Never once was I taught to try to control myself...no effort was made. I was just baaaaaaaaaaaaad.
You felt badly about yourself for the sake of the mother you loved and were disappointing with the differences that would, until you'd been correctly diagnosed and the reason for the differences named, come to haunt your life.
That is so sad a thing, Serenity.
You have had to be very strong.
We're talking two years old up until the teen years and in early adulthood when I was still very different, although my attitude toward my mother had changed.
Serenity? Toward My Mother/Myself.
And for each of us, the differences in our mothers will have affected us from the moment we were placed in her arms. Our mothers may not have been able to welcome. They may (and probably did) have felt their lives were out of their control in their pregnancies. birth control was up to the male in those times before The Pill, remember. Or was mechanical for women, and I think not widely available in that time. Their babies seem to have been seen as little strangers; as objects of curiosity and demand.
How out of control their lives must have become, with the births of their first children.
I still wanted her to love me, but I wanted her to help me
Could it be that you wanted her to help you be the little girl who would reflect that she had mothered well, so that she would love you? So that you could be for her all the things you so desperately hoped and tried to be? Given that no one could understand, not even a doctor in that time, that there were physical reasons for what was happening to all of you
and that in that time, every deficit in the child was an accusation against the mother (homosexuality, autism ~ formerly known as feral child ~ schizophrenia, sociopathy ~ you name it, it was an accusation against the mothering of the mother) your mom must have so blamed herself for your differences, Serenity. And she was blamed, roundly condemned really, by
the medical authorities
and by the husbands of the time.
It must have been so hard, for you and your mom both, Serenity.
I'm sure she did love you, and did wonder where she had gone so wrong in her mothering as to have harmed her own child, her own daughter.
There was nowhere to go for help in that time but to psychiatrists, or to medical doctors who, not having an answer, dipped into the unquestioned misogyny of that time and condemned the mother.
And there was no birth control and there was no taking a job outside the home and most women did not even drive; they had no life outside wife and mother.
We are so fortunate today, to have learned the real reasons for the things that happen to us, and to our children.
Maybe that is why she gave you chocolate milk in your bottles, Serenity. Maybe that pleasure of sweet chocolate was the one way she could please you, could soothe you...could love you.
And that probably just made everything worse, but there was no way she could have known that, then. Now, we know about hyperactivity and sugar and allergies.
All she could have known then was that she had somehow not been the mother you needed.
That's why she calls me borderline (if she stil does). It is something that will push the buttons of most people, especially when it's not true.
I agree. Whatever our sisters are struggling with, there does seem to be a kind of hatred for us that has nothing to do with us, with who we are really, and everything to do with their struggle to make sense of what happened to all of us.
I know she felt bad for me and tried to be good to me because she knew I didn't have a mother.
Her having come into your life was a gift. I am happy that happened for you. D H mom means a great deal to me, too.
But I had the heart and desire to learn how to help people and have been doing it all my life. The only person I refused to be good to was myself. Everyone else got second and third chances. I gave myself not even one chance I digress...
That is what we are learning to do, here on the FOO Chronicles. We are
"telling tales of old scars and of dark, unhealed wounds that the Child within each might...appear".
Or however that poetry goes.
We each have taken on the shame of our mothers. But our mothers' shame revolves around the concepts they held of themselves as mothers. A circle, then.
Remember that in that time, a woman had no other value. And she had so little control over her own life; and there was no internet where she could learn that she was not the only one who was somehow not happy, who felt that she was failing.
It must have been so hard for them.
My grandma told me everything. She believed "There are no secrets in a family."
With my grands, even with daughter choosing the streets and the drugs and the turning away that she did...I always tell them that when their mother is healthy, there is no better mom in all the world. Your grandmother should have done that for you, Serenity. She might have held faith with your mother's best intention for the family, however it all worked out in real life. If your grandmother had told you, over and over again, that your mother loved you beyond measure and was doing the best she knew...that would have been a very different reality than the one your grandmother created for you.
I know you love your grandmother. But she was filling your little girl ears with things that were not, strictly speaking, true.
It might have made such a difference for all of you, had your grandmother presented your mother
and you, in a truer light.
And then, she did what she did with that money.
And she did it to her own daughter, and to you.
She did not have my son's SSN and I refused to give it to her for th e purpose of giving him money and not the other two kids so she tried sneaky methods to get it...calling him up then calling him names when he said he didn't know it (he didn't).
It took great courage to stand up to the mother you so desperately needed to love you.
Wow.
He had a normal loving mother and father and his grandparents would never have done what mine did. Although she loved me, she made it harder in the end for me.
She did.
Why? Was she trying to destroy even that, between her daughter and you?
My mom does things like that.
It's as though she is determined that the strength that could be taken, by all the sibs, in learning to trust one another, will never happen.
