For right now, while we are healing mother wounds, we need to put those feelings of compassion for our mothers aside. So, that will be later, for me. For today, I am seeing the abuser through Maya's eyes when I cannot make that switch of point of view, when I am lost in the hurt of it and can only see from my abuser's perspective. That is helping me witness appropriately for myself regarding every traumatic incidence of abuse.

Maya is helping with KFCD, too.

I can only tell you what is helping me, Copa.

I am not posting about how it felt to call the shame of the traumas. That material was on the post that was lost. It is a difficult thing to have those feelings. I did it, I am doing it.

So can you.

No one has to live shame based. Not once we know it was wrong, not once we understand in our bones that our abusers points of view had no validity. And for our children, we should do this, learn to refute the shame-based negatives we were taught to believe was our only legitimate reality. We do not want to pass down that toxicity, that certainty that at some level, we are not strong enough.

We do not want to pattern that for them.

We do not want to pattern that somehow, we deserve not to be strong enough.

My daughter knows about Maya, about the strong, mentor mother and about being her own best mother. So do my grands. My son and I talk about this kind of thinking ~ about learning how those we admire go about creating their lives, but I have not talked with him about plugging in a mentor father or a mentor mother in the hurt places. I am just learning that one, myself. I think he does not need that in the same way my daughter and grands do.

He is so much like his father. D H mom was a great grandmother, too.

:O)

I see you.

I see you back.

That is where we heal. Right there.

:O)

Here is the difference when I am weak and imagine Maya Angelou witnessing what happened: The Maya figure, the strong female mentor figure, carries no resentment over what happened. So there is no shame for me, no bargaining the rightness of the healing.

Or, the black woman from Matrix. Smoking cigarettes and baking cookies and very, very powerfully present.

Black women seem very strong to me.

I like that about them.

Lisa Vanderpump ~ that is my white woman mother.

The mentors I've chosen have in common the utter lack of resentment. They are able to see what is without flinching, without taking that on, that judgment against the self that is what lives under resentment.

"That is unacceptable." When confronting inappropriate things, those are the words Lisa Vanderpump used. Those are the words I will choose, once I am through the hurt of it, regarding my sister's betrayal.

"Unacceptable."

It is what it is.

Simple.

And that is all I know, about that.

It is working well, for me.

That said, I take heart that our bonding and first 15 or so years together were sufficiently strong and stable to prevail.

A therapist told me once (it was that first therapist, as a matter of fact, before whatever happened there happened) that all the good things I had given my children would still be there for them to access, all of their lives. In beginning to see how difficult it must be to become addicted and beat it and fall again and beat it ~ which is how I am able to see my kids, now that I am seeing something other than guilt for me over what is happening, over what has happened, to them ~ I see incredible strength in both my children. There is a quote I read, something about: Most of us never know how hard it is for some of us just to be normal.

And that is true.

So whatever your child's path in life Copa ~ and Recovering Enabler posted to me once that their paths are for them to live and to learn from, just as we did and do ~ he has your strength and love to hold him up, to show him how to see himself.

Addiction is so destructive. It destroys something human in us, when we are trapped into believing joy and strength come from somewhere outside ourselves.

I read something else that was helpful to me: That when we are in the midst of something stealing our joy and our strength away, we only need to tap into the joy underlying all things ~ into the joy that created everything, the stars and the Earth and ourselves, in the first place.

So I looked for it? And there it was. Just like in Leonard Cohen's "Halleluiah". How deeply fortunate we are, to know such a thing.

I think that back in the times when we did not have the continual distractions of the "news" and all the other things we do these days to be happy, we probably were able to figure that out for ourselves, just watching the stars wheel through the night, or just watching, just being present, as the sun rose.

Those things, those hushed moments of presence, are still there for us.

He does not yet see or take responsibility for changing, the reality that his lifestyle, as a vagabond, unproductive, and marginal, throws him in with people just the opposite than those with whom he identifies.

Perhaps he is exploring that reality, Copa. That is how our daughter describes what she did. She came back from it to mother her children. And she beat an addiction, and a million other things that should have made her recovery impossible, to do it. And as I lost faith in her any number of times during that time, she did it, made her choices and took charge of her life and where she would take it, on her own.

So, that's an amazing thing, that she did, and is doing.

And doing well.

:O)

Like a hero's quest, exploring the dangerous things and then, turning for home. All we really have to do is be happy to see them, and not enable.

And here is a thing that I know: Once we stop enabling? The happiness in seeing them comes back. We stop worrying for them. We believe in them, and in the legitimacy of whatever path they are on, instead.

Very hard to get to that place, though.

For me it was.

Is. For me, it is.

Co-workers and bosses offering me money for sex.

Well, this is going to sound like a really bad thing. In my professional life, I have done things for people ~ done them willingly and with compassion and purpose ~ that were not pleasant things to do. I have dealt with body fluids and witnessed broken hearts and fearsome loneliness, not because I had a connection with my patients before, but because those are the things that were required of me on my shift. To stay present, not to offer platitudes, not to diminish the pain of it or the wrongness of what was happening to them. Just to be there and to see them where they were and accept it.

And then, I went home. And there were new patients, and I hardly ever saw those patients with whom I had shared such intimacy, again. In my volunteer work, I stood in for the real thing for those who are dying, and need that. Or I bake things for people I don't know, people I will never see, to raise money for other people I don't know, and will never know.

So...I know we are all supposed to believe prostitution is bad. But I don't know that there is a difference in being offered money for sexual services and being offered money for any other service any of us provides when we agree to trade our time and our skills for money in jobs or throughout careers considered legitimate.

We are, all of us, here on purpose. Human is a difficult thing to be until we let go of judgment ~ especially, until we can stop judging ourselves so harshly for having fallen into situations that were not perfect.

The point is that you came through it, and that you are here, now.

You win.

Whatever the past has been Copa, for you or for me, we win. I was not always married to my D H. I was wild as could be, for a time. Except for that geek thing I have going on, and that I was always reading and writing poetry and painting and etc. So, that cut into my wildness time some.

Perhaps those were the things that saved me, then. When it was only my mother and me in my head, I mean.

I became Cinderella

My father called me Cinderella.

I love him so much.

***

So, I'm going to post this now, so I don't lose it.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

That I was pretty counted as a demerit. She could not take pride in me. I always sensed she was jealous.

I think this: That our moms could not reconcile who we grew up to be with what they needed to believe about us and with what they were determined we would believe about ourselves.

So they did, and still do, their best to unravel the threads that hold us together in other ways.

The abuser's reality can only be sustained if the victim believes in the abuser's legitimacy.

Snip.

Looks like Maya had scissors in her pocket.

Bye, mom.

No compassion. Not yet. If my mother is lonely, if I am hurting the internal mother by turning away from her now, leaving her with who she is, with the wrongness of that, then that is just the way it is, for this time.

Maya will step in for me, when I cannot.

Without resentment.

Snip.

My mother, the entire interview, laughed uncontrollably. Really, could not, would not control herself. Hysterically. She could not speak. Just laugh.

I am sorry that happened to you, Copa. That should never happen, not to anyone.

I am sorry for the pain and confusion of it. Especially, for the confusion around issues of female identity. That must be a very hard thing to look back on.

But you are doing it.

Good.

There is a way. Find it.

My sister had taken on the parts of my mother that I rejected: Avaricious, materialistic, vengeful, hard, grasping, plotting, blaming others. I believe I was the moral center of the family, and that this went over somewhat poorly.

This could be true. But it could also be true that your mother and your sister are ill in the same way. This could be a genetic imperative. If this is true, if you see the genetic similarities between them, then now is a time to bless your good fortune that it did not happen, to you.

Or, to me.

Close call.

Once upon a time in a faraway land where time and distance had lost all meaning, there were born to the peasantry a generation of female children whose task and whose talent it would be to unravel the tangled skeins of deceit, viciousness, and trickery that bound the hearts, the souls, and the bloodlines of those families into which each would be born.

Reality is as we perceive it to be.

My sister's daughters were the crown jewels. As I had no genetic children, my sister could lay claim to my genes as well as her own. She could gloat that her eldest twin, looked like me, had my brains.

These are the patterns in dysfunctional families. It has something to do with grandiosity, but I don't have it firmly enough yet to be able to describe it clearly for you.

Again Copa, I am sorry this happened to you, too.

That's an especially deeply hurtful kind of pain, to have lived that.

Are you kind to the eldest twin, Copa? Hold a place in your heart for your sister's children. They will have been raised to hate you and themselves.

This was victory. Stolen bounty, not sisterhood. It felt like my sister had through her daughter successfully usurped not just my appearance, but through her children, the ability to make history through a bloodline.

Yes.

Looks like I am stuck in italics mode again. I apologize.

You are in their lives on purpose, Copa.

I burn with resentment too, sometimes. At bottom, our jealousy or envy or hatred teaches us which direction our happiness is in. If we can determine what it is we need, we can provide those things for ourselves. Oprah Winfrey had one child. The child died. She could not have anymore children. She was so poorly mothered, and she wanted to mother other girls into strength and wholeness because of that. The unfairness of it was eating her alive. All that money. No daughter. Not one. So, Oprah opened a very special school in Africa with her money and her will and her dream . And she is changing the world, both for those girls accepted into her school, and for everyone in the world as they grow into loved, educated, cherished women.

And Oprah claims every one of those girls, every one of those young women, as her daughter.

And to them?

She is Mother.

I am in touch with my hatred of my sister, here. How she used her daughters for a narcissistic victory, by feeling that she had stolen and usurped what was me. *And remembering here, her cruelty, by stealing all of my baby pictures, so that I could not have my own visual history. And those of my son.

