part 83

I'm getting more used to being okay with who I am. I really am amazed at the power I gave to my mom and brother and sister - it hasn't even been very long since I broke things off with all of them, but I feel so much more objective now.

I think back only a few weeks and am surprised to recall how heavy their judgment weighed on me. It is nice to be free of it.

One time I heard a woman preface a statement by saying that most people do not like what she was about to say, particularly victims of child molestation. So, I got ready to be offended. What she said was that living in the pain and suffering of the past - no matter what your past is - is just feeling sorry for yourself.

I was surprised at how offended I wasn't. It has taken a long time to be able to acknowledge that I was a victim, and that the things done to me and what I saw happen to others wasn't my fault. I suppose in accepting that I was a victim meant that I had to accept the pain that came with it, too.

And oh my god - what pain. It has been excruciating. A nightmare. Oh my god.

I felt that pain, but instead of letting it go, I kept holding on to it. I needed it to remind me that what happened to me wasn’t fair, and that it wasn't right, and that I have a legitimate reason for how difficult it is for me to just cope on a daily basis.

It was my proof. It didn't matter what anyone else said about me or about the past, my pain was my proof that I was actually hurt. I was an innocent child and I was harmed in the most horrendous ways by my own parents. I wasn't making things up, making myself intentionally experience so much pain so that people would feel sorry for me, or to try and get something out of life that I don't actually deserve.

Hearing that woman say that - that holding onto that pain and living with it by my side every day was just me feeling sorry for myself - it occurred to me that she might be right. Of course I was offended, and I did not automatically achieve Zen once I got this idea into my skull, but it got me thinking in a different direction - and that's pretty significant.

It was one of many times I would have to re-learn that I can't change the past, but I can't pretend it never happened, either, and I definitely have a choice about how it would affect me NOW.

I used to cry whenever I heard anyone described as "damaged goods." I don't ever actually remember it being said about me (that I know of), but it's what I believed about myself, and just hearing the phrase made all the parts of me that were broken and breaking scream. I didn't want it to really be true, or at least known to anyone but me, and I spent my life trying to make that happen.

You know what happens when you're screaming and writhing in pain on the inside and trying to cover it up on the outside? A big crazy bitch is what happens. It takes a lot of narcissism and aggression to try to cover up that much pain.

I have gotten to a point where I can see that I have been a big crazy bitch in the past. I don't believe recognizing that makes it okay for me to have been a big crazy bitch, but I can certainly empathize with myself much easier. Learning how to empathize with myself has been a tremendously humbling process, and I truly believe it is one of those things that continues to develop as long as I'm alive - there's never going to be a point where I can say, "okay, I have perfected the art of empathizing with myself, so I don't have work on that anymore."

But finding the way to empathize with myself in the first place is another of those paradoxes: it is one of the most difficult and painful processes I have ever experienced, but it is simultaneously a gateway to beauty and peace I never imagined possible. It's taken a lot of work to get there, and I am almost to the point of not trying to work out whether the benefits are worth the work. I am almost to the point of just living in that beauty and peace, and being grateful for it without question.

So anyway, I hadn't realized how much my relationships with my mom and siblings were inhibiting that ability to live in beauty and peace. I realize it now, and maybe I am just continuing to be naïve and foolishly hopeful, but it is nice to think that my mom and siblings can recognize how much better I am without them in my life, and be happy for me, and just let me have that.

I think that would be some sort of proof that they do love me, that they love me enough to stay away and let me live without hindrance. I don't know - maybe I just like thinking that they love me enough to respect my boundaries, but it may be that they still find me disgusting and manipulative and crazy and dangerous, and are happy to have all of that out of their lives.

It is nicer to think they are respecting my boundaries out of love, but either way I am grateful for the peace I have in my life now, and that I don't have to carry around the mountains of shame that fell off me when I terminated my relationships with each of them.

I do still miss them. I still miss my dad, too, though. I guess its just another one of those things that comes with the territory of getting better. And I AM getting better - even I cannot make myself believe that I have not really conquered all of the things I have been able to conquer. That feels really good. Feeling good feels really good. It really, really does.

part 82

I am still so sad. There is nowhere for my mind to go except to be sad. I'm not even that angry anymore.

Drugs and alcohol are no longer options for me; unhealthy food is no longer an option for me; running away is no longer an option for me - I very much recognize that I do have a choice in each of these opportunities to temporarily escape reality, but that is not acceptable to me anymore.

