It goes beyond her inability to empathise.
I agree.
My mom created, behind closed doors, a world that reflected and serviced a kind of towering grandiosity. I think that is the feeling. A kind of take no prisoners tyranny with herself as...not king so much as drill sargent or slave master ~ some mid-level power abuser unsavoriness, like Emmy Slattery's husband in Gone With the Wind.
Illegitimate; twisted.
I feel badly when I look at my mother this way. I do love her, after all.
I do, and I wish I did not.
She shines for me, in my memory. That is probably a construct. Beneath it is the spit-flying, screaming woman who hits. Whooo! She is so ugly and stupid
and I hate her.
***
I will need to choose a mother substitute. That will be Ariana Huffington. I watched an interview in which she described her children, and her feelings for her own mother. She obviously loves and honors and respects them all.
I feel angry with myself when I see my mother as she is.
What does anyone have, what does anyone know, on the dynamic, there? Touch the hatred, re-experience the powerlessness where it was formed...what comes next? Frankenstein, unfreezing with a vengeance. Not just thawing, anymore. Magically unfreezing, color swooping and rising and shading everything in the most beautiful shades of pink.
This only happens when we let self-condemnation go; when we refuse it; when we see our mothers for who they are and for what they did and
take our own sides.
Of course I would hate my mother for what she did to me then, and for who she is, now. Of course I would create a better than the real mom imagery that I could love and look up to. That is the feeling of dissonance. I know the difference between what was real and what I allow myself to know.
So dissonance is a feeling to be sought.
In fact, it is dissonance I am describing when I post that I am so surprised. That sense of disbelief is dissonance. A wrong note clanking away at the heart of the symphony.
Dissonance.
That is where we will learn true things about how we made sense of what happened to us so we can bring ourselves back. We are like Isis ourselves in that sense. We are searching for the lost parts and incorporating them into one that one whole, complete, loving being we grieve so fiercely, and long to see, again.
Ourselves.
That is what Copa was describing, maybe, when she posted about guilt at not allowing the mother to abuse her, or at not continuing to abuse herself at the mother's behest.
I wonder why I do not hate my mother, hate my sister and brothers? I mean, I do in a sense. It's like throwing all the toy soldiers into the air in frustration.
So perhaps I have my own grandiosity issues, along with the shame that attends them.
Or maybe, the only way I could tolerate seeing my family was to believe we could become something better than we were; or maybe, that
this time things would be better.
Or maybe, I believed that if I did not play the game, they would stoop playing, too.
Or maybe, I had no option and never did, but to play the role I did play ~ the hope of and belief in symphysis, maybe.
Since my father's death, everyone is operating right out in the open and without anesthetic. They are creating Frankenstein of themselves and one another and calling it good. That is what they always do.
That is what they did to me.
Probably, I have always played some version of odd man out in my FOO.
And now, I am thawing out.
Oh, those freaking villagers with their fire and their pitchforks
and their fear.
And what is the fear. That there is nothing better than what we know. That jettisoning what we know means confronting abandonment issues and there we are: mortality, again.
Oh, that Freud.
***
So...I am thinking of Ariana Huffington, who also worked full time and was a mom. She did not think of her children, did not create of her own children, what my mother did. It is important for us to seek adequate role models, so we can know how to see what happened to us, and how it should have been, instead. Why it happened the way it did is because our mothers were not sane people. (Our fathers...victims or villains?) We will deal with them once we have healed the belief systems we were hurt into, that all-things-service the-mom system, our mothers set up and continue to demand.
To this very day, my mom demands that kind of servile attendance from those in her life, and works to put others at a disadvantage. I see that in the way she talks about and treats the lady who drives her South; I see it in the way she talked to and about, the man who wanted to marry her. I see it in the way my sister encourages these kinds of things ~ participates in them! I still am so surprised. I hope I am not that way. These are probably the underlying reasons for my continually trying to find answers and balance in "ethical choice".
Well, good for me, then.
:O)
In a very real way, each of us has been enslaved. We are fighting now for intellectual freedom and for the right to spiritual freedom from the tenets of that time of enslavement. Other children, those we played with or studied with or dated, when we were young girls and the nature of the mother's abuse changed ~ those children had never been enslaved to the grandiose mother. (Or whatever the basic feeling underlying individual abuse. Could it be that each of the mothers circled the issue of grandiosity? Could that be a typical pattern, as we are learning that so much of what we were taught was specific to us is the typical symptom of a particular kind of illness, of a particular kind of worldview?) I am thinking here about "Don't you dare.", and about "Just don't think, Cedar." I am thinking about abandonment, and about what message a child would take from the abuser's neediness for grandiosity.
It is a heady way to look at what happened. To see the abuser through his or her wounds and recognize the betrayal of self and other in it.
I am thinking about my mother throwing my first story aside and then,
taking writing classes herself later in her life. In a way, I am hating myself here for letting her teach me that my writing was...disgusting is not the word. Bad writing...that could be the word, but with a bullet: That I would even try. That is the thing my mother condemned; that is the thing that made her angry. That I would even dare try
and that she found something of value in the writing that I was not allowed to possess. It was not ridicule that I felt. It was...it was like the threat of the physical threat of destruction.
Could it be that I stopped writing at my mother's response to my audacity in writing, and not because I believed...well of course. That is why I believed it was wrong to write when my children were so troubled and my family was falling apart.
My mother.
That is how I stepped into that belief system that rachetted me back to the how-it-looks self.
Oh for heaven's sake. My mother's abusive little fat fingers are everywhere in my life choices. Everywhere I have made a choice against myself,
there is my freaking abusive mother.
I see you / I see you back.
Copa. What does your internal mother have to say about whether nap time is over? Every time you get up, she makes you go back to bed.
By what right, Copa?
***
And the pieces are falling into place. And the thing is beginning to move, for me...but I feel disloyal to my mother in naming her through my adult eyes.
On rewrite: I no longer feel disloyal to my mother; I feel she is out there somewhere, and not the core of my psyche. There is a distance now between what she believes and who I am. I see her. Maybe that is what "I see you back." always meant. That there is a place inside me now from which I see and in which I am untouchable.
There is a Stephen King book: Dreamcatcher. The feeling is like that, like when the main character finds a place in his head where Mr. Gray is not.
***
So, those are my thoughts on that, this morning. Always, we must remember as we go through this material, that the important thing is not that we condemn our moms or sisters (or brothers) but that we see what happened to us, and what is still happening to us, through our own eyes.
And that we stop seeing ourselves through the eyes of our abusers. That is what is happening around those issues of guilt or horrified disbelief or sadness or regret as our perspectives on our moms / sisters / brothers changes. We are seeing clearly for the first times. That thin sense of distaste for having been their victims may give rise to all kinds of feelings we have repressed for so long that we no longer remember we have them. So, we need to expect some discomfort. That is just fine. We are worth every bit of it. These are exactly the things we need to know ~ these are the feelings we need to acknowledge, if we are to heal.
We were abused.
In that sense, our stories are sad, ugly little things. That is fine just fine, too. Time to claim these parts of ourselves; time for rescue. We will be our own heroes.
I have been thinking about heroes, lately. About that song about heroes. "And he's got to be strong and he's got to be sure and he's got to be fresh from the fight."
Or however that goes.
I will find and post it here.
We are doing so well.
Cedar
.
