I feel like October in the way that I was not supposed to exist. I don't mean that they didn't want a baby (I am seven years younger than my sister, so there's little risk of "accidentally" getting pregnant), but perhaps they simply didn't want
me. Maybe there aren't even any pictures of me, and that is why she won't let me see the slides? Because, seriously, she's had thirtytwo years to either get the slides converted to photos or at least show them to me
once. But I actually believe that it was just "too much of a hassle" for her to set the projector up, and that my baby pictures were nowhere near important enough to her to keep the projector (why would you throw out a working projector when you have slides that you need it to see???). For a long time I actually thought that I was adopted or "stolen", until I was old enough to recognise my physical resemblance to both my parents. Oh, well, when I next get home, I'm not going to ask, I'm just going to take the slides and then I'll know if I was even worth wasting film on!
Not in the best of moods today as you can probably tell. I've been reading "Trapped in the Mirror" again, and all my rage is starting to surface. It is funny, I thought I had already gone through the "anger phase" since I started rebelling against my mother in my teens and have rebelled ever since. This was before I knew that rebellion is just another form of enmeshment! I suppose that it is not until now that I can see what she
really did, and that she must have been aware of it on some level, so now I can get really angry. And I am furious
One example: When I was thirteen my hair started getting really greasy, so I started washing it every day. My mother noticed this and immediately started teasing/bullying me: "Why are you washing your hair every day? I bet you're in looooveee! Sleepyhead's in looovee, Sleepyhead's in looovee!" God, I wish you could hear the tone of her voice! Anyway, I stopped washing my hair every day, because I was going to get bullied in school anyway, and I preferred to be (overtly)bullied in just the one place, thank you verymuch! It is not until now, almost twenty years later that I asked myself: "How come she noticed that I was washing my hair every day, but didn't notice how greasy and stringy it was?" She must have noticed! Why would she do that!? Maybe she was jealous? After all, she always went on about my blond hair (neither my parents nor my sister are blond), but as a child I wasn't allowed to have long hair like my sister had. We lived in a huge house in a nice neighbourhood, but I got to wear hand-me-downs and cheap supermarket clothes. Now I'm even getting paranoid about my glasses! I was so nearsighted that I couldn't see what the frames looked like on me, so my mother would chose. I always put her awful choices down to bad taste, but maybe it was on purpose? I guess I will never know...
Anyway, I can see clearly for the first time, that everything was truly about her, every single thing was to further her own agenda. She hardly ever paid any attention to me except to criticise, forced me to play piano for years after I told her I didn't like it (I guess it was "posh"), but refused to let me dance ballet (she said it was unnatural). The way she behaved at PTA meetings was just to draw attention to herself, she didn't care about the embarrassment and extra bullying it caused me. She didn't even notice that I was bullied all the way through school. Everything was about her getting attention and possibly praise. I remember in kindergarten, I was perhaps three or four, the parents were there for some reason (first week?). The teacher asked if we knew how children were made, all children wre of course embarrassed, but my mother quickly says: "Sleepy knows! Tell them Sleepy! Come on, you know how babies are made, tell them!" Me, of course, going quiet and shaking my head furiously, too embarrassed to look at anyone. Lately I've noticed that she is even in competition with toddlers. When my niece turned one, one of her birthday presents was one of those boxes where you are supposed to put the right shape in the right hole. My mother "played" with her granddaughter in the following fashion: Niece would pick a piece up and try to put it in a hole. Mother would immediately grab the piece from here and say "no, it doesn't go there, it goes here!" and put it i the right hole. She would then beam with pride of her accomplishemnt and the satisfaction of being smarter than a one year old!
Meanwhile, my attempts to explain that the whole point of the toy is to learn through your own experience and your errors fell on deaf ears.
Hmmm.... I'm starting to get something that happened in my last bout of therapy. My therapist told me that I should think of change as in the way a child learns something new, learning little by little, making mistakes and try again and again until I got it. I didn't understand what she meant. I had no memories of that sort of learning. I've alwys felt that I have to be brilliant at something the first time I try it. Oh, well, I've got to stop venting this now (for a while at least), otherwise I'll keep writing all day and noone will have the patience to read my post.
