My mother/abuser is out of the hospital now. The doctors could not find anything wrong with her. That doesn’t surprise me. She will probably outlive us all.
Apparently, she was disappointed that I did not call her while she was in the hospital. I was honestly surprised by this. Should she have had that expectation? I have not spoken to her in 4-1/2 years, so why would she expect that this would change now? I guess a daughter is “supposed” to telephone her mother when she is hospitalized, so she expected that this would be that TV-movie-of-the-week transforming moment in our relationship??
I did not fail to call her as a way to hurt her. Honestly, it never crossed my mind to call her. Is that bad? I wouldn’t have known how to reach her, anyhow. I think she sent me her cell phone number, but I am not sure if I kept it. I have her home phone number, but she obviously was not there. I did not know the name of the hospital where she was staying. Yes, I could have gotten this information from my sister, but I didn’t want it.
I don’t want to think about her at all, and it is really bugging me that her hospitalization and Mother’s Day have made that impossible to do. I am not staying away from her to hurt her; I am doing it to protect myself. I don’t like the person I became when I was around her. I felt so much anger, and I stayed so dissociated that I lost large blocks of time around her. I would be aware that I just spent four hours with her but unable to share anything that we talked about. It was all a blank because I was not “there.” My body was there, but my spirit/consciousness was somewhere else.
I am really bothered by how much this is upsetting me. I feel the need to cry a lot, and sometimes I allow myself to cry. Honestly, I have been so friggin’ busy over the past two weeks that I have not had the time to cry very often. I don’t even know what I am crying over, only that my heart feels heavy. I don’t miss her. I don’t want her in my life. I want to cut this connection, but I don’t know how. I thought I had done it, but obviously I haven’t.
In other forms of rape, the victim does not have pressure from others to continue a relationship with the perpetrator. You do not have to invite your stranger rapist to Thanksgiving dinner, and nobody judges you for this choice. What my mother did was so much worse (and destructive) than a stranger rape, so why is there pressure to maintain a connection?
Nobody in my life is pressuring me to connect with her. This is a pressure that is coming from inside, but I don’t know from where or why. I don’t know if this is more self-hate that needs healing or what. I just want to stop thinking about her at all. How do I do that?
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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
Blooming Lotus 