What a poop.

Is there no way you can recover even one of the pictures?

How will you explore and confront and heal this wrong done you, Copa?

Pictures of her children, pages of their schoolwork, pictures they'd drawn, these are the only things that survived our daughter's last falling apart or hero's quest or whatever we want to name it. They are in a bin in the closet in this house, waiting for her, as I write. Before she knew we had found and cherished and saved them for her, the loss of those markers of all of their lives was more painful a thing to face than acknowledging any of the other things lost in that time.

She was so unbelievably happy to know that we had them, to know they hadn't been lost.

Ouch, for you, Copa.

She had no right. Your sister had no right to take those things from you.

This twin traveled to the same somewhat out of the way foreign country, city, even neighborhood where I had lived, learned the language, studying in the same school. This I sometimes thought was a little strange. After all, there was no real relationship between us. I had kept far, far away.

In her mind and heart Copa, knowing you were out there somewhere, loving her anyway, may be the thing that kept her intact enough to escape the self the mother and the grandmother taught her she was. We may not believe the things that happen to us and to our children make sense, but it seems sometimes that they do.

Good job, Copa.

Sorry for the italics.

Grrr.....

You were, for this child, what my own grandmother, and what SWOT's first husband's mother, and what my D H's mother, are for me and for her.

Salvation.

I am in touch with my hatred of my sister, here.

Good, copa. Now you can have it and heal it and let it go. Not for her sake, but for your own. We are learning to be stronger enough.

Hard work, but oh, so well worth it, to see clearly, to know what happened, and to reclaim our true selves.

To love ourselves again or for the first time, wholeheartedly.

How my son would FB my nieces and they would not reply. He never could understand why they did not love him.

I have posted before about my sister and her shenanigans. The difference is, now I know she is her own. I never did have to protect her. But because I was all wound up and guilty and loving and hating and resenting and choosing kind because nothing else made sense to me, she was able, and chose to, hurt my child.

Snip.

But my child is not me. She absolutely turned the tables on my sister, and in just as public a fashion ~ or worse.

Our daughter has alot of her father in her. She takes no sh*t.

Isn't that a cool thing.

So, I can let that go, too. But just like it is with so many things my mother has done, the correct response is: I see you. I see you back.

No italics. Now, I cannot get the color to change back, either.

Well, for heaven's sake.

***

That he could never understand the danger of my family I hope indicates I did not recreate it with him.

Neither of my children ever felt comfortable with either their maternal grandmother or with my sister.

Or else where did this survivor come from?

Well, I don't know. but it could be:

Once upon a time in a faraway land where time and distance had lost all meaning, there were born to the peasantry a generation of female children....

That could be true.

I loved her.

That is who you are, Copa. A person who chooses to love.

I think it may have nothing to do with your mother. I love my mother, too. That is why I have put guards in place, for now, to compassion for her.

I am affixing my own oxygen mask, first.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

What is it about dysfunctional people who feel the need to run, run, run? This no contact crapola is just running scared.

I think it is part of the isolation thing, and of the grandiosity thing. It is when we stand up, or when they find allies in one another, that these kinds of isolationism happen. I think they are not scared. I think they are taking their power to define us back. Whether a thing is true or not does not seem to be something that matters to abusive people. They can stretch or condense or change what seems true to everyone else and not blink an eye.

The longer my sister and my mother were together, and the less frequently there was contact to validate what was true about me or D H or them, the stranger and more certain their rationalizations for what they were doing, for who they were, became.

I told my sister that when I told her that I did not want to be in relation with either she or my mother because I refused to be who they insisted I was, in order to have relationship with them.

I did not know then how accurate my assessment was.

Snip.



***

It could be that without an enemy, they cannot unite.

Human nature is like that. They say that if alien beings descended on the Earth, every Earthling, every human being, would feel strongly united against them despite our current, seemingly unresolvable differences, now.

If you think back on it, you can (I can, anyway) feel those currents shifting around, feel the lie between my mother's teeth while she did that to someone else. When she did it to me, and she did, right to my face, I was defenseless of course. I could not see the wrongness in it, as my mother's shifting assessments applied to me.

Grandiosity is something my mother reflected to me. It was the other side of hatred, or was its close cousin, or something.

There is something here about how this thing was accomplished. Something about being overpraised for unimportant things and destroyed for the valuable ones.

That happened to me, and maybe to all of us, too.

Like a really messed up value system about what was real. That is why I felt I was doing something valueless when I wrote, maybe. Something of real value, something I am so curious and enamored of and passionately happy doing, but I put it away, believing that was the thing, that pleasurable thing, is what happened to the family D H and I had created.

I don't have this part yet.

Maya took herself and her writing seriously, too.

And until she did that, there was no Maya Angelou.

Here is a story: So, my mother and I are at WalMart. And we each have a cart, and are shopping separately with an agreement to meet at a certain place at a certain time, check out, and go. So, my mother comes up to me, smiling and smiling, and asks whether I've noticed all the men noticing me. I was sixty years old. There is no possible way men were noticing me. Unless they had a mother fetish. Or a grandmother fetish.

So, I was a little uncomfortable with it, but just laughed it off, right? And my mother just would not let it go. It was disturbing enough to me that I am relating the story here, but I don't know what it was that was so disturbing about it.

Stuff like that. Grandiosity, or the offer of grandiosity that is really a lie.

My mother told me this story: My sister, so happy that my parents were visiting her home that she was dancing, like a ballerina, around the kitchen for them.

My sister would have been in her mid-fifties, then.

And there was just something so wrong about her having told me that. If it were true, or it if were not true.

I felt badly for my sister. I did not tell that to my mother. I don't think I knew what to say. But if that really happened? What a strange and somehow dysfunctional thing.

But when I was talking to my sister, she seemed okay with having my mom there. I mean, there were things that were very hard because after all, it is my mother we are talking about, here.

Hard to know who to protect from what. Or whether anyone needs protecting from anyone, and I am trying to squeeze out a role, a place for myself, through that role of protector.

But I do know my mother.

Now, I do.

"Why? Why didn't you even one time, both of you, tell E., she's mys sister and I love her. Stop talking about her that way."

Maybe because they knew darn well that if your mother were not talking about you that way to them?

She would have been talking about them that way, to you.

That is how it works in dysfunctional families. The primary abuser, it seems to me, will cut anyone's throat but her own to keep the family weak; to keep us isolated from one another's strength, and from the true things each of us knows and cannot face, alone.

My mother has tried to come between my sister and her daughters, and between my sister and her husband. I would say too that she has. My mother sucks all the air out of the room, and a marriage ~ especially a recent one, cannot be the same thing it might have been.

Unless I am wrong about what I think I see, there.

But I think I am not wrong.

Those same things happened to me.

But I am married to D H.

They would have been freaked out and would not have answered directly or it would have turned into a session about me, not bout them and why.

That is all they know to do.

One of them, probably the sister, is the instigator, is the one whose own sense of self is tied into recovering or maintaining (or something) the value system set up by the mother.

Why doesn't matter.

Radical acceptance.

No compassion for them, not yet.

That is what we are reaching for I think, when we try to understand the why behind things like this. But we are trying to understand mindsets alien to our own. So it can never make sense. Things don't fit. There are no logical conclusions, or any kinds of conclusions, that hold water for us as we are trying to figure out the broken place and fix it.

Why doesn't matter, SWOT.

That confusion you feel surrounding these issues has nothing to do with you. Unless our sibs commit to their own healing instead of taking what comfort is available in believing what they have to know, on some level, are lies, they will never be people we can trust. So here is the question: Without trust, real relationship is impossible.

So, what are we doing, trying to figure out where our sisters and brothers are strong enough to trust both us and themselves?

We can't help them with that, anymore than we can believe our kids well and happy.

We can only try to see the patterns, and figure out what we can about that for our own sakes.

because I did love her so much

Your genetic mix must be a little different than hers.

I don't exactly understand it, but I do love, and I am proud for, the things my sister has accomplished. I get it now though, that she feels differently about me than I think I do feel about her.

Radical acceptance.

I think my sister actually feels deep hatred for me. Or maybe, together with my mother she does. Or maybe, she always did.

Probably that is true, looking back.

It could be that in my FOO, because I took on so many of the mothering roles, hatred that cannot be funneled to my mother is funneled at me?

I don't know.

No compassion. Not today.

Not yet.

I could understand it if she had done her famous and constant disowning act and done it for good. Then, yeah, she isn't being a hypocrie, at least.

I think the win for them is the satisfaction of isolating us. Or maybe, there is a position of strength in that. I feel like it is wrong in so many ways not to ~ to have turned away from my family of origin as I have. But it feels good to have a place to stand, instead of always trying to figure out the ~ I don't know. How to stand up for them instead of labeling them wrong or bad or something. We have all been hurt so much, already. I don't want to add to that. But maybe I never had the power to do that. Maybe they have been playing and playing me, all along.

That would explain why they could hurt me once we had been made vulnerable over what happened, over the way I fell apart inside, when my kids were in so much trouble.

They had probably been doing it all along.

But when I was all fallen apart, I believed them.

?

I texted it to her and I still have copies of that conversation (I never delete anything, yes, I should learn to do it). It's still there.

I have a FB response from my sister that is still there. Sometimes, I go back to review it, just to be sure I saw what I thought I saw. It's unbelievable proof, right there in black and white. It was the post having to do with her purposeful exclusion of my brother.

I feel happy to have that to go back to.

I might never believe it happened in just that way that it did, without that post.

So, don't delete it.

She had no obligation to stick up for me.

