Catharsis

I want to listen to something sad and sweet but maybe I should just listen to my own heart beating within my chest...

My sister and I had a good talk tonight about my mother's passing. For those of you who don't know, my mother suffered from mental illnesses for as long as I can remember. She wouldn't get help. Living with my mother was, quite honestly, hell. The things my mother said and did... it wasn't just your average, run of the mill mother/daughter angst. After I was raped at 14, my mother called me a whore. She was always paranoid about my father cheating on her (which he never did) and oftentimes, my siblings and I would bear the brunt of her paranoia. She never physically abused us... but she dragged us down into her anxious, scared and tense darkness with her. We were isolated from family members.

Over the years, I also think my mother became dependant on her pain pills. Whenever I would try to confront my mother, she would threaten me for calling her a "drug addict", which, technically, she was because her body had become dependant on the meds. She needed the meds to function and that signifies an addiction. About two months before she passed away, I was bitten on the leg by a spider and I had to be taken to the hospital in the middle of the night because I couldn't even walk. After the doctor opened the bite and removed the infected tissue, my leg felt better. When I came home, my mother offered me an oxycontin for the pain. I stared at her incredulously. I was not about to take that kind of medication for an infected insect bite.

As my sister and I were talking tonight, she said she felt guilty because she hasn't been as upset as I have since our mother passed. I told her that I've been upset because I feel guilty for thinking that life is easier without her. Only those of you who are very close to me know what used to happen in my house. I don't miss the screaming. I don't miss the crying. I don't miss the isolation. I don't miss WISHING that she'd get herself some help so we could be a whole family again.

My mother had been sick for about 15 years when she died. She started having these little breakdowns when I was about ten years old. Maybe that's when I just started noticing them, though, because people on my mother's side of the family have said that she's always had them. She used to blame me for her unhappiness... because my health was fragile. I was tutored at home from 3rd to 6th grade and I remember her saying "I can't be with this sick kid all the time!" and I remember thinking "Well, there's nowhere for ME to go! I AM the sick kid..."

After she died, my sister and I both had nightmares that she came back. She came back and isolated the family again. In those dreams, I fought with her as if she were alive. I cried. I screamed. I yelled in her face. 'You can't do this to us again! Go away... leave.' I wish I didn't have to feel that way about my mother.

Life is changing. There are shifts within the family and I have to keep reminding myself "THIS is what is normal... what you knew before was not." I feel like, in some ways, my mother made us feral. I feel like my immediate family is very close and tight-knit and anyone who tries to come into the circle needs to be torn apart... I need to let that go. I need to realize that the people coming into our lives right now (people from my mom's side of the family, mainly) have WANTED to be a part of our lives but my mother kept them away. My mother instilled an "us-against-them" feeling in us because she was a frightened, paranoid woman. What is happening now is normal and right. People need people. As a family, we are all we have. It's scary and strange and I'm trying to get used to it. I have these internal dialogues with myself and they help me. A couple weeks ago, I was in the shower and I thought to myself "Where were these people when mom was so sick? Where were these people when mom was in the hospital? Where were these people?" and then I realized "Oh yeah... mom kept them away."

I'm trying. I'm learning. I'm letting go.

Love to all.