I'm just not willing to hurt myself anymore, or to hurt my own beautiful family.

So I'm left with confronting the pain of how people hurt me.

Its shitty. For realsies.

Over and over I've been realizing that this was what I was so afraid of, why I didn't tell - and how none of them loved me the way I was promised they would if I kept my mouth shut. I put up with all of that horror to try to convince a bunch of assholes to love me. I've spent my whole life trying to convince myself that they are not a bunch of assholes. But they are!

Another big part is accepting who my mom really is - and she is fucked up. Seriously. I had been hanging on to the notion that I had a mom - a real mom - and now I can see how that was never true. I am hesitant to write her off as just plain evil, but I can't get around how insidious and destructive she has been in my life.

What also really sucks is how it all just makes sense now.

It's like, "oh."

I might have already written about all of this, but it just keeps going through my head, over and over and over.

I knew the things that were done to me were not right - even very much beyond the things I blocked out and have re-remembered, what I thought were simple, everyday normal things. I knew logically that so much of it just wasn't right. I tried so hard to get a similar opinion, to get some backup for my own sanity, to have someone else acknowledge that I was being harmed and that it was not okay.

And that feeling of getting shut DOWN - oh my god - when I would get to the point of realizing that it didn't matter what I said and saw that there was a wall set in front me that made me mute. Nothing I said could get beyond that wall. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how real and logical and fucking RATIONAL it was, that wall was there and it was stayed there and I had to learn to accept it as a part of life.

My dad put this wall up, my mom put this wall up, and my sister and brother learned how to put this wall up - and they still do it.

They are so incredibly entrenched with the idea that they are somehow smarter than everyone, more intuitive than everyone, better trained than everyone, that they refuse to consider their own arrogance as a tremendously debilitating aspect that makes them really not able to see much at all, that maybe the wall isn't keeping me silent and shut in, but keeping them shut out of what is real.

Oh my god. Sigh.

I want to hate them. I want to want to hurt them. I want to be ANGRY! My old stand-by, anger, got knocked on its ass and edged out as a way of not feeling hurt, and I miss it. I MISS BEING THAT ANGRY.

When I was in the hospital, someone told me that there is always pain behind anger. I believed whoever it was that told me, but I sure as hell did not want to think about exactly what it meant.

But now that's where I'm at. Thinking about the pain. And rather than wanting to hurt anyone or myself, I just want to be left alone. More than anything at all, I want my mom and my brother and my sister to just leave me alone. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would even want to speak to any of them, for any reason. I just want them to leave me the fuck alone.

So far they are doing a really good job.

So I guess that's good, right? I honestly would have a much harder time with all of this if they continued to try to contact me and tell me once again how supportive they are and how crazy I am. But they aren't.

I have a very difficult time imagining that they are not contacting me out of respect for me and my request that they did not contact me. I would imagine that is the tack they would take, though, if questioned about it.

When I first told my mom about the neighbors, I asked her to tell people - my aunts and uncles, the other neighbors, her husband. But she didn't. She asked me what she could do to help me and I specifically asked her to just let people know what going on so that I didn't have to keep going over and over it to every person I came across.

She didn't tell anyone. Not one single person.

After a week, I called her husband myself and told him about the neighbors. I asked my mom why she hadn't told him and she said she didn't feel it was her place to do that. She's shitting her pants wondering what I am going to remember next - about HER - and she doesn't want anyone at all to know anything about what I've been going through because she is a part of it all.

But she says she didn't tell anyone out of respect for me.

She made up lies about other neighbors, claiming that she couldn't confront them because they were so wrapped up in taking care of their ailing family members and ailing selves. After a few months of hearing that, I saw it as another excuse - a lie - to get me off her back about talking to other neighbors, but in a way that did not make her look bad.

She can take anything that has the smallest grain of truth to it and turn it into a full-blown campaign to destroy anyone or anything that might sully her reputation. I don't even know if it's her reputation among other people - it may very well just be her own view of herself that she's so terrified of actually changing, of becoming real.

But god forbid anyone try to confront her on any of it, because then she pulls the grain of truth out and gets all indignant about anyone questioning her. Actually, that is a lot like how my dad operated.

Its so WEIRD having hindsight undistorted by mind-fucking-colored glasses. Maybe it is so weird because it is real. It's not all of the bullshit that has been spoon fed to me for my entire life - it's actually real.

It's taken a lot for me to get to the point that I can look at something for what it is and be confident enough in my own mind to know that I am capable of seeing what is real - or that "real" even exists.