Yes she did. She had a right and an obligation to defend you. It was a lack of character that held her back. We will not condemn her for that, though. We know where she has been, and we know how that happened, and I think we know that she loves you enough that if she could have been strong enough, for both you and herself, she would have spoken up to her mother.

Or maybe I am way wrong, and my sister and yours too, are more like our mothers than like us.

That could be true.

I have had little to do with him for maybe thirty years and at least he was not being a hypocrite.

Yes he was. That is your brother. He has a right and an obligation to defend his sister. I remember reading a post of Jabber's once. He said that very thing, about his own sisters.

I have never forgotten that.

she starts reading my thoughts, showing a very unhealthy obsession with me (shudder) and giving me the creeps.

Maybe, she always did have this unhealthy kind of obsession with you. My sister has a picture of the two of us, of she and I, in her bathroom, where she can see it every day.

?

She showed it to me, pointed it out when we were touring her new house.

I have lots of pictures of my sister, and of my sister and me. But they are just scattered around here and there with other family pictures.

When my sister took her first painting class, she brought the picture she'd painted to me. From far away, in that other state where she lives, she brought it to me. She said it wasn't a very good picture, but she wanted to know I had it.

So, I do.

?

No compassion. Not today.

Even if she makes fun of them. Even if she calls me a liar

My sister no longer has rights of access to me. In my heart, I mean. Not since stalking my daughter and hurting her when she was so off the wall vulnerable and a relationship, some supportive something from her aunt would have meant so much to her. It is one thing not to be involved. It is another to exploit a vulnerability for a win I still cannot figure out.

I sound like a dork. I get that. I told my brother he has access to me, anytime. I get it that this is a dorky thing to say, too.

I do have that geek thing going on.

:O)

I can "talk" about it here without crying.

I love this.

True.

We can work through it, here. We can understand it enough to gather everything together and present it in a way that makes enough sense that someone else can make sense of it, too. That is what helps us, I think. Not so much the responses we make to one another, but the gathering of information in a coherent package that we can make sense of, and can trace patterns of behavior through so we can see what is real.

Okay. Thank you both for staying with me through this. You matter, and you are helping me be stronger.

It does hurt, to think I have been played for a fool and trusted the very people who were doing that to me. I mean, I sort of knew that all along, but it was okay, somehow. It was meant to stand up, and to stand up together, one day.

Cheesh.

But not to my child, you don't.

I see you.

I see you back.

Cedar

So. I am feeling pretty much like a poop where my sister is concerned.

 

[BusynMember]

Maybe because they knew darn well that if your mother were not talking about you that way to them?

She would have been talking about them that way, to you.

That is how it works in dysfunctional families. The primary abuser, it seems to me, will cut anyone's throat but her own to keep the family weak; to keep us isolated from one another's strength, and from the true things each of us knows and cannot face, alone.

My mother has tried to come between my sister and her daughters, and between my sister and her husband. I would say too that she has. My mother sucks all the air out of the room, and a marriage ~ especially a recent one, cannot be the same thing it might have been.

Unless I am wrong about what I think I see, there.

But I think I am not wrong.

Those same things happened to me.

But I am married to D H.

Many, many things you said resonated with me, especially how the mother puts value on unimportant things. And ignores things like compassion, the desire of one to help another, the goodness of one's heart, etc. Looks, brains (you can be a jerk with a brain), things that make her look good...she liked that. "My son graduated from XXXXXX University with honors. My daughters are pretty." She was also big on "not fat." That surely launched 2 into her what I feel is a lifelong eating disorder. Sick, sick, sick.

Here is a story: So, my mother and I are at WalMart. And we each have a cart, and are shopping separately with an agreement to meet at a certain place at a certain time, check out, and go. So, my mother comes up to me, smiling and smiling, and asks whether I've noticed all the men noticing me. I was sixty years old. There is no possible way men were noticing me. Unless they had a mother fetish. Or a grandmother fetish.

Even if you were thirty and a beauty queen, this shows that your mother is jealous of something superficial...your looks.

Yes he was. That is your brother. He has a right and an obligation to defend his sister. I remember reading a post of Jabber's once. He said that very thing, about his own sisters.

If you were raised in a family that says you love one another because you are family and the parents set an example, sure, he may have said it. But he was raised the opposite. I don't think it was his obligation to say it. I just would have cut off the trash talk and probably would have said, "You talk to him...he is my brother...or you don't talk to me either." I would not have participated in a will that excluded a sibling. Not before it happened to me. That's why E. didn't like me...in part, I did not play her idea of a good daughter. If I thought she did something wrong, I told her. And I was her scapegoat. I didn't have that right. How dare I not give one of my kids my grandmother's money and not cut out the other two! SHE told me to do it because HER mother wrote it down, after I warned her not to, and she cared far more about her mother, dead or alive, than she ever cared about me or my kids. She did not recognize a mother being a good, fair mother. She saw it as defiance.
Such strange minds we dealt with!

My sister no longer has rights of access to me. In my heart, I mean. Not since stalking my daughter and hurting her when she was so off the wall vulnerable and a relationship, some supportive something from her aunt would have meant so much to her. It is one thing not to be involved. It is another to exploit a vulnerability for a win I still cannot figure out.

Reprehensible behavior. I mean, short and sweet. There is no defense of this.

It does hurt, to think I have been played for a fool and trusted the very people who were doing that to me. I mean, I sort of knew that all along, but it was okay, somehow. It was meant to stand up, and to stand up together, one day.

Me too, but we are not alone. Adults who grew up and still deal with unloving families all feel foolish and tricked when we finally catch on. At least we did catch on, even though we aren't young anymore. We know the truth now about them and ourselves. And, yes, we can go through this together.
I already feel much better and have accepted that I was delusional about E., Thing 1, Thing 2, and Uncle Love Myself Madly.
And I'm starting to feel ok that I missed it. It was easy to miss and to deny when we WANTED a family...but we didn't have one. Not a FOO.

Oh, well. We don't need them.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

How does one confront an abuser. How does one confront the abuser. How does one consume the shame of it and confront the abuser from a place of strength and certainty.

The lust of vengeance, all consuming
pressed of the lust of life from whence it sprang
full bodied and full blown....

***

Glass eyed, in that acid etched cauldron where once the heart lived
the lone witch moans
Moon deranged at the Scorpion's plight....

So is the Scorpion my mother, or my sister? (My mother/myself. My sister/myself) Because we create relationship with someone else. So it would be my mother/myself. My sister/myself. So perhaps the Scorpion is me, black as sin and blackly dangerous. Shining. Power. Ooo-whee power. Which, as we unravel it, turns out to be what we needed to believe to survive the fear of it, the killing shame of it.

No fear. Just do it.

"Do not be afraid." Jesus said that.

Take the river into your two hands. Change its Course.

The Sword flies, whirling against the Sun. The falcon's prescient flight. Let that which was foretold then; let it now be done. As it was written, forever, in the stars. The stars in her eyes and the stars in her palm and the stars in the whirling heavens. The stars reflected in the cauldron that was her heart.

There is a poem about that.

The cauldron's acidic integrity
the novitiate's determined intent....

***

Imagery for today: This is letting go. However many times, however unbelievable the betrayal of self, again and again and again, this is the imagery of letting go.

Even if you were thirty and a beauty queen, this shows that your mother is jealous of something superficial...your looks.

Not jealous. Something to do with grandiosity and shame. It was not jealous. It was creepy, SWOT. It was so creepy, and she does things like that all the time. The hair dream: She saved what for me. She saved, and concealed, and made a gift to me of something that was my own: my own hair, my own identity as what I am: a red-headed woman. My hair, something which grew out of me; something having to do with my intrinsic identity, with the way I am put together, to grow that hair that only I grow.

So, hair in a dream represents something very core generated, very real, very ultimately real, and representing that.

And how did she get it. That is me, then. That is the internal mother. That is my concept of self she was giving me.

What does Maya think?

You are here on purpose. Come with your love and come with your God and come of the Light underlying all things.

Maya.

Happy. Strong. Including me, including all of us, in a whirl of Wind and Water and Sun.

Silence burning...
burning, bright

***

That is what Maya within says: You are here on purpose. Everything; all of it.

Silence. Overwhelmingly brilliant, this place where I am, in the Light. Let go.

Evanescee evanescing.

Breaking the spell; changing the course of a river; cleansing the stables. Cleansing at last, the Augean stables.

By my will.

There are other tasks. This is how one becomes a hero. Task after impossibility after task and impossibility and it is done and done and done.

And the energy is mine.

And I am strong enough, easily strong enough, to carry this Sword. To make it fly, and to claim my ground.

I will claim yours for you, too.

Red headed woman.

The freedom in it.

***

And that is an area of damage within us. That our mothers could give us ourselves.

We are here on purpose.

Our mothers birthed us, true: but, like Braveheart, you will never take our freedom.

"See? It was longer last time." And I am afraid in the dream, dry-mouthed with the fear of it, like I am always afraid, and so stupidly willing to believe her and to believe in her out of fear.

So that is where we are going. Out of fear. Striding purposefully out of it, out of fear, mortal fear. Because we did not know then, any of those times of self doubt ~ any of those myriad times when our integrity, our memories, our right to self, to our being living things with every inalienable right to everything to be alive means, all the pleasure of it ~ every incidence of abuse on any level (which called echoes of the others, resting unquiet in their shallow graves), we did not know then that we would survive it.

