Having an emotional/mental break/down. I think.
Is it possible to have one and actually be aware of it?
June 5th was my birth mother’s birthday. She would have been 69.
She died at 52.
Alone.
On the floor.
Beside her bed.
In her vomit.
Drunk and diabetic.
It’s a day in which I am always conflicted, bruise easily and am extremely emotionally vulnerable. Usually, I can brood through the day without too much damage to my psyche, but this year, something was different. The bowels of hell opened up and sucked me in. When my flesh was charred, my skeleton exposed and I writhed in unsuppressed agony, only then did they spit me out and release me to the hellish nightmares that have followed me in wakefulness since.
Perhaps, it’s because in my new-found lesbianism, the ensuing constant dialogue of causal and effect analysis has left me in a hyper-state of fluctuating emotions for nearly 5 years now. Jesus. Do lesbians need to talk everything to fucking death?!!! Whatever happened to just living in the moment and actually EXPERIENCING the relationship? And NO! It’s not always good to try and ‘deal’ with your past. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, some shit should just be left the fuck alone!
Whatever the cause, long ignored monsters have crawled out from under my bed, black demons lurk in every corner and lies by omission that have kept me relatively content for years are turning into truths I have never wanted to see. Their faces horrid, distorted and terrifying in the reveal as I always knew they would be. So, this year, in this hyper-state bordering undecided on suicide or insanity, the undeniable truth that my mother hated me so strongly – from my conception to her death – attacked me with such an unbidden and unexpected viciousness, I had no protection against it.
And it broke me somewhere deep inside.
I cried all night. Heaving, racking, painful sobs rocked my body and tore at my heart. The child inside, afraid and abandoned, unable to move from the place where love and life were brutally ripped apart, was forced to stand alone against this great assault, raise arms to the heavens and beg for the answer as to why she had been forsaken…
None was forthcoming. No comfort. No wisdom imparted. Not from God or Angel or Soul. No soothing words to hush the deafening roar of reality. Just waves and waves of crashing pain surging in to knock her down and back into the shadows of 1963.
It was…emotionally…crippling.
I spent yesterday in bed, unable and unwilling to get up. Raw, exposed, lonely, needing, wanting, unimaginably sad and feeling so very, very, very lost. Balancing once again, so precariously on the sharp edge of my abnormal condition of the mind.
For years I have pretended it didn’t matter; she didn’t matter. Almost like the constant retelling of my experience with her happened to someone else, that I was emotionally unattached to the horror she brought to my life. But, for some reason my barriers couldn’t protect me this year and I was crushed by the stark reality that the woman who gave birth to me hated me so much – to the point of literally trying to kill me – and then simply erased me from her life as if I had never existed. As if I had, in fact, died.
I suppose to some degree I had.
How does a mother do that to her child? What could cause her to be so full of hate for me? There is no rational explanation that can heal this forever bleeding wound and it has damaged me in ways I am only just beginning to recognize. I have made so many excuses for the abuses I have taken from those who profess to love me. Believing with every blow of their angry fists, every slice of their poisoned barbed words, every manner of their cruelty and abuse, that because they had spoken the words “I love you”, somehow, that made it all right.
Is my need to be loved so insatiable that I let myself be blinded by it and buried alive in meanness and cruelty? Never recognizing them for what they are? Or excusing them in the name of love?
God help me.
I am ashamed of this weakness. This inability to believe that I am better then and deserve more. And yet, I seem unable to stop it. This penchant I have for staying in unhealthy relationships because the words have been spoken. And never removing myself for fear that no one else will say them to me again.
I hate those words.
I have never trusted them.
They are the three most abused words in the world.
They have crippled me.
They have freed me.
I have given them undeserved power.
My mother told me she loved me.
And then she tried to kill me.
Am I really just a sad, pathetic, intelligent product of years of cruelty, neglect and abuse? So used to being showered in hateful behavior that I don’t feel complete without it? And if I am so intelligent, then why can’t I break the cycle? Is it too deeply ingrained in me now?
It all began so early…this knowing I was unloved. Unwanted.
Never knowing a parents love, abandonment, horrid orphanages, filthy and mean foster homes, an adopted sister’s cruelty, the cold indifference of an adopted mother, a birth mother’s horrible and terrifying abuse, the family rapes, a pimps extortion, an eX’s 20 year anger and now a Jekyll and Hyde lovers’ possessive possession of me – who is just as, if not more-so, damaged then me – may be my final, mental undoing…and of course, all the masked faces in between.
I am struck deeply by this sudden realization of a self-destructive pattern all in the name of “looking for love” and needing to be wanted. Loved. Never feeling quite “good enough” for the healthy love – never really seen what that looks like actually – so instead, choosing what causes pain because that is what I know. That is familiar. That must be what I deserve.
After all, it is my birth right bestowed upon me by my mother.
This is the legacy she has left me.
Aah, Mothers. I have been blessed with two and still I know not what it feels like to be loved by one.
Bitter irony that.
Soon, I will write the love story of my birth mother…
It was actually quite beautiful.
And then it wasn’t.