My mom AND dad - both of them are mind-fucking monsters. And while I can see that my brother and sister are both products of the mind-fucking, I cannot look beyond the fact that they have always been fucking with my mind, too.

I still imagine what they would think about the things I am writing and putting all out there. I imagine that they would highly disapprove of what I am writing right now, and maybe even shake their heads in disbelief. I imagine what arguments I will have to come up with to defend my point of view, to prove that it is logical and not delusional or crazy.

I keep thinking about what I should do to prove to them that I am not like my dad.

I know I am not like my dad, and I really can't handle playing into their hands anymore, obsessing over myself, over how I act, questioning my every breath, every word, to see if it could somehow be viewed as something my dad had done or would do. I've just focused so intensely on trying to convince them of who I'm not that I haven't really had much time for myself to consider who I am.

And I still like who I am, and I still know I am good person, and I still know that I am not maliciously manipulative, and I still know that I am not crazy, and I still know what is real.

I can just live now, and just allow myself to be my own person. I have never been able to do that before - I always felt like I had to view myself through the eyes of my mom and my brother and my sister.

But now, I have my own eyes that I can view myself with, and my mom and my brother and my sister can go to hell - my dad is probably already there. They can have a nice family reunion.

P.S. I am working a lot on my new novel again :)

part 81

When I was growing up there would be times when I felt like I was filled with lead and couldn't move. There have been a lot of times since then, too, but I don't think I was really aware of how I was feeling when I was still growing up.

It is a deep, deep ache - very deep in my heart and soul.

I may have already written about the incident on the boat in Florida, but I have been thinking about it a lot again.

When I was a teenager ("One" by U2 was constantly on the radio at the time) my family took a trip to Port St. Joe in Florida. We drove down there in the van and pulled our boat on a trailer behind us.

It was spring break, and it was really remote where we were staying, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do - it sucked. One afternoon, my dad and I were out in the Gulf on the boat. It was close to sunset and dolphins were jumping around us - it was very magical to see that.

But then my dad started to try and mess with me, and I yelled at him. Not long after that, another boat came up by ours and there was a man driving and when he got close to us, he shouted, "Is everything alright over here?"

My dad answered him that we were fine, but the boat had continued to get closer and I looked at the man and he was looking at me waiting for me to answer the question for myself.

I was really mad at my dad and thought about telling the man on the other boat that, no, nothing was alright, then tell him my dad hurt me.

The words were pressing against the back my teeth just waiting for my mouth to open and let them out, but I looked back toward the shore. In my memory, I was looking at the building we were staying in, but it could have been something else - regardless, I was looking back at where my mom and sister and brother were.

I thought that if I let those words out of my mouth that I would never see them again. The man would take me away from my dad and our whole family would be torn apart and my mom would be mad at me and devastated by it all, and my brother and sister and everyone else would think I was lying.

But telling on my dad was a real possibility - I knew that the things he did to me were really, really bad, and that he would be investigated and I would have a chance to tell the cops about him.

But looking back at the shore toward my family, feeling the utter finality of never seeing them again, was so overwhelmingly sad that I looked at the man on the other boar and nodded my head that everything was alright.

There was some chit-chat about the dolphins and how beautiful the sun set was and blah blah blah, then we parted ways.

When I got back to the condo, I went out the front door (on the street side) and sat down and smoked a cigarette. This trip was during a time that I smoked, but told my parents that I didn't. At that time, though, after my dad tried to mess with me on the boat and I didn't tell on him, I stopped giving a shit if I would get in trouble for smoking.

By that evening, I was set up on the balcony looking at the ocean smoking away right in full view of everyone.

What was anyone going to do to me? My dad wasn't going to say shit about it, and if my dad wasn't backing her up, my mom didn't bother to even threaten to punish me.

I suppose she and my brother and sister may have been viewing me as someone who did not regard the rules as things that applied to me, and perhaps were even shocked by my bold defiance. I think they were more likely initially surprised that I suddenly started smoking in front of everyone, but quickly shifted their minds to what they had always been told about me: that I was bad, that I only cared about myself, that I would do whatever I wanted no matter who it hurt.

I always felt like this is what my brother and sister thought of me, and until a few years ago, I still believed it. But after I first went into the hospital and stopped drinking and everything, we have been able to have this sibling-type relationship that I'd never experienced before.

My mom and I went to visit my brother for a weekend last spring and had a really nice time. My mom and my sister and I all went out to see a movie this past summer, and it was just really fun to be with them doing that.