We did not know then that we would live, and we came to harbor that undeniable fact of our Presence, to keep it secret and to keep it safe, the secret that we were still alive, that we were not dead, that we hadn't died. And that was the thing they were after; and that is the thing they are after now, reaching out of their graves to do it. And that is why these things are coming back to us, now. We know now what we did to keep that true thing ~ that knowing that we were still in here, still oh, so alive ~ safe from her, from my mother/myself.

Because the only thing we could know then, as little girls (or little boys) was what it looked like to us. And what it looked like was: my mother, enraged and senseless and empty eyes and screaming and empty eyes.

No one home.

No one inside our mothers to help them to save us.

So, that must have been pretty freaking scary.

So.

I am alive.

The Sword, whirling against the Sun. See the strength in that imagery?

I love Braveheart.

***

"How pleasant of you to have saved my hair, to have saved this particular concept of self, come to be in a time you were not. How could you have known this was my hair? How could it be real, this thing, this concept of self you have given me, when my real hair, my real self, my real identity, is here on my head and is as it is: real; not perfect, but only perfectly beautiful and very undeniably real.

So who are you, to give me myself in this way, designed so beautifully to hurt and weaken and designed so exquisitely to make me feel what is not perfect. The hair on my head, the real, is the hair of an aging woman. White in it. Beautiful, so they say, but not perfect; not young.

And that feel is the feel of my mother.

And that feel is the feel of the WalMart. Waiting to pounce.

And the Prince conquers his shame and his weakness and horror and everything he has ever believed to be true and declares freedom.

And the wildness responds.

The Sword. The decision and the will to reclaim.

And they, the Scottish rebels, create what now exists; and the very markers of shame are their pride and are there identities, now.

So, that's what I have, this morning.

***

There is no way she could give me my own hair. My own hair, my real hair, was still on my head, exactly as it is now ~ white in it, the red faded, the texture changing. It was the impossibly idealized version of "what you were" that she gave to me but it was never hers to give.

But it was never hers to give.

I will go into the white room, and I will be alone, and that will be good. Safe, trusted.

How did she even get in there?

Get into my things, hide who I am in a drawer and present it as though she had this power to define me? As though she were legit when we both know now that she was not there in those times of abuse. That is the resentment I feel for my father, in not protecting us. Because it was really scary to know no one was there in those eyes of my mother that were insanely empty, that were filled with an unknowable, unresponsive, unstoppable thing that I know so well. That is the thing in the WalMart memory. It was what it was in her power to do and so she did it. Made the choice to hurt me, and to watch the break, and to dance in that Light coming through the broken place in me.

Thief and fraud and she did not make of me what I am, I did. And it has been so impossibly hard. Just like with therapist 1: I did the healing there, not him.

He just hung on.

So does she.

Our enemies will be devoured, consumed, encompassed.

***

Our enemies will not be defeated; they will be devoured.

And only I can say who is the enemy. This is where safe passage is.

Right here. Core.

Heart.

Singing, like the angels.

***

I will look that up.

So there is nothing; no hope and my dreams will tell me all I need to know about how to do this.

Fear. How did she get in here. Did she die. Does she change, do I change my view of her when she is no longer corporeal.

She will haunt my dreams?

Good.

I'm quite hungry, today and every day.

True.

Like the vampire child, like the warrior too, I am quite hungry, today and every day. Just a fact. Like a warrior. Toothpick. No hunger that cannot be acknowledged. (This is a reference to a martial arts concept having to do with a warrior's discipline. That though a warrior is hungry, is weak from hunger, he will place a toothpick in his mouth and believe he has eaten. And so, his strength is undiminished.)

And no harm is done.

I will not be that thing in my mother/myself.

Nothing that cannot be held, that cannot be claimed, in the face of, before the fact of, my Presence.

***

And I couldn't let go of it and finally, I got it, what it was I was trying to show myself with that discordant little note that kept pinging away. Like a timer. Like: This matters, this place you are blind to, this place you cannot see the meaning of.

I was able to go through memories with that same feeling to them, some more traumatic, some less, but all with that same eerie kind of obscenity to them. Something not right. Something bad that had been happening to me all of my life. It is like what you said, SWOT, about your mom's pride in your brother's degree. There was something off about the way it was used.

So. I got it. What we are trying to discover is what happened to us. What we are trying to reclaim is self concept. Incidents such as this one at WalMart, or the story about my sister pirouetting for my mother to demonstrate her joy at having her parents in her home (like the birthday party, which is something I reviewed on the post that was lost ~ the shame in it; the shame in that I was who I was, and that my mother knew and could break me at any time, in front of anyone. And that we both knew it.) Or that fact that, whether that story is true or not, my sister's own mother told it to anyone not in an advice asking way, but in a contemptuous way ~ all these things that I had been trying to understand the fascination in, trying to understand why they mattered ~ they seemed so irrelevant, especially given the nature of the abusive incidents, one upon the next, that I have been reviewing as well. What I missed was: that my mother was abusing me even then and she knew it and I didn't except that I did. She was making me look foolish, and shallow and stupid.

And that is where an abuser wants us.

That is the similarity between your brother's degree and the way it was used, and every single, smallest thing that happens when I am with my mother. She chose to abuse then, and she chooses it now in everything, in every relationship, all the time.

That little ping is the flavor of interacting with my mother on any level, at any time, ever.

The obscenity in it is that I know this when it is happening but refuse to see it because that is the flavor of my mother. But just like with Copa's mother, it is impossible to see because they simply refuse to acknowledge any of it. This messes with our minds because we survived (or believed that is how we survived) by being hyper aware of what was going on with our mothers.

Instead of living from our cores, like everyone else does, in full awareness of what is going on with our selves, not with our abusers. This is the dynamic explaining the control an abusive male employs to dominate, and to break, the spirit of his mate.

Abusers abuse because they are abusers.

Locus of control.

***

Adults who grew up and still deal with unloving families all feel foolish and tricked when we finally catch on.

"...until we finally catch on."

What does that look like to you, SWOT? The catching on part. What was the sense that you made of the thing, of the purpose of the things that happened?

So, I asked myself that question. All the imagery of light, of self and motion and coalescence. This is what it feels like to be a whole self. This is what it feels like, to be a living, live and loving, human being.

A human being with full access to herself. To her self. That is what everyone else has that we do not, or did not, have. That is why we are overwhelmed by the fear of it. We have done what we have by the force of our Will.

The Will imagery, again.

That our mothers could reach out from the freaking grave to keep us destroyed.

That is why these stories of your mothers, of how you were hurt, can resonate within me.

I see you.

I see you back.

I am adding "F you, mom" to the needlepoint in my saddlebag for you, SWOT, and for your mother too, Copa.

Ten years ago my mother had a roof collapse in her Condo and felt my duty was to assist her. I was on my way to live in Rio de Janeiro. I went.

My Mother was angry. Felt abandoned. She was jealous. She maligned me to my sister for leaving secure employment, and for what all, more, I do not care.

I called her from Rio.

She said this: I don't want you to ever call me again. I don't ever want to talk to you. And hung up on me.

I waited a week or so and called again. She hung up on me.

I called a week later, same response. I decided to hold her to her word. And did not call again. For years.

This was by far not the first nor the longest breach in contact that we had.

At some point in the year or two before she died I spoke with her of this.

She said it never happened. She denied she would ever do such a thing. She was not angry or defensive. Only that it had never happened and she would never have acted in such a way. So, of course, it had never happened.

My mother tells the most extraordinary lies, too. That was an uncomfortable admission for me to make. I keep stumbling over that as I post here. Over what kind of person I could be to post things like this, things that could not possibly be a correct interpretation of what happened.

That is why I keep posting that I cannot afford compassion, just yet. If I am wrong, then that will be the truth I come to, eventually. I just keep not coming to that sort of place, so far. So far, the more I keep the heat on, the worse things are looking for my mother.

The thing is that there is no other interpretation that makes sense, that ties everything together until finally, it coalesces and becomes what it always was, after all. I know that sounds confusing. Let's say: Until all the separate little discrepancies reach a tipping point and suddenly, things that were not included in the original mix fit right into those parameters too, smooth and seamless as silk.

Copa, if you are reading here, this piece about lying, about emotionless denial of the facts, was instrumental in my ability to claim a place to stand from which to keep going.

Thank you.

I accept it now. I bear my own memory. And feel sadness for all of us.

I feel rage. If I were to describe the genesis of it I would say: You had no right. I am, we all were and are, here on purpose. You made us weak, confused, inept, afraid of our own selves, too afraid or ashamed to claim full access to ourselves. Where we needed to have full access, where we needed to be strong, there was only you, hitting and hurting and weakening us forever because we cannot turn away from the memory, from the sure knowledge of the woundings and scarrings you inflicted so you could do something so stupid as to dance in the Light you broke us open to have.

I don't know what that means, either.

I just know it is true.

It is a correct thing. The purpose, the reason for our woundings, was ignoble, is and continues to be, a shameful thing; something reprehensible, like a lizard. Cold, alien, like a lizard or a snake. The way a snake is so still and then, strikes, the venom outrageously toxic. For heaven's sake mother, stand up.

***

One more reclamation of locus of control: Just as we learn is true with our children when we tell them they were raised better. My mother was gifted by the Universe itself with children perfect in every way and she chose to dance in the Light of their destruction.

And I still don't get the win.

There must be one, there must have been one. She continues to be who she is to this day. Slyly, oily coyly destructive. That is the coward in her. Awe/patronization. Circle.

Where am I in that circle.

Awake.

I see you.

I see you back.

I have pictures of my mother in old age that are on her dresser, in my home, now. All of them in her "out of the house" guise. My mother too was beautiful and kept her beauty even in death.

I have said before that my mother had a persona for "going out." With makeup on and dressed up...like a plant...she oriented towards the light, the sun.

