here. came across an article via socialamber.com and had to lie down and think for a while.
after fighting with my mother this morning about not spending time with her, I tried to compose my feelings and thoughts into an email. the truth is, she's right. I always give shit excuses to avoid spending time with her. why? I can't tell her how I really feel because I'm pretty sure that would make her even angrier. she is difficult. difficult to deal with, difficult to be around, difficult to keep amused, impossible to keep happy.
I've always been convinced that if anyone were to know me for who I really am inside and all the dark thoughts I have, they would know that I am unloveable. I am difficult. for the past seven or so years, only one thing held true. I am alone, I will be alone, that is how it was, and that is how it will be.
I had violent thoughts as a child. pushing my mother down the stairs, hurting her, running away into the forest, never having to face her again. as soon as the thought surfaced I would push it darker and deeper down and the guilt would rise immediately and I knew then as I know now that I am a terrible person for thinking it.
I went to see a psychiatrist in New York. I'd been studying childhood cases of disassociative personality disorder, especially the ones resulting in juvenile crimes of murder. I was convinced there had to be something similarly wrong with me, that there was something causing me to have had horrible thoughts about the person that gave birth to me. I told the psychiatrist, I don't think I love my mother. the session went nowhere.
it's not that she didn't do the things that mothers are supposed to do. she fed me, she changed me, she arranged playdates for me, she was invested in my education, she made sure that I was always clean, warm, and she always tied back my hair neatly and nicely with little hair clips that came from a magical bottom drawer in her bathroom.
she would also get impatient, angry, and scary. I was always aware of how much she sacrificed for me, how much of her time I took up, how thankful I was supposed to be, and that she did these things for me because I came from her womb and she was obliged to do them.
when my mother is happy she is the most wonderful person in the world. sometimes she sang while I fell asleep and maybe because it reminds her of her younger years as a singer and dancer I could feel that she was temporarily placated and yes, then I could sleep.
when she is angry she is terrifying. she becomes irrational, confusing, and rash. but she never hit us as hard as the bad parents in tv movies.
I am always waiting for the shift. she is not a timed bomb, or a pressure cooker, or an alarm. there is no countdown. there is only the shift.
she does not like to tell you why she's angry. it wasn't until I entered my twenties that she began, like she does now, to hint at what you might've done wrong. her reason, she holds it close to her heart, warm, like a secret you do not deserve to know and could not possibly understand. she must be ashamed, too.
she does not say, I'm sorry. that would acknowledge that she was temporarily out of control. and that is the most fearful thing in the world to her.
she made me cry an unknowable amount of times. even now I can feel the hot tears shamefully sliding from the sides of my eyes, and because she gets angrier when I cry, I press my face to the seatbelt and shield my eyes with the nylon strap, beige woven nylon turning darker. I am good at crying silently now. I've learned to be still.
psychiatrists usually pinpoint age fourteen (years after my father admitted defeat at understanding my mother and they were divorced) as the year my major depression began, after a pivotal episode with my mother (I got a navel piercing without her knowledge and confessed to her that day) ended with her words, I don't love you, I hate you, especially you.
yes those words hurt a lot. but they were not new thoughts to me.
my mother said recently that after my brother was born and I was born, she was sad. she says she imagined hurting her baby. she hinted at dark thoughts.
I don't fault my father. I don't find it easy, either, to forget that after eleven years of marriage, he could divorce her. I could not.
I don't have many childhood memories. I remember shameful tears, dark nights and her beautiful voice, how beautiful she always was, her perfume, how soft my parents' bed was, macaroni and cheese, playing with a friend my mother would call strange and refuse to let me play with again, my brother making me laugh (a lot), my father coming home from work, the feel of pool concrete underneath my feet, the peace I found in reading. more often I remember my mother's voice, my father's voice, the arguing, the yelling, the threats of leaving, the barbed words, the poison. I remember putting a pillow over my head because sometimes children did that in books when things were noisy and they couldn't sleep.
but I found it suffocating and with my head pressed so close to the mattress I could hear my bed's heartbeat in my ear, and I knew it was alive and might hurt me. I just waited until they were done and the shadows in my room grew rounder, less jagged, and I would breathe very quietly so all the bedroom monsters (especially the ones in the attic) would think I was already dead.
I found it horribly romantic to pretend I was dead. I thought I might die in my sleep at any time. I was worried I would be awkwardly splayed at some unflattering angle at the point of death. I made a practice of carefully folding my hands over my chest like nosferatu, so I would fit neatly and look nice in a coffin.
I thought of going down the hall to the next room and telling them they were keeping me up and I couldn't sleep. my brother did it a couple of times. he was lucky, his bedroom was one more room removed from it than mine. but I was afraid the anger would shift towards me, that I could make it worse.
it is easy to remember these things in vague detail and dismiss them because you are grown up now and big people are not supposed to be so afraid. to think, I must remember things wrong, your picture is not painted quite right.
when my little sister was born when I was twelve, my half-sister, my mother cared for her as she best could. she was not the exact same mother I had when I was born, because things change. but many things stay the same if you forcefully hold them in place or refuse to acknowledge them. seeing this new child scared me because I didn't want my mother to mess her up, too.
my mother didn't necessarily raise me wrong. I'm intelligent, ambitious, generally quite gentle, and charming when I need to be.
she's not all-bad. she's not all-good. she is erratic, inconsistent, and dangerously moody. which is maybe the most dangerous thing for a child. children need consistent responses to positive and negative behavior. lacking these, a child is not able to differentiate between positive and negative actions. a "well-done!" should not shift to a "go away" and shift to a "shut up". without a relative consistency of response, the child cannot build sufficient context for proper behavior. without any explanation for an authority figure's mood-shift or emotionally violent outburst, the child is never given a chance to understand, or build these pathway-connections.
the child withdraws, becomes fearful, too shy to complain about the things that matter, or to ask for things-- or becomes sneaky, deviant, and will sometimes display inappropriate behavior, sometimes seemingly at random. painful shyness can hide an aching anxiety.
my own deviant behavior hasn't netted me any jailtime or murder headlines. most people are shocked that someone my age and well-educated, from a pretty middle-class family, could have logged so many hours with a psychiatrist, so many visits to the hospital, and a substantial history of drug abuse.
this summer I spoke with a friend about his psychiatrist's comment on relative-time and drug-use. for me drugs take me out-of-time, wrap a filmy layer of soft muslin around me, and the only heartbeat I know is mine, I can breathe, and I can sleep.