I really loved having a brother and a sister, and I told them that.

I really, truly believed that they saw me in a different light, as a real person who had been badly hurt for most of my life. I thought they thought I was a good person.

I really tried to hold on to that for as long as possible, but after my sister tried to convince me that I was in the midst of a psychotic break and my brother tried to convince me AND my husband that I was malicious and manipulative like my dad, and that my mom had done none of the things I said she had done, it hit me really hard.

Their view of me never changed. They had only been placating me and rewarding my good behavior by allowing me to be a part of the family. I was acting like they thought I should, and so was deserving of their love.

But once I stepped outside of that - specifically by telling them about my mom - I was no longer behaving well. My brother, for some reason, tried to keep in touch with me, and I appreciated it very much. But I was still under the impression that he actually saw me as the person I am, and not the person my parents taught him I was.

It was really a hard hit when I heard him telling me I reminded him of our dad, and it hit me even harder when I heard him explaining to my husband about my certain characteristics that were the same as my dad's, and that the reason my husband believed me and not my mom was because I was just manipulating him, too.

On more than one occasion when I have told someone what my dad did, the response was "I believe you believe it happened." What the fuck is that? Its saying that the person does not believe what I am telling them, but they don't want me to think they are saying that I'm lying, so they just say that I am crazy instead.

That's what my brother especially has been doing for the past few months. Who does that benefit? Him? He doesn't have to act like a total douche by calling me a liar, but he can still try to make me believe that he supports me without having to believe the things he doesn't want to believe?

Yeah, that is pretty much how I see it. My brother truly believes that he is simultaneously all-knowing and open-minded at the same time. He can definitively know the "real truth" while simultaneously believing that he is open to any possibility that what he knows definitively he might not really know definitively.

I have felt bad about being critical of my brother - it has been much easier to be critical about my sister and my mom - they are both so cold and condescending. But my brother, I thought, at least tried to be caring.

Whatever.

After this past weekend, after seeing what I have been trying so hard not to see, I feel like I did at that moment when I was out on that boat with my piece-of-shit bastard of a father, looking back at the shore and hurting so badly at the possibility of losing my entire family that I once again did not take an excellent opportunity to escape from him.

That is what I was most afraid of - losing my whole family.

But now I've gone and told anyway. And now I've lost my whole family.

Except that I have a new family - a real one, where we do actually all love each other and want what is the best for each other, and we are not playing an eternal game of mind-fucking.

It does hurt very much to not have a dad or a mom or a sister or a brother - and to acknowledge that I never really had those people in my life in the first place - but it helps tremendously having my husband and kids and friends - all very real people, all very sincerely a positive part of my life - around me every day.

That is more than enough to get by on <3.

part 80

So there is this thing about writing about the things my mom and brother and sister do - I mostly have tried to avoid it in this public forum.

I started to write more about my mom in the past few months, because that is what I have really been struggling with, and if I am not writing all of this to help myself, then what is the point?

I have decided that I will go ahead and cross some more lines and write about my sister and brother, too.

It's been an intense weekend.

I have been really grateful for the support my brother has shown for me, particularly since I started talking about my mom and her involvement with the abuse. I have been anxious about it though, because I know he doesn't believe anything bad about my mom. I made it very clear to him, though - as I have to everyone else - that I am not asking anyone to believe me.

I know the issue of my mom is especially difficult for my brother because, well, my mom is his mom, too.

He has been very consistent, though, in keeping in touch with me and reconfirming his support for me.

As previously mentioned, I have been anxious about talking to my brother because I don't believe he finds me credible. He has been really careful to walk a fine line between fully supporting me and my claims against everyone but my mom, and wanting to continue to be supportive of me.

That's fine.

I have been playing my part in keeping conversations superficial in order to maintain that relationship with him.

I started getting a little tired of the dancing-around-the-elephant-in-the-room thing, though, and finally straight up asked him about my mom. I hadn't heard anything from her or about her and I have been imagining her going on with her life with her head high while gracefully acknowledging this newest blow to her in her difficult - but innocent - life. I don't want to talk to her at all, but it still bothers me that she hasn't tried to call, and I have been pretty surprised at how clean the cut has been between the two of us.

She hasn't tried to discuss any of it with me, or let me know she loves me anyway, or anything like that. She has, though, apparently been running her campaign against me pretty full force. I mean, it’s the same campaign that's been run against me since I was born, but it is strange being so much more aware of it now.