Each of these few pictures that I have...has this outside persona.
Except one.

The picture for some reason, though she is in a nightclub, and all dressed up and pretty, captures her tough arrogance--her cruelty. Each time I enter the room where it is I feel a chill. I have thought about removing the photo. But do not.

I need to remember how I was killed over and over by this person.

I do not deny what happened to me. I could not. It happened for my whole life. And for my whole life while my mother was alive, I remembered and I lived my life protected from her. But, I forgot for a spell, after she died.

Maybe, once she was finally dead, once you had seen her and protected her and cherished her through that, you could access the will to heal. Going back feels like timelessness.

Here again Copa, your description of your mother, of the going-out persona, allowed me to see that same aspect of my own mother.

Thank you.

That was a hard question, a hard place of uncertainty, to share. The essential lie of it, the thing we did not see reflected in the outer world and so, could not count on to be true, to be real, in our trying to make sense of things. A question of integrity, then. A question of not being able to be certain we saw what we saw or heard what we heard.

Gaslighting. Our own mothers were gaslighting us.

Well, how do you like that.

Locus of control.

Why doesn't matter.

Locus of control. That matters.

Many, many things you said resonated with me, especially how the mother puts value on unimportant things. And ignores things like compassion, the desire of one to help another, the goodness of one's heart, etc. Looks, brains (you can be a jerk with a brain), things that make her look good...she liked that. "My son graduated from XXXXXX University with honors. My daughters are pretty." She was also big on "not fat." That surely launched 2 into her what I feel is a lifelong eating disorder. Sick, sick, sick.

So, depersonalization. That is a piece of how we grew up. This was the style of our nurturing, when we were little kids, and after we'd grown up and finally, got away from them. But they can put us in that place any time they want, and they do want.

My mother is like that, too.

She believed I was bad to the bone and the longer she lived the more she thought so

"...the longer she lived the more she thought so" Or is it that the longer you lived and created a life away from her toxicity and from being toxically shamed about the way you thought and being held and seen in a light of continual belittlment you stood up to her, you reclaimed yourself, you repaired your self image, more and more.

And she hated that, and hated to see or be anywhere near you because you were coming to know the difference between her constructed reality and what was objectively real.

It is beginning to look to me like we are uncovering the difference between our mothers (who are weirdly similar and absolutely not right in the heart) and ourselves and between our mothers' interpretations of us and how and who we are, really.

That is what the dream of hair was telling me.

The image my mother returns to me cannot possibly be correct, cannot possibly be right or of value: thus, a lie. No one, not even a mother, can give you your own hair that she has kept in a drawer and that you have grown, beyond.

It has something to do with shame/grandiosity, and with that WalMart visit.

It has something to do with the flavor of being with my mother.

It has to do with the paint and the dust and with being sick and the hair in it; it has to do with the table smelling of syrup and my believing she was right. It has to do with that beach trip.

Teeth.

That stove; my brother crying.

I stand up.

***

Captain Kangaroo, sleeping

Sleeping Buddha.

(To sleep in such peace; without fear.) This imagery has to do with being hurt in the night; has to do with being jerked awake and into the nightmare. Fear, again. Perhaps that is why we sleep so lightly now, and do not trust the night time. But since the image of the sleeping Buddha, and the repeating image of Captain Kangaroo, sleeping on his side (no atheists in foxholes ~ I will take any healing imagery I am given and know myself so fortunate to have it) I am sleeping better, myself. I awaken in a place that feels full, replete, very, very good.

So that must be what it is to feel safe, then.

***

Beautiful, broken doll on the bathroom floor / baking her way back; all those muffins, all that baking no one could eat it all, all that goodness.

Changed energy; determined intent.

Hold.
Stand.

Braveheart

Sword in reclaimed ground.

For anyone still with me, this is where we have to go, to heal. We need to let go of "sanity" for a minute and just go.

Trust. You are, I am, every one of us was and is and was always meant to be, joy filled, happy, and whole. Every one of us was meant to have full access to self; and every one of us was meant to trust that the self we are is a good and bright and honor filled creation, direct from the hand of God.

So there's that, then.

Nothing to protect. Nothing hidden; nothing to protect.

:O)

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

One more reclamation of locus of control: Just as we learn is true with our children when we tell them they were raised better. My mother was gifted by the Universe itself with children perfect in every way and she chose to dance in the Light of their destruction.

And I still don't get the win.

Cedar, it's easier for me to answer now. After all my thinking and probing, I am in a much better place.

Cedar, you mother most likely had a personality disorder. They divide and conquer and love it. They favor and disfavor. They do mean things to their disfavored because I believe they enjoy watching their most vulnerble child squirm. Yes, I think E. liked it. I don't know if she knew she liked it, but she certainly seemed to. They are also unpredictable, like when E. used to wake me up in the wee hours of the morning to shout at me about something that had happened weeks ago and I thought had been resolved, even waking up Thing 2 who shared my room. Her anger seemed to come out of thin air. These are things we had not spoken about for WEEKS. She couldn't wait until morning to scream at me...lol? This isn't normal.

Did she ever do this to lost and golden child? No.

She also did this when I was awake, bring things up out of thin air, when they weren't even being talked about and start up yelling.

Then she disowned me. Because, probably, I would not divide and conquer with my own kids. I would not make my adopted kids feel lesser than and would not do what she wanted.

She also had unrealistic and silly admiration for certain people (all white/all black...sound familiar?) Thing 1 was all white. He was The King to her although he actually had a lot of probjlems. But, hey, he was SMART. Her brother, Uncle Torture, was another one. He laughed about his unfaithfulness and games with his girlfriends, he was tied to his mother until the day he died, and he never did anything that did not benefit himself (perhaps he was even an overly friendly professor for admiration and not altruism). That wouldn't shock me. But she worshipped him. Her last golden child, so to speak, was her boyfriend after the divorce. The fact that the man was flawed didn't stop her from talking about his brilliance. Yeah, so he cheated on her then married a woman who wanted a green card and abused him until he died. Real smart. These were her heroes. They could do no wrong. I think later on, one of Thing 2's girls became another goldenchild. I honestly can't say why. I don't know her girls, I am profoundly happy that our kids never knew us or each other's kids, and Princess does not like Thing 2..she had her for Thanksgiving once and said, "I don't want her here again. She gives me the creeps. Sorry, Mom." Princess always had a lot of insight.

Your mther had golden and black people in her life. White/black. Personality disorders. Divide and conquer. Personality disorders. Deliberately starting drama and trouble. Personality disorders. Involving everyone...personality disorders.

We were raised by sick women. They have adult children who struggle. Because of how they were.

When I was very young and screwed up, my 20s, I would tell all my therapists, "My Mom was a good mom. I was just a terrible kid." I would say it cheerfully and I believed it.

A child isn't the reason a parent is abusive.

If I would have taken off early from her and rest of the loonybin, she would have found somebody else to abuse. She probably would have picked on Thing 2, especially since 2 did not invite 1 to her wedding. Gawsh, if I had done something that cruel, God would have been standing over me with a thunderbolt in E's eyes. But since she had me to be bad, she could go along with this atrocity that should never happen. 1 had never been mean to 2 in his life. She didn't want him at her wedding. He was ugly. To her.

But that was ok. Of course she probalby told E. another reason, but she told the truth to me. She'd been bashing his looks for probably ten years or more by then.

She also has black/white thinking, does the personality disorder cut offs and come backs and is a drama queen who makes horrible choices for her own life. Her kids are high achievers, but I'll bet they have issues she never shared. I can't believe they made it out alive and well with her in charge.

Personality disorders.

Sickness.

Dysfunctional families.

We become just as sick.

I'm so much better now, even bout FOO and E. All this writing was therapeutic. They are all nobody to me anymore. It doesn't matter what they say anymore. It doesn't matter what they do or if they read my thoughts. It doesn't matter because I don't want to know one thing about them anymore. And, frankly, I don't...and I like the peace.

Cedar, you will find this peace too. One day you wil let go. You will see how sick your FOO was and how they were making you sick. Their kind of sick is contagious and generational.

Cedar, don't ever ask an abuser why. The abuser thinks YOU either did the abusing or deserved it and you will never get an answer. Trust me. I've been reading voraciously about dysfunctional families and the dynamics. They are all cut out of the same cloth. If you're looking for satisfaction, become radically accepting. You will not get satisfaction or closure.

You simply have to finally get so fed up, like I am now, that you no longer care. I am starting to feel that peace and contentment I had for so many years before E. came into my mind and her disownership needed exploration...and I needed to grieve it because I hadn't before. It feels great to have finally let it all out. Don't ever expect satisfaction from an abuser. Just let it go. They didn't win. We did. Our good lives are our wins.

Thank you for listening.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

The reason that imagery my mother gave me, of my sister dancing in the light of my mother's approval ~ the touch of obscenity in it that I knew was there somehow but did not know what it was exactly, or how it fit, or why that imagery kept coming back, has been cleared.

What my mother celebrated, in relating that story to me ~ in making for me that imagery of my fifty year old sister, who has never taken a ballet class in her life, pirouetting through her own beautiful kitchen had been identified and is mine, now. (This was an important piece of this imagery. My sister is safe, now. She is married, there is money, enough money for sure, and there is a beautiful kitchen that is my sister's own kitchen. So, my sister got away, was able to stand up, saved herself, right? Not if she was dancing, was performing an action designed to please my mother to keep her from blowing everything up and was making a fool of herself to do it.

"Don't tell, Mom. Don't tell them I don't deserve to be me. Don't turn my husband against me, don't ruin this for me."