Though in reviewing my sister's behaviors throughout my life, I am seeing that there was always a mix of hatred and loving and anger in the way my sister sees me, things have been thousands of times worse since my father's death. Since My Mother/My Sister/Myself have no firm center but the one my mother chooses.
I had posted before about my mother's seeming celebration of the "jealousy"
over her, between my sister and myself. Now...why would a mother say such a thing, with that little smirk, to a daughter in her late fifties about a sister also in her fifties?
Or tell me shaming things about my sister dancing for joy in her own beautiful kitchen because she had my mother and my father with her in her home?
Our mothers, and maybe our grandmothers, too...I don't know. They seem determined to weaken all of us, to keep the sibs apart, to instill jealousy where family connection and the strength come of it should be. And always, the center, the glorified center, is the mother.
That is why we are ferreting through all this stuff instead of getting out of bed, so to speak.
We are doing well with it, I think.
I dreamed last night of the fattest horned toad. There were many of them and I knew they were there, in my house, but I hadn't seen them, before. I could hear them, moving behind the walls. In the dream, I opened the door to the vanity in the bathroom and there was this incredibly fat horned toad.
It was brilliant orange, brilliant yellow and white.
It looked right at me.
That is the dream.
When I was a little girl, I was fascinated by dinosaurs. I wanted a horned toad in the worst way. I loved the fact that they spit blood out of their eyelids when threatened. I never did get one, but I never forgot about them, either. I learned all kinds of things about dinosaurs and the La Brea Tar Pits and so on, when I was little.
You guys are not going to believe this I know, but the library was my favorite place in all the world.
:O)
It still is.
Anyway, that was my dream last night. D H says the horned toad represents my mom.
It was a very beautiful horned toad. But it was amazingly fat. I am afraid, and I am not.
Beautiful colors, just beautiful.
In real life, horned toads are gray.
Well, he did have that right, if she had the right to try to trick my son. And to call him a liar.
No. She did not.
I wonder whether it was the grandmother who suggested that your mother might learn your son's Social Security number.
Did anyone have a choice?
No.
I had always believed that we (my mom and my sister and me) were all doing the best we knew and that it just somehow had never come together.
Yet.
That was the family dinner imagery, I suppose.
But it seems now that my mom is determined to create the reality that now exists.
D H says I will be vulnerable to my sister if he is gone when my mother dies.
He is correct.
Hey, I didn't visit my mom when she had brain cancer, but I did call her. It was interesting. Since she was not in her right mind, she was nice to me, if she even knew who I was. She even cried once and said, "I can't read. I look at books but can't read the words."
I said, "Well, you had surgery. It will get better."
She sniffed. "That's true."
Why do you believe she did not know it was you, Serenity?
I don't think it's about mourning a parent who has passed. My sister's mourning of my father is ~ there is so much that is not right about what is happening to her around the issue of my father's death. I would so love to see my father in person again...but I feel him around me, sometimes. I dreamed of him, after his death.
My father has a paper bag. A small one. The top is folded closed, and he holds it in the crook of his arm. He is sorry to be leaving but he is going on and that is all there is to be thought, about that. He has stepped onto a tiny pontoon boat, and is about to sail into the river that leads to the sea.
I am seeing him off.
He hands me four wooden salad serving spoons with beautifully painted ceramic handles. (There were four children in my FOO. Two of the salad spoons? I already own, in my real life.) He says, "She will need these."
I think he means my mother.
He meant me.
That is the dream.
He gave me the remaining pieces of the set of four.
I admired my father. I enjoyed him. He was kind and determined and very bright and so, so funny. But I don't grieve him the way my sister did and does
and it has been something like seven years since his death.
I know I have the best life of any of them. I have love.
This is true, for each of us.
It has taken me forever to understand what I mean to D H.
Or to understand what he means, to me.
Trust issues? Or self worth. The two are so closely intertwined.
And we have named that betrayal of self, here in the FOO Chronicles.
And you were a soldier at the end for her, although she didn't deserve it.
The mother hadn't earned Copa's sacrifice, this is true. But to me, it seems that what we are doing here in the FOO Chronicles is coming to understand our mother's realities, too. It seems to me that what we are coming to see is that our moms were ill, or judged themselves and us so harshly because ~ I don't know, Serenity. It's like you posted. Did any of us really have a choice. Did our moms have a site like this where they could hold our their secret hurts and shamings for healing? No. They had the entire medical community
and the pervasive misogyny of those times and that's all.
So, though so much of our lives have been hurtful and shaming and really just so freaking mean and awful...we do have this site, and one another and right witness, and we are healing, because of it.
So...that's good, then.
We are blessed.
Like, miraculously blessed in the very real sense of that word, blessing. And we are working hard, and telling our truths with integrity and finding ethical, healing witness, here.
:O)
Yes.
I just finished your post, Serenity. It was beautiful.
Cedar
