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.