I don't want that underlying fear, that feeling of fraudulence, in my life anymore. I want to be whole, and I want to be strong, and I want to be my own.

That feeling that there was something obscenely wrong in the way my mother described my sister, dancing in her kitchen for joy at my mother's presence in her home tied in to a birthday party when I was eight, into the WalMart experience, and into an invitation to the beach when I was eight or nine.

It was the same dynamic at work from my mother's point of view: to make us into beggars, not only dancing for her approval, but gladly buying into betraying ourselves, into naming ourselves whatever she said, so we could be safe from her in the present moment.

Vulnerability. That is the name of the circle. Once the circle joins, you cannot find the beginning of it. So, you cannot name where you are and step out. Now, I have the name of it and I see how the circle is thrown, like a net, to snag and draw us in.

So I could step away, verify it, and choose against it. Just another trap, and now I see how it works. I will recognize it, every time, from now on. Even deep inside where there are traumas I cannot recall with words.

***

When you made my sister a beggar, dancing in the light of her own destroyed self for your pleasure. That is the flavor of every interaction with my mother. Fear of hurt and fear of exposure to that truth she taught us was the only thing real about us, whatever else we might have been, or might have accomplished or acquired, in the world.

And again, I can see my mother in what she does to someone else, but I can only see her as she relates to me by extrapolation, by that little "ding" that tells me I am on the path.

***

But when you have a D H, the mother's power is usurped. And that is why my mother has tried to destroy each of her children's marriages or to label their mates defective. And that is why there were no weddings, no real weddings, for any of us. There is validation in a wedding, in a vow. I don't know what my mother said to my D H. I am sure she said something, because that is who she is. D H doesn't much care what anyone else says about anything and he never did, and he likes me pretty well, so that was just a weakness for us. But my mother took my sister's husbands #1 and #2 aside ~ husband #1 at the wedding, which is where my mother first met him ~ and told them both that my sister was mentally unbalanced. The year after my father died, my mother began going to stay with them (and she came to us, too) in the winter. And my sister told me that both her daughters and her new husband had come to her, and had told her what my mother had said to each of them about my sister that very same time she was staying in my sister's home.

So, with her husband and daughters there to protect her and cherish and make her strong, she confronted my mother with what each had been told.

The point being that these things really, actually, happened.

My own mother did and does want to see her children destroyed, labeled and left bereft, to this day.

Why doesn't matter.

I see you.

I see you back.

If it will help anyone reading along for me to go through these things in a chain of consciousness way, I will. If you are doing this yourself, be aware that the old feelings of shame, of distaste for ourselves, will come back and will seem very real.

And that is where the mentor mother, as many of them as it takes to help you see through someone else's eyes and not those of your abuser, comes in.

And I used Maya and the lady from The Matrix and Lisa V to see the things I worked with yesterday. And through their eyes, that shame, that personal distaste for myself, was placed where it belonged. With the person who chose to enact it: my mother. The my mother/myself inside me has no validity, now.

And that is what it took, to be free of it.

And this is how that part went, because I think that is the only part that would be helpful to anyone reading along. So, I was in a pretty bad place re: self concept. And this is what I did, and the things that came up are what happened.

"So, Maya, what do you think about this? About those feelings, about that fear, that helpless exposure."

"It taught you to be strong." (That is what I heard come back at me. I was like, WHAT?!?)

"It did, Maya." (So, I had to dance around that one for a little while. Like, thanks for nothing, Maya. Cheesh.)

And you are strong. Strong enough. You just didn't know it, then. (And when we know better, we do better.)

So I don't know exactly who said what, there. But I still felt pretty crummy, pretty much in the trauma of the thing, instead of outside it, seeing with my adult eyes.

So Maya looks through my eyes; and so does the black lady from Matrix. And Lisa Vanderpump comes to my birthday party, comes right into my birthday party and my mother....

"What are you doing" (Lisa) And as she comes, unbelievably, to understand:

"What have you done."

And the black ladies laugh and laugh at my mother because they are familiar with such things. They know what my mother has done, and she is an object of their good, rich laughter. Nothing unusual about what is going on here. Nothing a thousand million broken people, or wicked people, have not done, before.

Just that old, old black magic, come calling.

Maya smiles. White teeth, flashing in the Sun.

The black lady from Matrix. She knows too, and she laughs and smokes and bakes cookies.

And they are seeing my mother.

And my mother looks confused.

Time to go, mom.

I see how to see you.

***

Lisa V. She does not know about that old black magic. But she knows fair play; she knows civilized behavior. She knows what she sees, when she sees my mother. And she knows too, how to see for, how to teach, a child and all her siblings and her father too, about people like that, and about who and how they are, really.

About people who abuse those they are obligated, by everything decent or right or good, to protect.

So that's another pretty big piece.

I will say it again: I think we cannot go back for these broken parts of ourselves without letting go of rationality for a little while. If you don't think you can do it alone, don't do it. That is what we pay therapists for. To bring us, and to bring us back safely, from our own childhoods, from the trauma in them. Layers upon layers of it.

It is working, for me.

***

So the birthday party is my first clear memory of the taste of grovelling. I never grovel, never beg, refuse to cry out. Until I learned to cry for myself at the shame of it, at the stupid thereness of it, I would find a little tiny place to stand by not crying out at what she was doing; there was no one to help, so begging would not help. But I did beg, in the same way my sister did too, that day. And it wasn't the paying I surely did afterword. It was what would happen, when it happened in front of those friends, those little girls who were safe in their homes and whose mothers felt so kind, so real that they must never, ever, suspect about me and my mother.

And about the obscenity there, at the heart of things.

And that is what my mother did to my sister, and that is the fear my sister was dancing, dancing so fervently, to prevent. Knowledge of those times we did beg, of those times where we were broken, and identified with the abuser instead of ourselves.

Locus of control.

And that is what the timer was for. Time to know these things, to tie these three things that I know together.

***

And that is the exact same thing my mother was doing to me at WalMart that day. Offering an ersatz approval for something that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what a series of strange men shopping at freaking WalMart think about whether I am attractive (like a whore) or spectacularly elderly and shriveled and old. (Like a used up old whore. Ridiculous and obscene.) That is part of it. I am sixty when this happens. I am a well preserved and even, a pretty sixty year old, when it happens. That is the little grain of truth that made the wheel turn, in this piece of abuse my mother committed to enacting. I am whatever I look like, whoever I am, just having a day and she brings up the issue, the forever issue of appearance and that, whatever else it brings up, brings up, for me, the issues of aging and not enoughness and whoredom. And that is a point I made too, in the initial post I did on this WalMart thing.

I did not have the whore piece, then.

I do now. Thank you Maya/matrix lady/Lisa.

"Unacceptable."

That is Lisa.

No resentment. No angst. No regret. Over and done.

"Unacceptable."

And there was more, but I lost the rest of it.

These are things we had not spoken about for WEEKS. She couldn't wait until morning to scream at me...lol? This isn't normal.

My mother did this too.

And from your comments, I was able to trace and deactivate the things that I learned about myself there, and that have affected me, that have affected my ability to be rational and strong and to have access to my sane mind.

Thank you.

It sucks to be afraid, to know that kind of wild, unrational fear where all you can do is leap into the darkness and do it anyway. She had no right.

And that is why she did it, of course. To prove to me that she did.

I see you.

I see you back.

We, those of us broken in the ways I was broken at my mother's hands, we were not broken over one instance of abuse. We were broken, with malice, at ever possible opportunity. We lived with, and were absolutely dependent upon, our stalkers.

That is the feeling I am always trying to find a word for when I describe what it feels like to interact with my mother. Or to try to make sense of things from the perspective of the internalized mother, my mother/myself. Where well mothered people find wisdom and strength and courage and acceptance, we find a broken place.

And we don't even dare go there.

And if we are very strong, we leap into the situation and fly by the seats of our pants. and how many times has that imagery come up for me, lately.

Hearts in our throats, flying by the seats of our pants.

Good.

Good for us.

And what I learned from all this hard work I have been doing, is that my mother is still stalking me, and every one she has anything to do with, anyone she can see, with her predator's eyes, to this day.

And that is an important thing to know, if you are a compassionate person, if you are a person who believes we are all essentially good.

Grandiosity is something my mother reflected to me. It was the other side of hatred, or was its close cousin, or something.

Maybe, for me, grandiosity is that thing I named vengeance.

Yes.

When you cannot accept what is, then you make an imaginary place where those things cannot happen to you ever again. But you know in your heart it isn't real. We have posted about that, before.

Maybe that is where insanity begins.

If it ever stops feeling like pretend.

Here is the proof of it: It never once stopped a freaking thing. It was pretend. Pretense. Safety imagined to cope with, to mount some sort of defense to, the living insanity that happens, like a trap door and a hanged man. There is nothing to stop what happens between the time the trap door is opened and the hanged man. Nothing but a miracle will save him, now.

So, I, we, those of us who lived that reality as children, created that miracle for ourselves and believed it with all our hearts.

And so, we lived; we held on to our sane mind.

When traumatic things happen, when we lose a daughter and then, a son and a therapist turns on us, we go back to that place where somehow, we held on to our sane mind.

And it comes out in our poetry.

Slippery stuff, real.

But it didn't help us then and it is not based in objective reality now. And if any of it were true, then our responsibility is not to let it go. Just in case. And so we are back in the thick of it.

And I came through with flying colors, with colors flying.

"And yes, it goes against what we are "supposed" to do. But we live in the rabbit hole now. We do what we have to do, to keep our boundaries intact."

Albatross

So in a way, that is what I am doing, now.