When I first confronted my mom about her part in the abuse, she came right out and told me that I was having false memories and obviously was coming up with these things in my mind because I am so angry at her for not protecting me when I was growing up, and that the things I said she's done are angry projections.

This past weekend when I last spoke with my brother, I asked him why he thought I would do something like make up all of this shit about my mom. He admitted to me that he believed I manipulated people like my dad did, and that me saying the stuff about my mom is something I am doing maliciously to manipulate people, and everything I said after that he contributed to another effort of mine to manipulate him. He also was "concerned" that my husband and kids are only getting my version of events, and that I was isolating them from other sources of information so that I could control their perceptions of the situation.

Then my sister called to explain to me that it is a strongly supported fact that it is possible for someone who was abused as a child to experience a psychotic break as an adult. I told her I haven't had a psychotic break, but she still tried to convince me of it anyway.

After that, my brother called my husband and let him know that I was a malicious manipulator and that I have the same characteristics as a sociopath (just like my dad). My brother also wanted to make sure my husband heard a different side of the story than mine, and to let him know that I was probably manipulating him, too.

I expected as much from my sister, but I have to say I was a bit surprised at my brother for calling my husband and warning him about how psycho he thinks I am. I thought that was very rude.

I don't think my mom or my sister or my brother have realized that I actually have a pretty firm grip on reality, and that suggesting that I am like my dad or straight up delusional and psychotic will not make me melt into a puddle of doubt and neurosis about who I am or what my motivations are.

Who can blame them for trying, though, because it has always worked before.

Anyway, this has all been disheartening, to say the least.

Sigh.

I suppose I will be accused of writing this stuff about them on my blog as a way to get back at them for continuing to do what they have been doing since we have all been alive, which is to convince me that I am evil and/or crazy.

I don't really give a shit - seriously, once again, what the fuck else is new? I also think that if they are concerned about what I might write about them on my blog, they should maybe stop being such assholes to me. After all, they should be well-aware by now that I do not fear the truth, and I do not fear sharing the truth with the whole world.

I don't expect that to happen, though. One thing I have learned very well over the past few years is how pompous and narcissistic and self-indulgent we all are. My mom, my dad, me, my sister, and my brother - we have always sincerely believed that we knew more than anyone else, and that the only possibility concerning anything at all cannot be anything other than the way we see it.

I didn't figure this out on my own, but as I have gotten healthier, my therapist has noted the changes in who I am, and one of those changes is that I am not quite so narcissistic as when I first began therapy with her. I'm not going to lie - I did not like hearing that.

But I couldn't deny that it was true. One of the most painful things for me to do has been dismantling my certainty in my own intellect and abilities. It is a tricky process because I am also trying to learn to have confidence in myself as a good person, and it all gets pretty oxymoronic sometimes.

I have found, though, that the less I foolishly claim to be certain of, the more peace and confidence I have about simply who I am.

I follow the Dalai Lama on twitter, and he is always posting things about how tolerance of myself will lead to tolerance of others, and vice versa, and that this is imperative to maintaining peace, health, and happiness.

Peace, health, and happiness are not things I am accustomed to, but I know that I would like to be. If it takes admitting that I have been a great big, cocky, narcissistic, nasty bitch for most of my life, then I guess that is what it takes.

Besides, acknowledging and admitting and accepting all of the ways that I am obnoxious and imperfect has really made it easier for me to stop hating who I have been in the past, and to start liking who I am now. It really is imperative to my having peace and health and happiness.

Even though it would be so much fun to have money, I would gladly give up every dime just to hold on to that peace and health and happiness, and to pass it on to the people I love. Considering all of my experiences, past and present, a peaceful state of mind is what heaven is, and it is incredibly humbling to be able to experience heaven in this hellish world.

part 79

I told my therapist that I didn't know if it was just some sort of self-preservation or dissociative thing, but it seems as though -in hindsight- there has always been a separateness in my perception of my relationship with my mom. I was picturing her in my head and she was separated from me by glass, as though I might sully the air she breathed if she let me get too close.

I have been thinking about what it means to grieve the mother I wished she was, and found that there is little to grieve. It sounds so harsh and mean when I say that, but that's what it feels like. Letting go of my dad was an extremely dramatic and gut-wrenching process that felt like my soul was being sucked through the eye of a needle.

But with my mom, it is just different.

I am definitely willing to concede that I am in a reactive phase, that my true feelings are being suppressed in order for me to be able to go on living life in the face of this pain. It's not what it feels like though - it feels like there has always been a glass wall between my mom and I, and that our relationship was very superficial.