Do we all live in the rabbit hole?

At some level yes, or there would not be imagination or creativity or the language of music or math or color.

Or we would not sing.

***

And that is the way to see this. That is the way to welcome those parts of us, too. We did live in the rabbit hole, then. Other impossible things were happening, things that absolutely did not make sense and they kept happening and no one knew correct answers at all. Not the authorities. Not the professionals. Not anyone, at all. (Talking about our children and families falling apart, here. This is chain of consciousness stuff.)

Grandiosity is a thing we create when we cannot accept what is because it doesn't make sense. I wonder who I might have been had these things never happened to me. In a way, I admire my capacity to do that ~ to create that beautiful and dangerous and powerful world. That is where I write from, I suppose. How I do it, how every writer does it, I mean.

This part of me, this writing part, that is something I love. Something my mother touched only once. Oh, wait; I meant a million times. What I meant was that this is the part that witnesses, that lived, that remained present. This is who I am, the hidden self choosing now to come naked. So I am sifting through the events that called me to protect myself and seeing them, seeing even that, through my own eyes.

I wonder why I need to know this, now.

It isn't shaming, any more than religious belief is shaming; telling us more about the believer than about the belief.

This is the part of me that leans in.

Preferring objective, to subjective, reality.

On we go.

***

How does one stop being a beggar.

By having nothing to protect. By knowing what there is to know. Nothing hidden; nothing to protect.

No wonder my abusive mother/myself was always telling me not to think.

I think in the most amazing fashion.

So do you, for anyone reading along.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

I'm applauding everything about your honest, heartfelt post, Cedar. Honestly, I could relate to most of it, except for the fact that I did speak out and try to defend myself and did not do what she wanted me to do.

Why are dysfunctional mothers so worried about how their kids look?

Well, their daughters.

So one day I let my best friend cut sideburns for me. I had long hair. God forbid I cut my hair. I knew I was in trouble because E. had told me, "I hate sideburns on girls." Truthfully, it didn't look too good. I was afraid to go home. When I did, yep, she started mocking me and making fun of me and telling me how horrible it looked as soon as she saw.

Over a stupid haircut. Why did t his bother her? I was failing school, but she never ever bothered to yell at me for that. I used to see failure notices on the kitchen table and she never addressed them to me. But I let my friend cut sideburns and I had short sideburns now and she didn't like my hair and she followed me around yelling at me about it. I remember her telling me how boys won't like me now. I believed her because I thought it looked bad too and the only boy who'd liked me up until then was a boy I didn't like back, but I dated him because E. liked him and I truly believed nobody else would ever want me. Back to the hair and her fascination with how I looked...and what her priorities were for her oldest....

"Boys like LONG hair, NOT SHORT HAIR! It's ugly." She honestly told me that over and over again.

And God help it if boys didn't like you, huh? You're a girl and you don't need to be smart, you just need to be beautiful. Another winner from E. If I recall, and since it did not have to do with me, I'm not sure about the details...I believe she paid for Thing 1's college bills (although he had scholarships) and would not pay for Thing 2. And Thing 2 wanted desperate to have a certain major in college. E. told her that if she took that major, she wouldn't sign for her loan, which she would pay for completely on her own. "Girls just have to be beautiful. Smart is for boys." Again, not sure it played out exactly like this because it had nothing to do with me, but I know I heard the story and it is something like that.

I remember thinking, "What a b****" when I heard about it because I still really loved Thing 2.

"You're getting fat." Another nugget from E.

I'm lucky I did not also get an eating disorder. What kind of mother says that to her daughters?

Thing 2 is very vain about her physical appearance. I actually think it's sad because nobody looks good forever.

And it's so superficial.

Our personality disordered, abusive mothers are superficial. They are fake. They don't even know what they are. They are angry at their own pasts (mine was). She was actually very weak and pathetic although to me she was as big as the room she stood in and yelled at me in. Looking back, how weak she was. She needed me to yell at because it made her feel important? Who knows?

Cedar, I have gone ballistic reading biographies and posts of dysfunctional families as I took on this quest to find out the "why" to the best of my ability. Cedar, there are so many of them. It is always the same song. The sick mother or father or sometimes sick mother and cowering in fear father or vice versa picks a child to honor and a child to pick on. The more kids, the more the dynamics change. There is usually only one scapegoat, but sometimes there are four k ids and two are golden and two are scapegoats. The goldens never think th e scapegoat was scapegoated. That is just the way it is. So the families are fragmented and there are bad feelings and lack of any contact at times.

Although we have just figured it out, our families are very common scenarios. It was sadly comforting to feel understood by strangers whose posts I've read. And whose books I've read.

I understand why you free associate here...it is validating and helpful and I'm much better than I was when I started out. I think I understand what can not be exactly defined. However, what it boils down to is this dynamic, whyever it comes to exist (Sorry guess whyever isn't a real word), happens often. Sick parents or a sick parent has kids and divides and conquers. Somebody is left out. The family doesn't work and the sick parent has damaged her offspring.

I know that. I know it's common. I don't feel alone.

I also got an excellent idea about what to do when the horrible day comes that I lose my only FOO member, my Dad. I will do what a few other outsiders have done. They called the person who is performing the service and told them the situation and asked for their help in easing the situation.

It's hard to believe that when I first read Thing 2's post, I was so furious and ashamed by her false assessment of what I'd written that I'd thought of not honoring my father when he has to leave me. I'm way over that now. She's the one who doesn't get it. Bite me. I can handle being in her space one last time with my family around me. She won't talk to me. I won't even look at her. After the ceremony, I don't know or care if others are getting together at somebody's house...we're leaving for our sanctuary in Wisconsin. And that will be the final chapter in this crazy FOO. At least for me it will.

I do not think of them often anymore since I spilled my guts and got over it. I have not checked their FBs. I have not gone back to the site where Thing 2 posts HER point of view, which she is entitled to do. But I don't CARE what she writes. I don't bring up either ones name to my father and he doesn't bring them up to me.

Did I ever mention that years ago I threw out all my picture albums from my childhood? I don't have any baby pictures anymore. I have no pictures of me before I started having my friends take pictures. I have no pictures of young me, young E. or young anyone. The kids first view of how I looked was in my teens on a vacation and then my first honeymoon...hehe. I sound like a serial bride, but just twice.

I don't remember when I threw it out, but I lived back in Illinois at the time and don't think I was married to my husband yet. I may not even have known him. It was that long ago that I wanted to erase my childhood.

I do not miss the pictures. They used to sort of give me the creeps.

Anyhow, keep writing and so will I. We will write this stuff right out of our systems. It is working for me. I hope it works for you too

 

[JulieAnn]

You all write so beautifully. I read every word. Thank you for letting us intrude. Bystanders to your stories. I want to shake your mothers. But you won. You persevered. You all did.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Hi, JulieAnn.

Thank you for reading along, and for posting in to tell us so. It is shaming in one way to know that you know, but that is the thing I am trying to reclaim here, too: Accepting that this is who I am. Accepting the ugliness in it, but not the blame, not the shame, for the ugliness.

So, thank you, JulieAnn.

We need to claim our stories, our true things about us that we wish were not our true things, before we can reclaim our integrity.

I still would have rather been seen as, like, a font of wisdom for a minute. I'm just sayin'.

"I hate sideburns on girls."

You little rebel you.

"Boys like LONG hair, NOT SHORT HAIR! It's ugly." She honestly told me that over and over again.

That's so awful. You could be bald right this minute for all I know, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to who you are in your heart, or to how you respond, with your whole heart, to all of us when we need you.

I also got an excellent idea about what to do when the horrible day comes that I lose my only FOO member, my Dad. I will do what a few other outsiders have done. They called the person who is performing the service and told them the situation and asked for their help in easing the situation.

I love that idea. You won't be alone. You won't be distracted by Thing 1 and Thing 2.

I love that idea.

I will do this too.

Looking back, how weak she was. She needed me to yell at because it made her feel important? Who knows?

Yes.

Not important. Powerful in an unreal way that she could not enact on adults. Grandiosity or hating you because she hated herself, maybe? My mother seems to hate herself, or to battle hating herself. (Here comes Cedar's usual confusion where all things to do with her mother are concerned.) My mother was part of a group once in which the male who had created the group was doing a study on elderly people and happiness or despair. On how it is that some of us are so unhappy, so lost at the ends of our lives, and some of us seem pretty balanced around what has happened, what was lost, what might have been. And as I am posting this, I realize my mom may have lied about what was found in her case.

From her survey, my mother has no regrets.

And it was a remarkable enough thing that the person and my mother talked about it two or three more times, to clarify the conclusions drawn from her responses.

So there's that.

"Girls just have to be beautiful. Smart is for boys."

You are beautiful, SWOT. I don't know how you look on the outside, but your heart is courageous. And that is a true kind of beautiful, real and lasting and true as could be.

I know that because I am that way, too.

Who knew, right?!?

I still really loved Thing 2.

I don't think we have to convince ourselves we don't love them. I think we just have to see them for the choices they made, for the people they chose to become. We could wish they had been better than that. Maybe they are not so strong as we are, SWOT. Ultimately, why doesn't matter. It is what it is. And I feel in such a happy place because I know that now. (I finished this post after working through FOO issues on your Watercooler thread.)

It is a weird little feeling, the way I feel now. Like everything that was so rivetting to me just a few days ago is resting in someplace sunny, now.

Well, that's good, then.

"You're getting fat." Another nugget from E.

I'm lucky I did not also get an eating disorder. What kind of mother says that to her daughters?

Thing 2 is very vain about her physical appearance. I actually think it's sad because nobody looks good forever.

And it's so superficial.

My mother: "Just wait until you've had a baby and you are fat and misshapen." And you could have blown me over with a feather when that did not happen, to me. I had two babies, and that did not happen, to me.

I thought it would, though.

I wanted babies anyway. But it was very nice that did not happen, to me.

On Thing 2's vanity: I don't know what to make of my appearance. We have posted about that, before. I always had to be feeling put nicely together. In the sense that nothing was overtly wrong, or sticking out anywhere, like my hair. Which we have already talked to death about.

Oh, wait.

That was me.

:O)

What looks like vanity ~ the too tightly presented woman or man, I think that is confusion over what the reactions are in the outer world and how that collides with the reality our mothers taught us, live and well and cackling away in our inner realities.

I can remember being so ashamed of what I looked like that I would just give up and go to wherever it was I was going. Now, looking back at my pictures, I see that I could have just gone as myself. And that there was no possible way that could have been the ugly I felt I was.

Another lie my mother told me.

No, I think it is that I had to put things in some kind of order to make how I thought I looked (beaten/grovelling/broken/defeated) with the responses I ~ with the way people responded to me in the real world. It was a strange thing, a strange "What is true." place to be, that whole issue of appearance and what matters.

Still alot of conflict there about that. So, in a very strange way, aging is a gift. I am not what I was, and yet, I am so much more than I was. As I recover myself, I see the niceness in my eyes and smile lines and laughter and kindness.

And just kind of general prettiness, which is a true thing that I like very much, too.

And I know those things about me now. But I did not know them before.

She was actually very weak and pathetic although to me she was as big as the room she stood in and yelled at me in

I know!!! They seem so big to us. But we were little girls, then.

And as we know now, they were bullies and cowards, and were very wrong to do what they did.

(Very wrong; and Cedar gets that little flash of post-traumatic reality that leaves her wondering what kind of person thinks like I do about her own mother. But I know what to do with that, now. Maya's laughter, the lady from Matrix, smoking and baking cookies. Lisa V., realizing what she is seeing, what that is that that big woman is doing.)

Cedar, I have gone ballistic reading biographies and posts of dysfunctional families as I took on this quest to find out the "why" to the best of my ability.

Isn't that something, that you did that? Here is a question I have been meaning to ask but got too wound into my own stuff to remember: So, how is it that you are able to digest and assimilate and communicate so beautifully now, but could not or would not or somehow found yourself unable, to do well in school?

What do you think that was all about?

Unless you just want to let it go. You are so happily through it, now.

I wondered about that a couple of times. Things you would post about intelligence, or about that place where you write from, as though those were not amazing things to be able to do at all, let alone to do so well.

That is some pretty heavy duty research you do, sift through, and then post for all of us, here.

It was sadly comforting to feel understood by strangers whose posts I've read. And whose books I've read.

Sanity, there. To know it happens, and how it feels when it was you it happened to and what the nature of the struggle to come back is ~ those things are priceless tools to have.

However, what it boils down to is this dynamic, whyever it comes to exist (Sorry guess whyever isn't a real word), happens often.

True. I thought I was the only one having a problem with it.

That's the difference. To know this is hard stuff, but to be certain there is a way to come through it. To know everything we need to change everything we know about ourselves is right here, right inside us.

honoring my father when he has to leave me.

I love this.

The way you see it now, I mean. "Honoring my father when he has to leave me."

I just love that.

Bite me.

On the fridge it goes.

:O)

I sound like a serial bride, but just twice.

It was that long ago that I wanted to erase my childhood.

I was so ashamed too, of pictures of myself as a little girl. Then I read somewhere that the thing to do is to look at that little girl I was with compassion. To witness for her, with compassion and pride in her strength.

And I couldn't do it.

So, that is where I started to work, at first. With those pictures. That is where the concept came from of witnessing without a picture ~ with nothing but that trauma feeling, or that "ping".

"There is a better way. Find it.", right?

Remember that story I told about the lady in Group Therapy for FOO issues, and her fear, that overwhelming, freeze-you-in-place fear, that somehow it would leap out of time and into a job interview, or into a blossoming friendship? I wish we had been able to find that picture for her, and nurture her into seeing her abuser through her own eyes, instead of his. I don't even remember her name, now. I wish I had known then how to help her, like I would, now.

Really though, I am mostly so grateful that I was helped. I hope she found the same kind of support to heal that I have found, here.

I do.



That's us.



Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

Isn't that something, that you did that? Here is a question I have been meaning to ask but got too wound into my own stuff to remember: So, how is it that you are able to digest and assimilate and communicate so beautifully now, but could not or would not or somehow found yourself unable, to do well in school?

Oh, Cedar, lol. That is my dilemma.

I have many neurological glitches, such as face blindness, which makes it very hard for me to remember who anyone is, even if I have knwon that person for ten years. All they have to do is change a hairstyle and they look like a stranger to me. I've been tested by neuropsychs several times. All of them found a severe non-verbal learning disability which is kind of the opposite of autism with some similarieis.

You have good to great verbal skills. Mine were in the superior range. I was always good at talking, giving speeches, expressing myself and creative writing. But...then we get to my perforamnce level IQ, which is how you can do things and in my opinion is more important in the workforce than how well you can speak. And my performance IQ is in the low average range---85. Math often is really horrible for somebody with a N V L D which means non verbal learning disabliity (that is the abbreiviation). Concentration can be challenging. Organization is challenged. Handwriting is often a mess (mine was). Also, we share the icky traits of not being able to read body language or understand how to make small talk with autistics (both of us have these traits). We can speak well, but we do not know what to talk about. So we are dumbstruck at parties. Smalltalk bores us to death and puzzles us. Groups have too much stimuli and are too impersonal. They bore us too and confuse us. We are mostly introverts who underachieved in school. My FOO never tried to find anyone who could help my school issues. There were bigger fish to fry, like having long hair and attracting boys.

My school problems would have been there even I had had loving prents, but maybe loving, tuned-in parents would have sat and helped me with homework or gotten me a tutor who was NOT just around when I was going to have to pass or class or not graduate...I really needed one for most classes all the time. And they did have the money. They just didn't like to spend it. And E. was not invested in my future. She told me early I was to learn to type because then I'd always be able to get a job. I did go a half year to a junior college for rich flunkies, but I didn't do that well there so I decided that my goal should be to learn how to type well.

I did not learn to type well. The first class I took, I flunked. Typing. I am poorly coordinated and that includes my fingers. But the second time I tok the same class, I did exactly what the teacher told me to do. I did not fold my legs. I did not try to go fast. I just had to do what she asked. At the end, I was a whiz typist.

All my life I have started out very slow and ended up above average, but my early slowness cost me many jobs. My Neuropsychology diagnosis states cognitive disorder not otherwise specified as my second diagnosis. And it's true. So I qualify for a job coach and some supports. And this "the stupid one" is probably another reason why E. picked on me, although she did seem to care more that I keep my hair long than I pass my classes. My dad? Uninvolved and out of the house. I wish I could call him out for being afraid of her, but I was too and I get it. I can't be angry with him. He is the only FOO person who does not favor others over me and nothing 1 and 2 say will change that. I appreciate that more than I should because of E., and 2 (1 is pretty much not much in my thoughts).

Cedar, I am a a different style learner. Once I do learn I have a really good memory. I also tend to get stuck kon topics and research them to death. Right now it's family of origin and I'm so glad I took this on. It is such a relief to know that there are thousands of #'s who are selfish, shallow and abusive to ONE child and thousands of Thing 2's who don't believe she was abusive at all...it was me. That is the usual scenario in so many families that I smile now thinking about how cliche our sick family was...for a sick family.

My FOO has a short history (grandma and E.) of favoring their sons and other men. All E's Golden People were men. The loan exception was one of my nieces who was a bit troubled. "She needs me" she said when questioned about why she was interering with 2's parenting. She had promised never to do that because my grandma had interferred with ME and helped ME and had made MY life so much better, but hers so much worse...haha. So I guess it was ok for E. to favor one of her grandchildren "because she needs me" but it wasn't ok for her mother to favor me, and she did, "because she needs me." My grandmother knew. She got it. Interesting that E. repeated something she thought was so awful for her. Every time I was upset with her, I'd run to my grandma's loving arms. And it killed her. And she promised not to repeat it. But she did. No insight. None. No looking back and thinking, "Hmmmmm...that must have been wh at my mother was thinking when she gave a safe haven to MY troubled child."

What a bogus person with no consistency in her life.

But this is so common I feel tons better. Many have left their families. Many were left behind and are not able to see the truth and are happy they were left behind by the dysfunction. Most have their own families now, like me, and have good ones. Often the more Golden children stumble along. Sometimes not. Thing 1's physical issues still challenge him. I still admire how he handles them. I don't know him as person to have an opinion. Thing 2 can not handle her own personal life without causing drama of her own making.

I did better. So I feel a silent win.

Cedar, you have that silent win. Look for it. Value it. I am going to post one of the places I went where I got validation and you can read it too. I think I've hit every site that exists about the golden child and the scapegoat and dysfunctional families...lol. I am now a walking encyclopedia about them!!

 

[BusynMember]

Cedar and anyone reading, this is one of the mildest sites I've found. I didn't want to overly depress anybody. But it tells the stories of families who have disonncted, not talking to certain people, etc...just like ours. I laughed by the time I got to this forum. I was not laughing at the people, of course, or at their pain. I was laughing selfishly for ME because they were all so familiar to me,a lthough the details are a little different for each person.

http://community.babycenter.com/post/a41309578/how_many_of_you_do_not_speak_to_siblingsparents