I would definitely cry if she died - I mean, I miss her now and she's still alive. With my dad, I wasn't sure if I would cry when he died, and it turns out that I didn't. It has been ten months and still it feels so surreal remembering that he is not here anymore. He is dead. I'm not sad, I'm just less scared.

I don't think that is how it would be with my mom if she died. For one thing, I don't want her to die. I don't want her to be tortured or brought to justice or harmed for any reason, justifiable or not. I wished so badly that my dad would die already and give me some relief. I don't think my mom's death would give me relief.

Not having a relationship with her - at all - has given me a lot of relief. It has been very quiet and peaceful on my end of things, and I wonder how long it will last.

I wonder if she lives until she is 90 and I haven't seen or spoken with her in 30 years if I will still cry when she dies of natural causes and at a very old age. I think I would.

Comparing these extreme scenarios between my mom and my dad gives some perspective on how different my relationships were with each of them. I have never had a primal fear of my mom; there were at least four or five times I was convinced my dad was going to kill me. It was very … I don't know…disturbing (?) seeing my dad's face each of those times as he closed his hand around my neck and put his face close to mine.

He seemed to go through some sort of transition, from anger to dull hatred to surprise to Christ-like as I watched him killing me. The Christ-like part was because he felt really good about how gracious and forgiving he was for letting me live. He gave me life when I was conceived, and then over and over again each time he didn't kill me.

My mom slapped me across the face once, and she would spank me with a wooden or plastic serving spoon when I was little, and she put soap in my mouth when I said something offensive to her, but other than that I don't recall my mom ever attacking me physically or doing anything else that would lead me to be convinced she was going to kill me.

I definitely felt safer with her than my dad, but that doesn't mean too much.

She would protect me and support me and nurture me to a level that would leave her love for me and her abilities as a mother without room for question.

Anything further than that, I only remember her walking away or shutting me down.

For as long as I can remember my mom at all, she would walk away or shut me down when it came to giving more of herself than was absolutely necessary to convince me that she loved me.

I'm sure she feels differently about that, but I am very much enjoying the freedom from being in any way concerned with how she feels about anything.

The mom behind the glass, it seems, is an accurate way to describe how she felt to me.

My therapist asked me what kind of mom I wished I had. I think about that a lot these days, and already had an answer before she finished asking the question.

I would want a mom with long, frizzy, curly hair who is short and slightly overweight. She would wear jeans much more often than slacks. She would smile at me because she felt happy that I was her daughter, and I would be able to see her love for me in her eyes always.

She would teach me how to shave my legs and put on make-up and do my nails. She would be pleased at how pretty I thought I was, happy that I was feeling confident about myself, and that I looked like her. She would have allergies and be clumsy and like to look at art and read novels.

We would go to museums and movies and take trips to luxury spas and just indulge in the fact that we were mother and daughter, and that we were women.

She would have been horrified at the way my dad treated me. She would consider my safety and well-being a higher priority than her loyalty to my dad. She would ask me what's wrong and sit down and hug me and ask me why I was so sad whenever I made another home in the bottom of a closet or in the crawlspace of the house and wouldn't come out for hours.

She would be concerned with the welts on my forehead, and take them seriously even though I made them myself by banging my head against a two-by-four in the sloped ceiling of the unfinished storage closets. She would be upset when she saw me sewing thread into my skin and then ripping it out, and when she saw me hold each of my fingers over a lit candle until they were black and smelled like burned flesh.

It would bother her very much that I was so anxious about going to school, and not dismiss it as a daily excuse to stay home.

She would be concerned when I would cry and cry and cry and couldn't tell her why, no matter how hard I tried.

She would understand that "just getting attention" was a very important part of a child's life, and not an excuse to dismiss every single disturbing word or behavior from me.

She would act like she loved me. She would give me a sense of who I was in the world, just by my relation to who she was in the world. She would like the way she looked and felt and acted so that I could learn how to do those things for myself.

She definitely would have been someone very different than who my mom really is.

But I love her anyway, because she is my mom.

But I can't live with her hurting me over and over and over again, blatantly lying about what she'd done to me, preferring to portray me as a delusional lunatic - even to myself - than risk having anyone looking at her disfavorably.

I can't handle the lying and the duplicity and the manipulating - maybe I could handle just one of those things and still be able to hug her and tell her I love her and go on walks with her. But I can't handle all of those at once, and it sucks because that's just who my mom is.